Future-War Fiction

The Tale of the War-to-come—from Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove to The Invasion of England in 1803—is immediately recognizable as the most self-contained area of future fiction, since the basic propositions of these projected accounts of wars still-to-come derive from the political or technological possibilities of their day. They first began to affect the thinking of nations after the extraordinary success of Chesney’s Battle of Dorking in 1871. That warning to the British people was an immediate reaction to the new kind of warfare revealed in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870; and it proved to be an ideal model for the many tales of “the next great war” that became a familiar means of anticipating technological advances in warfare and of presenting arguments for bigger fleets and greater armies. From 1871 to 1914, as the major European powers advanced towards a conflict all expected, a continuous stream of these anticipations gave their readers highly selective accounts of salutary defeats or well-deserved victories in “the next great war” that would be fought between one or another of the international groupings of that time. With the emergence of the mass press in the 1890s, this future-war fiction became a favored means of warning a nation of the urgent need for more troops or more ships. In a most ironic way, however, these anticipations of wars-to-come were grounded in the assumption that, when the Great War began in earnest, it would be an old-style affair of decisive fleet actions and one-day infantry engagements. (IFC)

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