Customer Reviews

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

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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.