The Great War in England in 1897
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The Great War in England in 1897 was written by William Le Queux and published by Tower Publishing Co., London in 1894. An important book in the invasion literature genre, it depicts the invasion of Britain by the French with their Cossack allies. By the end of the story, the invasion goes the other way as the victors divide the spoils: Britain seizes Algeria and Russian Central Asia, thus decisively winning The Great Game, while Germany annexes more of mainland France in addition to Alsace-Lorraine.
It is considered to have influenced, directly and indirectly, many subsequent works. Specifically, H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, published four years later (1898) seems to have borrowed many plot elements. In Wells' book, as in Le Queux's, a relentless enemy makes a devastating surprise attack and penetrates to the heart of London. In many ways, however, Wells' book seems a deliberate antithesis to Le Queux's nationalism: in the Wells book, the attack is extra-terrestrial with the the invading Martians posing a deadly threat to all humanity; human weapons are futile against the invaders, who are overcome only by earthly microbes; and in the aftermath, the nations of chastened humanity are drawn closer together.
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