The question was asked in the title of a short story published in Cassell’s magazine by John Munro in 1899. That story, and several other Wellsian science fictions on similar themes, was collected in an anthology by Michael Moorcock in 1977 – England Invaded. Invasion literature was big in British pulp fiction in the decades leading up to the Great War:
Invasion literature (or the invasion novel) was a historical literary genre most notable between 1871 and the First World War (1914). The genre first became recognizable starting in Britain in 1871 with the short story The Battle of Dorking, a fictional account of an invasion of England by Germany. The Battle of Dorking was so popular it started a literary craze for stories that aroused imaginations and anxieties about hypothetical invasions by foreign powers, and by 1914 the genre had amassed a corpus of over 400 books, many best-sellers, and a world-wide audience. The genre was extremely influential in Britain in shaping politics, national policies and popular perceptions in the years leading up to the First World War, and still remains a part of popular culture to this day.
Moorcock, who never hid his political light under his fictional bushel, was well aware of the contribution popular culture made to a climate of opinion where war was welcomed and enemies demonised. Indeed, his anarchistic and dystopian/utopian fiction of the late 60s and 70s (particularly in the Jerry Cornelius novels), made a series of subtle fictional points about the American will to empire and the Vietnam War, as did the British “New Wave” of sf generally.
In 2006, the dementedly far right Republican Senator, Rick Santorum, lost his seat to a record vote for a Democrat in Pennsylvania. Santorum had lectured his constituents on the consequences of his defeat:
In the dying days of his Senate race, Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum warned voters that turning him out could bring on World War III. “Many Americans are sleepwalking,” the soon-to-be-ex-senator huffed, “just as they did before the world wars of the last century.”
There’s a fascinating article in the LA Times by Reason Magazine associate editor David Weigel on the rise of culture war fiction among right wing sf writers in recent years.
Be afraid, conservatives. If you survived the victory speeches of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and allowed yourself to think, “Things can’t get any worse,” get over it. They can.
Two years from now, terrorists under the banner of the “Progressive Restoration” will take over Manhattan in a larger attempt to overthrow the government. Thirteen years later, President Chelsea Clinton and Vice President Michael Moore will haul out the good White House china for Osama bin Laden’s state visit. By fiddling with your radio, you may be able to catch an underground broadcast by Sean Hannity. If you own a radio, that is; folks living in states that are under Sharia law won’t even be that lucky.
These aren’t my fantasies or nightmares. All of these vignettes are ripped from science fiction thrillers that have hit shelves in just the last 18 months. Sharia comes to the United States in Robert Ferrigno’s potboiler, “Prayers for the Assassin.” In Joel C. Rosenberg’s “Last Jihad” trilogy, a steel-spined U.S. president nukes Baghdad, then combats a Russo-Iranian axis, all in fulfillment of Scripture (or so we’re told in the nail-biting third book, “The Ezekiel Option”). Hannity and his stone-jawed sidekick, G. Gordon Liddy, battle the Clinton restoration in Mike Mackey and Donny Lin’s comic book, “Liberality for All.” The Second American Civil War is breaking out in Orson Scott Card’s “Empire” (book out now, video game on the way).
If it all sounds a little strange and crazed, that’s because it is. The right’s sleep of reason is bringing forth dark, futuristic political thrillers.
Not all of these books are from the LaHaye Left Behind school of apocalyptic fiction (though their astonishing publishing success is a political and cultural phenomenon well worthy of notice and debate). Orson Scott Card is a prominent sf writer who’s won the Hugo and Nebula awards. Card, rather bizarrely, describes himself as a “Tony Blair Democrat” and is a big fan of Fox News:
It’s a good feeling to hear about our war from people who actually think it would be a good thing if we win.
There’s a connection here. Fox News tends to be analysed more in terms of its departure from accepted journalistic standards. But that’s to miss the point. Fox News performs a cultural role – shaping ideas, mindsets and creating an ideological climate. The “culture wars” are rightly named. As Weigel correctly observes:
Culture war fiction serves the same function. “Liberality for All” simply continues the one-sided conversation that’s been taking place across right-wing media with increasing fury since 9/11. If you think the media, the courts and the United Nations are in cahoots to destroy your way of life, beating liberals in elections won’t solve the problem. Better to dream up the final battle between liberals and liberty that has been framed by Hannity (the real-world blowhard, that is, not the fictional action hero) and fight it out in the funny books.
Card, the Hugo- and Nebula-winning science fiction writer, is the biggest literary heavyweight to try his hand at the culture war novel (though you wouldn’t know it from “Empire’s” stilted dialogue and improbable plot twists). But, by his own admission, he’s doing it for a higher purpose than mere book sales.
“We are so constantly pounded by mild-mannered, stating-it-as-fact fanatics of the left who dominate the media that that starts sounding like the normal climate,” Card sighed during a promotional interview with husband-and-wife bloggers Glenn Reynolds and Helen Smith. “Repetition makes even insanity sound normal.”
Some insanities, maybe. Not quite all.
Sf has a long history of imagining other worlds where politics and society are configured otherwise. Perhaps the warfic is telling us something. The slogan “another world is possible”, beloved of anti-globalisation movements, is weak because of its lack of imaginative content about what that world would look like. Any successful political movement has always been able to imagine what its utopia might look like. Since the symbolic end of history that was trumpeted as the only imaginable consequence of the end of Soviet communism, those who would like to imagine a different world have struggled to map out its contours. Perhaps the left needs to understand that confronting the culture warriors with reasoned arguments is only part of the game. It will be won when, and if, we can imagine different worlds.
Cross posted at Sarsaparilla.
The man in the High Castle was not a bad SF yarn,Card is not my cup of tea,prefer SF english writers,also like short stories over long novels in the fiction section,but enjoy reading bios and such and history.
May be Card can go into competition with sciencetolgy, bloke who invented that was a SF writer
Mark
i’m the writer of the NY Times bestselling “potboiler” Prayers for the Assassin, which posits a future civil war in the US, after which most of the country converts to Islam and the Christians relocated to the Deep South.
You might have found Weigel’s article in the LA Times fascinating, but i found it rather dim and overly literal. the background to my novel is contained in a high school history paper circa 2025 by one of the main characters:
Though the jihadi attacks had little direct, long-term impact on the United States, the true importance of the 9-11 martyrdom was that it induced the former regime to over-extend itself in fruitless and expensive military engagements around the world. The political and economic consequences of this U.S. response were profound and long lasting. After all their short-lived triumphs in the Islamic homeworld, the Crusaders fled, grown weary war, eager to return to their idle pursuits. This great retreat left the West no safer than before, but instead drained it of capital, manpower and, most importantly, will.
Yeah, I know it’s ridiculous and impossible to imagine.
all best
Robert
“Perhaps the left needs to understand that confronting the culture warriors with reasoned arguments is only part of the game. It will be won when, and if, we can imagine different worlds.”
Well said. As a student of environmental policy and an employee of an environmental agency I recently struggled with why the concept of a sustainable society was so hard to grasp, why we continually need to re-argue the case for it and why it is most frequently articulated as economic sustainability, rather than social or environmental sustainabilty.
It wasn’t until I listened to a talk by David Suzuki that I realised what I was missing, and therefore what most of us were probably missing: a vision for the world in 30 years time. I had no idea of what a sustainable society would look like other than “better”, so therefore I was letting other people decide how it would develop.
A good story revolves around conflict in a plot line, so perhaps sf writers have more to work with when they imagine society in disarray. It may be difficult to find a recognisable protagonist in a society-wide shift to renewable energy, or water conservation, on which to base a sf novel of this nature, but you do have an excellent point Mark. What other genres and forms of communication can be used to create the imagery that the left needs to inspire the shifts that they are arguing for?
Funny you should mention Man in the High Castle, John (it was Philip K Dick BTW). On one level it’s about the Japanese taking over the West Coast after WWII this playing into invasion anxieties. But on another level, it’s about being a stranger in your own country. Both deal with a loss of supremacy but one stokes fears and the other encourages empathy. I wonder if there’s a sharp division on how the book is taken.
Like the Japanese flight simulator addict who tried to hijack a plane to fly under Rainbow Bridge, I see great merit in shepherding our cultural warriors back into the realm of fiction.
Everyone:
If you want to get a feeling for the “invasion fever” in Great Britain in the years before the First World War broke out, read the novel “Riddle Of The Sands”; the ‘Seventies film, based on a much abriged version of the story, isn’t too bad either.
“I see great merit in shepherding our cultural warriors back into the realm of fiction.”
Yes, that way they always get to write the happy ending. Another well flambéd one liner Ants.
Bob F, stop being so defensive. It sounds like you’ve written a lively and popular thriller. Wish I could. More power to your elbow.
But history and literature, and the history of literature, is chokkas with otherwise entertaining yarns claiming never mind the width, feel the quality ‘cos it really could it happen here. But it never does as the future is never what we remember – aside from a few prescient fragments by PK Dick and JG Ballard.
Speaking of which and of “invasion fever”, it’s also worth revisiting Saki’s novel of the UK under German rule, “When William Came”. HH Munro (Saki) was a very shrewd professional political pundit and a writer of genius yet when it came to how the looming WW1 would play out, he got it utterly wrong.
It’s still a good read though, especially at the end when the aristocratic protagonist is briefed by a high Tory matriarch to make the supreme sacrifice – that is to become a travelling salesman moving through the countryside fostering insurgent cells to fight the hi-tech occupying power.
And Graham, “Riddle of the Sands” is a great yarn although it’s worth noting its author was executed for treason by a British firing squad to Churchill’s great satisfaction.
Um…I didn’t finish that last comment. I meant to dwell on the irony of the guy who wrote a massively popular book warning of the growing threat of German surface naval power and which helped inspire Churchill as he and Jacky Fisher reformed the RN, ended up getting shot with Winnie’s blessings while German surface naval power as a deciding factor during the Great War turned out to be a complete furphy.
And Nabakov a great furphy is what imagining the future will always be as will a life -threatening struggle also be a part of it but without the imagining we would all become conservatives yearning for the mythical good times of the idealised past.
Culture wars fiction is certainly nothing new… these (ludicrous) plotlines described here are just very blatant examples. The Lord of the Rings is a paradigmatic example, in my opinion.
Riddle of the Sands is a great read, but that’s one reason why I’ve never felt it was entirely representative of the invasion genre. Mostly they have very little literary value, though great historical value. It’s also unrepresentative in that Childers pulls his punches: the big German invasion never happens. Most writers preferred to show the invasion itself, and/or its aftermath, to really bring the message home. He was also writing surprisingly early (1903); aside from a few imitators of The Battle of Dorking in the 1870s, the German invasion genre didn’t really take off until a few years after Riddle. It’s never really been clear to me how popular Riddle was at the time, either — it wasn’t referred to much in the late Edwardian period, that I’ve noticed.
The author I would choose as the exemplar of the genre is William le Queux, who really set the bandwagon rolling in 1906 with his hugely popular The Invasion of 1910, and was such a bad writer that in the middle of Spies of the Kaiser he swapped the names of the two protagonists — the brave intelligent one and the dimwitted but faithful sidekick — apparently without realising it! So he has it all.
But for all that, if you only read one, Riddle is certainly the one to read, with maybe Wodehouse’s parody “The swoop!” for a chaser. I’m also fond of the movie, Michael York makes a fine Carruthers, wot wot.
In a sense, Wells’ War of the Worlds is a bit of a twist and an oblique reference to the invasion literature genre.
Moorcock has written about Le Queux, I think.
Back to the broader theme, I was thinking of some of the feminist sf of the 70s which does try to imagine non-patriarchal worlds (and often has libertarian/anarchist themes as well) – at its best, like Doris Pisterchia and Ursula Le Guin’s early work, it’s superb, precisely because it is so imaginative. At its worst, just like the invasion literature perhaps, it’s appallingly dull and dry because it’s too didactic and fails to imagine a utopia but rather stays well and truly within this world and casts stones.
This article tosses around a few fundamentals of ‘Imaging the future’ which is well worth a look.
Nabakov:
Jeez!! I knew Churchill and his mob were rats but that must take the prize for ingratitude!! I’ve often wondered if publishing “The Riddle Of The Sands” may have forestalled the Kaiser’s cousinly plans for Great Britain. (If that is so then putting the US Army counter-insurgency field manual on internet recently might have been a similar cunning move; don’t know).
Kim:
You are right. “War Of The Worlds”, like “THX-1138″, was both science fiction and, for the astute, comment on the current situation and on the immediate future. B.E.M.s from Mars are allowed to wear pickelhaubers too if the fashion strikes their fancy.:-)
Everyone:
Not quite off-topic but …. I’ve googled high and low without success trying to find a German TV serial (4 parts?) broadcast by the blessed AD-FREE!! SBS around 1990~1992 called “Johkenin” or something like that – about village life in East Prussia from 1938 up to and beyond the Soviet Red Army invasion.
Graham – Ich habe es finden. Or as the Germans would say, I think that over time you confused the name of the film with the name of the director.
Unlikely, because Germany never seriously considered invading Britain. Its navy drafted a few amateurish warplans ca. 1900 but as it never came close even to parity with the Royal Navy, there was little chance of having to put them into effect. (Luckily for the German army!)
Dusting off my sources again, there was a big kerfuffle resulting from Riddle, which resulted in the first of several official committees to examine the invasion question, but the practical result of this was zero (no extra spending, no redeployments). And if it hadn’t been Childers who alerted everyone to the German “threat”, it would have been somebody else (probably le Queux) … such was the paranoia of the day.
Steve:
Thanks a lot for that terrific link to the film database – but that film doesn’t sound familiar so shall keep looking.
Brett:
There was, however, a lot of worry about Germany’s commercial ambitions and about their Kaiser, who everyone in the British ruling class – and every Prussian peasant – knew was as mad as a meat-axe (though few would dare say so in public) …. so the paranoia about invasion by Germany was probably justified to a certain extent.
There are some interesting parallels between Kaiser Bill and Mr G W Bush. Invasion anyone? A nice quick little war?