Prewar Prophesy Literature, Part II — Sci Fi Goes to War

Science fiction, for its serious aficionados, has literary roots back to ancient doomsday works and the later  utopian essays of Thomas More and Francis  Bacon, but the genre—as we recognize it—emerged in the latter  19th century out of the industrial age.  The new technology spawned excited thinking about new  devices and their applications in the future. This era's  science fiction founding figures were Jules Verne and  H.G. Wells. Each had much to say about the future of  warfare in their writings, particularly about weaponry. Both, however, also dabbled in Invasion Lit and wrote  important novels that mixed the genres.  

Verne's 1879 The Begum's Fortune portends a war  instigated by a militaristic German (who is also a  prototype "mad scientist"). It features gigantic cannon (think "Big Bertha") and, possibly, the earliest prediction of chemical warfare—carbon dioxide unleashed to  freeze the opposition in place. The most improbable  element of  Begum is that the fighting takes place in a  French town (colony?) on the coast of Oregon, USA. 

Published two decades later, Wells's 1898 Martian invasion classic, War of the Worlds, was a thinly disguised war premonition. It, too, incorporates fearsome weaponry and gas warfare elements, with a decisive invasion-ending demonstration of biological  warfare. Earth (if you haven't seen either of the movie  versions) is saved because the Martians have no  resistance to earth-borne disease.

The French Contribution

The bigger contribution of science fiction to the body  of premonitions of the First World War involves weaponry, however.  This is not to say all the prognosticators predictions came about  or that many of  their predictions were entirely new thinking. Countless  fulfilled predictions, for example, have been incorrectly attributed to Jules Verne's vivid imagination. Submarines first appeared in the American Revolution, and  the Montgolfier brothers were demonstrating their balloons, antecedents of airships, about that same time, that is, long before Verne was born.  

Nevertheless, he wrote thrilling adventure novels  featuring them and he stirred  imaginations. In a broad  way, as Invasion Lit writers helped generate the war fever of 1914, science fiction writers  got inventors, entrepreneurs, and military staffs thinking about novel ways to fight wars. Jules Verne gets much of the credit for initiating and stimulating this process.  

Of the many imitators of Jules Verne, two, both French, most prominently built on his work by "futurizing" weapons while imaginatively intensifying the combat elements of their writings. Also, they supplemented  their writings with dramatic illustrations.

Albert Robida's View of 20th-Century War

Albert Robida's work appeared in two waves. From 1883 to 1890 he published a remarkable series of  magazine pieces and books that addressed future  wars, the most famous being La Guerre au vingtième siècle (War in the Twentieth Century). His war scenarios are sometimes fantastical—Mozambique takes on Australia in 1975—but his caricature-style drawings capture many aspects of the Great War of the future struggle. Many of his predictions would be validated  during  the  war:

 • Railroads would play a dominant role, used for mobilizing and moving troops, and as mobile artillery platforms. 

• Airships and balloons would be used for bombing, firing specialized artillery, and observation. 

• Chemists would be called on to create asphyxiant gases. 

• Artillery and barbed wire would command the battlefield. 

• Tunneling would be required to attack and advance.  

•  Specific weapons would  include: armored vehicles, bomb-dropping airships, fire and gas projectors, and anti-aircraft artillery. 

Robida examined every dimension of future life, but after the turn of the century he returned to future war as a favorite topic and income producer. In a brilliant series for the magazine La Guerre Infernale he covered the same territory, but this time drawing in a more realistic style, updating the look of his soldiers and their weaponry.  Once again (see above), his work captures the grimness of World War I battlefields, and the use of airships as a terror weapon. 

For some reason, Robida did not seem too interested in other types of aircraft beyond airships. There does not seem to be many fighter or pursuit airplanes in his work. Another Frenchman, who wrote extensively about the future, took up some of the slack for him, preferring the airplane to the airship.  

"Capitaine Danrit" was the pen-name of Émile Driant infantry officer, parliamentary deputy, and novelist. Before the war, he was among the most prolific of all Invasion Lit authors, almost all of his writings pretty bad. His overheated style was probably driven by his hyper-patriotism and by his valid foresight of an era of  terrible wars enabled by the new technologies. Driant's most remembered invasion work was the worst kind of "Yellow Peril" rabble rousing about a Japanese-led invasion of Europe, titled L' invasion  Jaune.   

Émile Driant at Verdun

There are, though, redeeming aspects to Driant's work. He was one of the few science fiction writers of the period, who was also a professional military officer.  From the 1880s up to the war he wrote a series of  novels under the heading The War of Tomorrow and stories for magazines such as the Journal des Voyages. His best predictions came from exploring the operational potential of what we call weapons systems: combat air squadrons, airlift, and (surprisingly) submarines. For an infantryman, he had his eye on the sea, also speculating about naval air operations and transoceanic troop deployments. His most impressive observations may have been about the need for specialized equipment to rescue crews of disabled submarines.   

Driant was unique in World War I futurism in one respect. He saw the future war he had long predicted come to pass, fought in it, and died fighting.  Lt. Col. Émile Driant was in command of two battalions of Chasseur Alpins on the front line at Verdun in February 1916. He and his men, without support, held their  position until the second day of the battle when most of them perished, including Driant. Today, Lt. Col. Émile Driant is better remembered as the first hero of Verdun than as an author. 

H.G. Wells

As an imaginative futurist H.G. Wells stands alone. He has some claim (with a number of others) to predicting the battlefield power of the machine gun, modern artillery, and chemical agents. Two imaginative works, though, are his unique predictors of war to come. In 1903 he wrote a short story for The Strand magazine titled "The Land Ironclads," that described in  their  function  and  general design. Though his version was unrealistically large (100-foot long), they were armored, had specialized treads (modeled on elephant's feet) and carried lots of guns and soldiers. These "Land Ironclads" had the ability to crash through trench defenses and barricades. Many parties are given credit for advocating the British tanks that first appeared on the Somme in September 1916, but Wells had inspired them all, long before.

In 1908, he subsequently published the novel The War in the Air, which prefigured the role of bombers in both tactical and strategic settings. When Germany and the U.S. find themselves at war, the Germans gain the upper hand by building an air fleet with zeppelins and flying machines called Drachenflieger.  They first destroy the American dreadnoughts in the North Atlantic and then level New York, leaving it a “furnace of crimson flames, from which there was no escape.” Of course, we see now that these predictions worked out in greater detail during the Second World War, with Germany and her allies on the receiving end, but it was not for lack of trying that the results were not as severe in the Great War.  

Wells had many misses in his numerous forecasts, of course. He missed the troop transport function, for example. He believed that after bombing an opponent to smithereens there would be no way to transfer occupying forces, hence, civilization there would simply collapse. He missed submarines, and, as air historian John Morrow points out,  like almost all of his contemporaries, Wells missed "the aspect of the airplane's use for which it became most famous—aerial combat and as the vehicle for the great heroes of the war in general." Nevertheless, even today in the 21st century, H.G. Wells is still regarded as the greatest  predictor of war weaponry.  

Source: Over the Top, November 2013