George Griffith (1901) The Raid of Le Vengeur, Pearson’s Magazine – February 1901 Chapter I.–THE DREAM OF CAPTAIN FLAUBERT. It was the third morning after the naval manoeuvres at Cherbourg, and since their conclusion Captain Leon Flaubert, of the Marine Experimental Department of the French Navy, had not had three consecutive hours’ sleep. He was […]
Eugene Demolder (1901) L’Agonie d’Albion Tells the story of the defeat and fall of the British Empire. Full text (in French) https://archive.org/stream/lagoniedalbion00demo#page/n9/mode/2up
Capitaine Danrit [E.A. Driant] (1901) La guerre fatale: France-Angleterre In 1888 Driant began writing his first guerre imaginaire (“imaginary war”) novel, which he was to publish using the pseudonym “Capitaine Danrit”. This was La Guerre de demain (“The War of Tomorrow”), comprising three stories which told the tale of: La Guerre en forteresse (“Fortress Warfare”), […]
Captain William Elliot Cairnes (1901) The Coming Waterloo Review in the Spectator 26th Jan 1901: Captain Cairnes …..has … given us a very engrossing as well as plausible picture of the next great war. The time is in the immediate future—to be exact, the year 1903—France and Russia are ranged against England, Germany, and Austria, […]
Anonymous (1901) The Sack of London in the Great French War of 1901, F.V. White & Company In fact, one strain of the genre—the blockade narrative (of which The Sack of London is a sample) – is specifically tailored to address concerns over the potential consequences of the fact that the workshop of the world […]
Oshikawa Shunro (1900) Kaitei gunkan (The Submarine Battleship) (aka. The Undersea Battleship or The Underwater Battleship) Invasion literature had its impact also in Japan, at the time undergoing a fast process of modernization. Shunrō Oshikawa, a pioneer of Japanese science fiction and adventure stories (genres unknown in Japan until a few years earlier), published around […]
Colonel F.N. Maude (1900) The New Battle of Dorking In 1900… Colonel Maude described the initial success of a French invasion in The new Battle of Dorking. He planned his imaginary war on the fact that, “there are three months in every year—July, August, September—during which the French Army is fit for immediate warfare. And […]
This genre of literature rose to prominence at a time when attitudes regarding Britain’s friends and potential enemies were changing. While France had traditionally been seen as Britain’s enemy there was a new potential threat from the newly formed German nation. Technology changes – both at sea and in the air – were also threatening […]
The subject area of invasion scare and future war novels can be extended to cover a vast array of novels including many in the science fiction genre. For the purposes of this site I have set boundaries as follows: Date: novels published between 1870 and 1914. Some later examples are included where they relate to […]