JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post History of the Future series
There's an awful lot in this nihilistic-pro-socialism revolutionary Sci-fi tale of invasion and Armageddon and deliverance from mega-capitalists than I will make room for here, where "here" is an 1893 tales depicting 1903--I really just wanted to point out the pretty pictures of flying machines. (For a full summary follow the link above to a Wiki article on the book; also do follow the link for a short biography of the author.)
"Of all the battlefields of this the bloodiest war in the history of human strife, none had been so deeply dyed with blood as had been the fair and fertile English gardens and meadows over which the hosts of the League had fought their way to the confines of London. Only the weight of overwhelming numbers, reinforced by engines of destruction which could strike without the possibility of effective retaliation, had made their progress possible."
"Had they met their heroic foes as they had met them in the days of the old warfare, their superiority of numbers would have availed them but little. They would have been hurled back and driven into the sea, and not a man of them all would have left British soil alive had it been but a question of military attack and defence."
"But this was not a war of men. It was a war of machines, and those who wielded the most effective machinery for the destruction of life won battle after battle as a matter of course, just as a man armed with a repeating rifle would overcome a better man armed with a bow and arrow." --George Griffith, Angel of the Revolution, a Tale of the Coming Terror, 1893, pp 302-3. Full text via Project Gutenberg, here.
The attitudes of the airship crew in Battle scene #1 are perhaps inspired by this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anton_Romako_001.jpg
Posted by: Smut Clyde | 28 December 2013 at 03:24 PM