Abstract/Summary

H.G Wells, in both his fin-de-siècle fiction and his journalism, speculated on the shape that future warfare would take, with some of these predictions, including aerial bombardment, proving to be correct. Rather than focusing on military innovation, this article instead will examine how two of Wells’s most well-known works of science fiction from his initial creative stage, The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898), anticipated domestic developments that took place in Britain during the build up to the First World War and during the conflict itself. The ways in which violence was used as a response to monstrosity and transgression as embodied by Griffin and the Martians will be located as a foreshadowing not only of much more coercive state policy post-1914, but also as an anticipation of a discourse that justified such measures through tropes of existential struggle against an ‘othered’ opponent.