The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871-1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-To-Come [Paperback]

I. F. Clarke (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1996

This selection of short stories offers a return journey through the future as it used to be. Time speeds backwards to the 1870s, to the alpha point of modern futuristic fiction, when a new college of prophets and predictors first began to describe the new machines, the new societies, and the new wars that would follow in the next decade or the next century. The imaginary wars in this collection of sixteen stories are powerful reminiscences of dominant expectations as these were perceived and projected during a fateful period of European history. They are venerable echoes from the last age of innocence, before the military technologies of the First World War demonstrated in the most brutal ways that the unexpected can make nonsense of assumptions about the future.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

This excellent anthology makes available a generous and well-chosen selection of future-war narratives ... a worthy and very welcome companion [to I. F. Clarke's earlier work on futuristic fiction]. -- Paul Alkon Utopian Studies --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 382 pages
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press (January 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0815603584
• ISBN-13: 978-0815603580
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,586,576 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Germans (French, Russians, etc.) are coming! Prepare!, February 12, 2000

By 

James J. Bloom (Silver Spring, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871-1914: Fictions of Future Warfare and of Battles Still-To-Come (Paperback)

This book is an excellent sampling of the new genre of science fiction that evolved during the run-up to the Great War. I.F. Clarke's fascinating introduction and notes are alone worth the price of the book. He gives a sprightly and informative review of how the "Future War" tale evolved in the wake of the shocking rapid victory of newly unified Germany over France in 1870. This first of the "lightning campaigns" electrified British Col. of Engineers George Chesney into writing an anonymous series of stories for Blackwood's Magazine in 1871, purporting to be a "history", told in 1925, by an English veteran of the disastrous invasion of England by the superbly trained and armed Germans in 1875. This bombshell of a cautionary tale caused a frantic debate in Parliament over the preparedness issue. It also was the prototype of the whole genre sampled in this collection. Chesney's "The Battle of Dorking" is the first and longest of these Victorian and Georgian era semi-fictional battle forecasts. Examples from several nations involved in the arms buildup of the late 19th and early 20th centuries present a rounded view. Land and sea warfare innovations are depicted as they might be used in the near future. It is fascinating to read how the future antagonists saw the enemy and the shape of the next war. It gives you a contemporary view of the war jitters that led to the horrible holocaust of 1914-1918 -- the horror of which is never anticipated in these tales of bravado and derring-do. I have just received the sequel anthology "The Great War With Germany" and can't wait to read it. Highly recommended.