Anxious, Fictional Accounts of the Future
This section addresses several fictional accounts of these technologies (or their imagined potentialities) in action as well as the biographies of those who wrote them. Many of the authors included had military or science experience enough to understand the implications of the military advancement - just as the above section addressed the concerns of the average citizen, so to does this section address the future fears of these knowledgeable individuals. Be it Bulwer-Lytton's Vril or Samuel Butler's "Book of Machines," there was a fear of the destructive power of military technology, with H.G. Wells' "The Land Ironclads" providing a troublingly accurate prediction of the way Europe would inevitably end up fighting World War I. Many of the technologies imagined in these stories were taken either from weapons in their infancy, such as King Solomon's Mines implementation of new firearms to subjugate and control the natives of a lost land through a mystical fear not unlike that used by the British when colonizing Africa. The Vril, arguably, sees the imagination of an almost infinite power source capable of absolute destruction and great productivity, not unlike the nuclear fears created after the surrender of Japan in 1945 as a response to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Samuel Butler provides several arguments in his "Book of Machines" that are echoed by several officers previously listed in this anthology, as supply chains became clogged with parts and bullets rather than men and food. While just a modest selection, many writing at the end of the 19th century sensed the coming danger as military technology exploded exponentially before coming to a head in World War I.