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Riddle 4 - The threat of war / invasion
This was a common theme in late 19th and early 20th century novels - mostly a German invasion, but other writers picked France or Imperial Russia as the major threat. In some, the threat was averted at the last minute, but in others the invasion was successful and Great Britain became a subject nation. The earliest of this kind is the 1871 The Battle of Dorking (a successful German invasion), and better-known examples include The Thirty-Nine Steps or even The War of the Worlds. Is this theme still a valid contemporary threat and if so what parallels are there in recent books?
Comments
I don't think there's as much interest in an invasion by another nation: it's a less credible threat, and that kind of European imperial ambition was of its time.
Threats in the current zeitgeist are more like the typical Bond villains: attacks on systems and institutions, extreme outcomes from criminal megalomaniacs, special forces and sabotage, that sort of thing. I don't think that a land war in the UK, or even in Western Europe, is thinkable at the moment.
As some of you know, I've been reading my way through a compendium work called The Battle of Dorking and Other Invasion Stories 1871-1914 which includes a variety of variations on a theme - the chief variation being whether the adversary was the Germans, the French, the Russians, or some combination thereof.
Some of the books are, frankly, not very good reads except for their historical interest, and are much more along the lines of "we're just not ready for invasion and the government ought to do more... if they don't we're DOOMED!!!". That theme is of course present in Riddle but is handled in a more low-key and less strident manner.
But a common factor which is, perhaps, hard to keep in mind in any era after the mid 20th century is the difficulty of long-range communication. All those books have at very most telegraph signals sent along cables, and the sudden blackout of any reliable information because said cables have been cut (or sometimes the signalling stations seized) typically causes panic in the population and all kinds of wild speculation in the newspaper editions. So the civilian fog of war is a key element in most of them, along with the expectation that the government ought to do more to keep news flowing.
Reliable, long-distance communication is still difficult. Social media means that all sorts of incomplete and conflicting reports come out of an ongoing event. Hostile actors can make it worse by injecting false stories and spreading misinformation. Revolutions often cause the regime to block internet access. Governments may prevent access by journalists to areas.
Good point, I'd forgotten the reliability part of that equation
Well, It's not so unthinkable as it used to be - certain thugist Nazi-like authoritarian regimes might find the prospect of a 51st - or 58th - state the logical next step.
Some of the tales in the compendium "invasion genre" book I've been reading - all the stories having been written between 1871 and 1914 - have a kind of post-apocalyptic feel to them. It's like the writers were trying to posit "this is what life would be like if Germany / Russia / France / whoever successfully invaded right now". They're not quite what we would now call alternative history, as all of them are looking ahead in time from the present-day of the author. But there's something of that same feeling of this is how things might have been.
I can't see anyone attempting military invasion of the UK. I can see the possibility of subversion, economic aggression, and a take-over of the apparatus of power.
But surely you agree an invasion Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, Kaliningrad, or Greenland is not entirely off the table...
is Greenland the 52nd state, or is Gaza the 52nd state and Greenland the 53rd? I'm forgetting my order of annexation!
UK is the 51st state - I heard it in punk rock.
Great Song! I owned it at one time - on the album of a different name... something about a ghost - and had entirely forgotten it! Thank you for reminding me! Looks like our presidente for life got the numbering wrong himself!
I thought the baddies in the book were just too gentlemanly to really take the threat of invasion seriously, but I suspect that's more about me living in my time today, as it seemed that this was much more serious at the time.
I will say that as a Canadian, that while I am not concerned about a physical invasion from our neighbours from the south, for the first time in my life I am concerned about real aggression and hostility making my life (or my kids' lives) tangibly worse through economic or other actions. While the USA has always held a great deal of power and sway in this country, and sucked much of the cultural air out of us here, it's only when those who do so are so egregiously terrible about it that it has felt so real.
I suspect if I lived in the time and place of the book I would have felt a lot more angst about the possibilities being presented in it.