Beyond Dorking, Sand Riddles and Wars of Worlds, by Claude Bouchard.

Throw the expression Invasion Literature to a group of literary buffs and you will be quickly showered with names such as Chesney, Childers and, of course, Wells. True enough, invasion literature was born from George Tomkyns Chesney's 1871 short story, The Battle of Dorking and H.G. Wells. 1898 The War of the Worlds is probably the genre's best known work. Also not to be neglected is Erskine Childers. 1903 The Riddles of the Sands, often dubbed the first modern spy novel, in which two vacationing sailors discover a secret invasion fleet off the coast of Germany. However, it must be noted that other works, and for that matter, other authors dedicated to the invasion genre exist as well.

In addition to The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells also wrote The Land Ironclads (1904), which predicted the breakthrough in trench warfare well before it was actually achieved late in WWI. The War in the Air (1907) tells the story of the United States having to fight invasion on two fronts; the Germans to east and the China/Japan Confederation to the west. World-wide atomic war is the subject of The World Set Free, published in 1914.

Journalist and writer, William Le Queux, authored The Great War in England in 1897, published in 1894, which depicted Britain's invasion by the French and their Cossack allies. His 1906 publication, The Invasion of 1910, has Britain being invaded once again, this time by the Germans. Spies of the Kaiser, published in 1909, with another .Germany invades Britain. plot, ended up playing a major role in the formation of Britain's MI5.

George Griffith's Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror, published in 1893, combined world war (with the French and Russians fighting the similarly allied British and Germans) with global terrorism, where the terrorist organization, Terror, ends up ruling the planet after overthrowing the Tsar. The 1894 sequel, Olga Romanov, tells the tale of a mad Russian woman, the Tsar's last living descendant, a century later as she plots to overthrow the Terror world order. The Outlaws of the Air (1895) depicts aerial warfare of the future while The Raid of the Le Vengeur (1901) takes place with British/French tensions as the backdrop. A world war of gigantic proportions threatens the planet's population while a fast approaching comet threatens the existence of planet itself in Griffith's 1907 publication, The World Peril of 1910.

Other works and authors of the invasion literature genre include Banzai!, published in 1908 and written by Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff under the pseudonym Parabellum. Banzai! is a fictional account of Japan's invasion and conquest of the United States and the latter's subsequent resistance efforts. P.G. Wodehouse's The Swoop!, or How Clarence Saved England was published in 1909 and is a comical satire, telling of the invasion of England by armies from Germany, Russia and other countries. Hector Hugh Munro, under the pen name Saki, brought us When William Came which was published in 1913 and tells us of life in London following the German occupation and the changes which came with it.

By Claude Bouchard, July 2009

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