Background
The novel was originally commissioned by Alfred Harmsworth as a serial which appeared in the Daily Mail from 10 March 1906. According to historian of Germany Sir Richard Evans, the paper built up "mass alarm" by dressing its London newspaper vendors as Prussian soldiers complete with pickelhaube helmet and placards showing maps of where the 'troops' would be next day. [1] The rewrite of the story, featuring towns and villages with large readership of the Daily Mail, [2] greatly increased the newspaper's circulation and made a small fortune for Le Queux; it was translated into twenty-seven languages, and over one million copies of the book edition were sold. [3] The idea for the novel is alleged to have originated from Field Marshal Earl Roberts, who regularly lectured English schoolboys on the need to prepare for war. [4]
To Le Queux's dismay, a pirated and abridged German translation (with an altered ending) appeared the same year: Die Invasion von 1910: Einfall der Deutschen in England translated by Traugott Tamm. [4]
In Le Queux's earlier novel, The Great War in England in 1897 , it is France which invades Britain as an implacable enemy. In that book's plot, German soldiers land in Britain as allies coming to help repulse the French invasion, and are welcomed as saviours. In between Le Queux's two disparate depictions of an invaded Britain, the Entente Cordiale of 1904 changed the diplomatic and military landscape.
Spy fiction is a genre of literature involving espionage as an important context or plot device. It emerged in the early twentieth century, inspired by rivalries and intrigues between the major powers, and the establishment of modern intelligence agencies. It was given new impetus by the development of fascism and communism in the lead-up to World War II, continued to develop during the Cold War, and received a fresh impetus from the emergence of rogue states, international criminal organizations, global terrorist networks, maritime piracy and technological sabotage and espionage as potent threats to Western societies. As a genre, spy fiction is thematically related to the novel of adventure, the thriller and the politico-military thriller.
Operation Fortitude was the code name for a World War II military deception employed by the Allied nations as part of an overall deception strategy during the build-up to the 1944 Normandy landings. Fortitude was divided into two sub-plans, North and South, with the aim of misleading the German High Command as to the location of the invasion.
The alien invasion or space invasion is a common feature in science fiction stories and film, in which extraterrestrial lifeforms invade the Earth either to exterminate and supplant human life, enslave it under an intense state, harvest people for food, steal the planet's resources, or destroy the planet altogether.
William Tufnell Le Queux was an Anglo-French journalist and writer. He was also a diplomat, a traveller, a flying buff who officiated at the first British air meeting at Doncaster in 1909, and a wireless pioneer who broadcast music from his own station long before radio was generally available; his claims regarding his own abilities and exploits, however, were usually exaggerated. His best-known works are the anti-French and anti-Russian invasion fantasy The Great War in England in 1897 (1894) and the anti-German invasion fantasy The Invasion of 1910 (1906), the latter becoming a bestseller.
Harrie Irving Hancock was an American chemist and writer, mainly remembered as an author of children's literature and juveniles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and as having written a fictional depiction of a German invasion of the United States.
The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service is a 1903 novel by Erskine Childers. The book, which enjoyed immense popularity in the years before World War I, is an early example of the espionage novel and was extremely influential in the genre of spy fiction. It has been made into feature-length films for both cinema and television.
The Axis of Time trilogy is an alternative history series of novels written by Australian journalist and author John Birmingham, from Macmillan Publishing.
La Débâcle (1892), translated as The Debacle and The Downfall, is the penultimate novel of Émile Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart series, which first appeared as a serial in La Vie populaire from 21 February to 21 July 1892, before being published in book form by Charpentier.
Invasion literature is a literary genre that was popular in the period between 1871 and the First World War (1914–1918). The invasion novel first was recognized as a literary genre in the UK, with the novella The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (1871), an account of a German invasion of England, which, in the Western world, aroused the national imaginations and anxieties about hypothetical invasions by foreign powers; by 1914 the genre of invasion literature comprised more than 400 novels and stories.
The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer is an 1871 novella by George Tomkyns Chesney, starting the genre of invasion literature and an important precursor of science fiction. Written just after the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War, it describes an invasion of Britain by a German-speaking country referred to in oblique terms as The Other Power or The Enemy.
Before Armageddon: An Anthology of Victorian and Edwardian Imaginative Fiction Published Before 1914 is a collection of stories, including invasion literature, and one article, all edited by Michael Moorcock. Originally published in hardback by W.H. Allen in 1975, it was re-issued as a paperback by Star in 1976.
The Great War in England in 1897 was written by William Le Queux and published in 1894.
The Swoop!, or How Clarence Saved England is a short comic novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom by Alston Rivers Ltd, London, on 16 April 1909. Its subtitle is A Tale of the Great Invasion.
Herbert Wrigley Wilson, known often only as H. W. Wilson, was a British journalist and naval historian.
Bernard Charles Newman was a British writer of 138 books, both fiction and non-fiction. His works have been translated into over 20 languages including Japanese and Braille. An historian, he was considered an authority on spies, but also wrote books concerning travel and politics. His fiction included mystery novels, plays, science fiction and children's books.
Henderson's Boys is a series of young adult spy novels written by the English author Robert Muchamore. The series follows Charles Henderson, the creator of the fictitious CHERUB organisation. The novels are set between 1940 and 1945, during the Nazi occupation of France in the Second World War. Throughout the novels, Henderson leads a series of war missions, aided by children.
A hypothetical military victory of the Axis powers over the Allies of World War II (1939–1945) is a common topic in speculative literature. Works of alternative history (fiction) and of counterfactual history (non-fiction), including stories, novels, and plays, often explore speculative public and private life in lands conquered by the coalition, whose principal powers were Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy.
The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells, first serialised in 1897 by Pearson's Magazine in the UK and by Cosmopolitan magazine in the US. The novel's first appearance in hardcover was in 1898 from publisher William Heinemann of London. Written between 1895 and 1897, it is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between mankind and an extra-terrestrial race. The novel is the first-person narrative of both an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and of his younger brother in London as southern England is invaded by Martians. The novel is one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon.
Operation Graffham was a military deception employed by the Allies during the Second World War. It formed part of Operation Bodyguard, a broad strategic deception designed to disguise the imminent Allied invasion of Normandy. Graffham provided political support to the visual and wireless deception of Operation Fortitude North. These operations together created a fictional threat to Norway during the summer of 1944.
Imperial German plans for the invasion of the United Kingdom were first conceived in 1897 by Admiral Eduard von Knorr, commander of the Imperial German Navy, against a background of increasing Anglo-German rivalry and German naval expansion. Acknowledging the inferiority of the small German fleet, his concept called for a preemptive strike against the Royal Navy to establish temporary naval supremacy. This would be followed by an immediate landing, before British naval reinforcements re-established command of the sea. Subsequent studies determined that the shortest possible sea-crossing would be a prerequisite for success, requiring the use of port facilities seized in Belgium and the Netherlands to embark the expeditionary force. Reconnaissance of the English east coast was completed and potential landing sites in East Anglia were selected.
