The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

Future War

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

Briefly, the Future War narrative describes the near-future invasion of a country (almost always the writer’s home) by its enemy. The Future War narrative is written with a didactic intent, usually to warn the reader about the country’s lack of military preparedness and its insufficient physical and spiritual/emotional vigor for such a war. Although the Future War novels of the Victorian sort began in 1871 with George Chesney’s “The Battle of Dorking” and essentially ended with the onset of World War One, the subgenre’s history predates Chesney’s work.

Antique futuristic fictions such as the anonymous Reign of George VI, 1900-25 (1763) anticipate little change in the business of war; here King George, sabre in hand, leads his cavalry in the charge. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, awareness of technological change spread rapidly. Herrmann Lang was able to envisage very different patterns of future combat in The Air Battle (1859), and many new technologies were displayed during the US Civil War (1861-1865) and observed by representatives of various European nations.¹ [1] [see also “Memoirs From a Journey with the Flying Fish ‘Prometheus’”] 

Chesney’s work was popular and controversial, spawning numerous imitations and rebuttals, and from 1871 until roughly 1890 most Future War novels were modeled on “The Battle of Dorking.” After 1890 the invasion/Future War began to mix with other genres, from science fiction (see: War of the Worlds) to fantasy/horror (see: Dracula) to the anarchist novel (see: Angel of the Revolution, Anarchists).

The causes of the Future War novel were multiple. In the final decades of the nineteenth century a common attitude in England was pessimism about the state and fate of the Empire (see: Fin-de-siècle Unease). England seemed to have no disinterested allies, but it did have a number of enemies. Its economic position was threatened; there were an array of troubles inside the country; and a war between England and the major European powers, which had not taken place since Napoleon, seemed inevitable. Worst of all, the English military was not (in the eyes of some observers) prepared to deal with the changing political, military, and technological situation.

One of the reasons for this anxiety was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Before the war England had felt secure due to its geographical isolation and the strength of its navy. Advances in military technology were not seen as a threat to the Empire; the English military felt that their military and naval technology would evolve at the same rate as their enemies’. But during the war the Prussians’ superior technology, tactics, and military organization alarmed observers by humiliating the French army, which had previously been well-regarded. The idea that warfare was no longer being fought by traditional rules with traditional weapons implied that the English military, and England itself, might not be as secure as -previously thought.

One of the ways in which English writers dealt with this alarming and depressing idea was the invasion novel. Before 1871 many English writers wrote large numbers of stories and novels written which chronicled the expansion of British Empire and the spread of Christianity. The invasion novel describes the reverse trend, in which Britain’s decline leads to its fall at the hands of foreign invaders. The English reading public has always had a taste for stories of mass destruction, from the “school of catastrophe” novels of the 1820s and 1830s (see: The Last Days of Pompeii) to end-of-the-world novels of the 1880s and 1890s (see: The Violet Flame), but the Future War novels were different because of their topicality and because of the authors’ finger-pointing at specific causes for England’s decline. These causes varied according to the author’s personal hobbyhorse. The first Future War novels blamed specific aspects of the English military’s weaknesses. Later Future War novels listed, as the ultimate source of England’s weakness, the expansion of power to the lower classes, immigration, the “degeneration” of the Britain’s “racial stock,” an innate wickedness in Asians (see: The Yellow Peril) and Africans, who had been offered the benefits of Empire and Christianity and had been so ungrateful as to decline them, and Great Britain’s foreign enemies, usually some combination of France, Germany, Russia and/or the United States, allying against it.

In America, Future War novels began appearing in the 1880s, altered from the British model to include specifically American aspects and concerns.

Between 1880 and America’s 1917 entry into World War 1, novels and stories imagining future wars became an influential part of American popular culture. Projecting the causes, forms, and consequences of war fought years or centuries hence, the literature expressed and helped to shape the apocalyptic ideology prominent in America’s wars from 1898 throughout the twentieth century and all the way to the present. In this popular fiction, the emerging faith in American technological genius wedded the older faith in America’s messianic destiny, engendering a cult of made-in-America superweapons and ecstatic visions of America defeating evil empires, waging wars to end all wars, and making the world eternally safe for democracy.² 

The American Future War novels were ultimately more hopeful than English Future War novels, but they expressed many of the same concerns.

The earliest American fiction to imagine an alien invasion actually satirized this self-image so central to American culture and American history. Back in 1809, just as the republic was being established, Washington Irving published this imagined invasion in his popular A History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker. Exposing the ethnocentric core of the argument that Europeans “discovered” “America,” a land inhabited by ferocious “savages” called “Indians,” Irving presents a parallel case, an invasion by “the Men from the Moon.” The “Lunatics” approach us with the same cultural imperialism that Europeans and their colonial descendants bring to nonwhite peoples, and they come armed with a technology vastly superior to our own, including directed-energy beams (precisely the superweapon being sought by the U.S. government ever since the late twentieth century). Irving thus revealed America itself as a nation that originated as an act of conquest by alien invaders.

Unlike Irving’s satire, the American future-war fiction that emerged as a body of literature in the 1880s turned America’s colonial history inside out, establishing what was to become a conventional pattern: the invasion of defenseless America by aliens from across the seas. With unintended and revealing irony, this literature often perceived the victims of domestic oppression—Chinese “coolies,” blacks, Indians, European immigrants—as these foreigners’ confederates treacherously lurking inside the nation.

By the end of the nineteenth century, American fiction had projected invasions or attacks by China, Spain, Britain, Japan, and Russia, as well as genocidal uprisings by various nonwhite peoples inside the United States.³ 

For Further Research

I.F. Clarke, The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871-1914 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995).

I.F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, 1763-1984 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966)