George Tomkyns Chesney 1 hr 10 min read

A veteran, decades on, tells his grandchildren how a foreign power crushed an unready Britain, the swift, humiliating invasion that swept away the empire in a matter of days.

George Tomkyns Chesney's 1871 story is the foundational work of invasion literature and future-war fiction. Sharp, sobering, hugely influential. Read it for the tale that launched a whole genre, a chillingly plausible account of Britain's downfall, written to warn a complacent nation, that echoed through decades of anxious imitators.

In its time

Published in 1871, during the 1870s, under the sea and around the moon.

Reading it

1 hr 10 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).