The End of the World, Part I: H. G. Wells
From the desk of Thomas F. Bertonneau on Tue, 2011-09-13 16:00
The End of the World is an apocalyptic myth that first becomes prominent in religious speculation in the period of Late Antiquity. St. John’s Apocalypse, included as the last book of the New Testament, is the best-known item in the genre, with its elaborate visions of Armageddon and the Last Judgment. Persistently, however, since the French Revolution, the myth of the End of the World has secularized itself, expressing its eschatological anxiety in terms of entirely this-worldly events. In the Twentieth Century, the End of the World became a staple of “scientific romance” or science fiction, where it often concerned the perfection of destructive instrumentality. In England beginning in the 1870s, the foreign invasion story became popular. In George Tomkyns Chesney’s many times reprinted Battle of Dorking (1871), Kaiser Wilhelm I, not content with the defeat of France at Sedan, pushes on through Belgium and the Netherlands, crosses the Channel, and reduces Britain to vassalage. Sometimes the invasion involved the so-called Yellow Peril, an onslaught, in some non-specific near future, by militarized hordes of Chinese or Japanese, who overwhelm Europe.
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