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

by Ignatius Frederick Clarke (Editor)

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—the opening years of that enchanted period before the First World War when Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and many able writers delighted readers from Sydney to Seattle with their most original revelations of things-to-come. In all their anticipations, the dominant factor was the recognition that the new industrial societies would continue to evolve in obedience to the rate of change. One major event that caused all to think furiously about the future was the Franco-German War of 1870. The new weapons and the new methods of army organization had shown that the conduct of warfare was changing; and, in response to that perception of change, a new form of fiction took on the task of describing the conduct of the war-to-come.

Genres: Fiction, Speculative Fiction

396 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1995

About the author

Ignatius Frederick "Ian" Clarke was a British scholar and professor of English, known for his work on science fiction as a bibliographer, historian and editor, and also, with his wife Margaret, as a translator of early French science fiction.

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

A number of short stories that are interesting reading about the concerns and predictions of the time, particularly the fear and overestimation of air power. However, the quality of much of the writing is not too good.

[Nicholas Whyte]

http://nhw.livejournal.com/176976.html[return][return]Worthy, but to be honest, a little dull. Clarke has written a couple of the key works on sf of this period, and this collection brings together 14 short stories anticipating developments in warfare between the Franco-Prussian war and Sarajevo 1914. Some of the best known works of the period are omitted, I suppose because Clarke has already collected them elsewhere. A couple of familiar names crop up here unexpectedly - Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, A.A. Milne (this last a short parody of the genre).[return][return]With relatively journalistic material like this, I tend to rate the stories (pebhaps unfairly) on their predictive ability. Jack London's tale of the Yellow Peril, wiped out by germ warfare, does not impress on this count. Conan Doyle's piece about submarines and Gustaf Janson's reflections on warplanes score well, but for me the standout story was an early one, the anonymous "Der Ruhm; or the Wreck of German Unity", published in Macmillan's in July 1871 shortly after the proclamation of the German Empire. The author correctly predicts the humiliation and collapse of Germany as a result of militarist overstretch. Of course it was rather less immediate than he anticipated, but it nonetheless happened not once but twice in the following seventy-five years.