“Invasion literature” has a long history in the English-speaking world. So too is the debate as to whether it merely reflected contemporary concerns or has actually helped to drive events. Today, two new novels premised on a Chinese invasion of Taiwan are helping to rekindle this smouldering genre.

In the years before WWI the English speaking world was alarmed by numerous novels presenting a fictional invasion of the British Isles by the German Empire. It started many years before the war, the first notable work being The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer by Sir George Tomkyns Chesney in the wake of Prussia’s victory over France in 1871. The genre heated up over time, Erskine Childers’s 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands took a minor Foreign Office official Carruthers off on a yachting holiday where he discovers a German invasion plan among the sands of the Frisian coast. The Invasion of 1910 written in 1906 by William Le Queux continued the theme and was serialised in the Daily Mail and as such has been criticised for fanning “Gemanophobia” and mass alarm. Here Le Queux creates a junior MP who rallies the British to defeat the invading Germans at the Battle of Royston. A 1913 novel When William Came: A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns by Saki was a further development.

The last major addition to the genre was of course Buchan’s 1915 The Thirty-Nine Steps written after the war had started and again has the stout British hero — well, Rhodesian — foils a plot to undermine Britain’s naval preparations.

For many of these books the motive was little more than the literary potential of an actual or foiled invasion — but for some the novel had the potential to shine a light on what the authors saw as the weakness in the British Military. And arguably some were influential on public and official opinion regardless of their writer’s intent. Churchill, then at  the Admiralty, was supposedly interested in Erskine Childer’s book, even though unbeknown to him Childer’s mind had wandered from a German invasion to his own attempts to run guns for Irish nationalists.

Would these books have been forgotten if the war they predicted had not come to pass? Possibly, but not all to the same extent. Le Queux had already written a book on a potential French invasion of England, that is now lost to history. But there have been numerous other novels of greater and lesser believability based on a future invasion that thankfully has not come to pass.  At one extreme H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds was about a Martian invasion of Earth. There have also been numerous Cold War spy thrillers and the occasional book such as Clancy’s 1986 Red Tide Rising that imagined what would happen if it turned hot. A book that felt so plausible (at the time) that Ronald Regan recommended it to Margaret Thatcher.

The genre reappeared after the cold war, noticeably with the 2016 book by a former NATO commander General Sir Richard Shirreff’s War With Russia which foretold a more expansionist Russia, which headed for the Baltic and then nuclear war.

So, should we be concerned that two recent books seem to be reinventing the genre for a modern-day invasion scare? Further from home this time, but still a real concern — China invading Taiwan and the seemingly real threat that Chinese aggression may move from the rhetorical to the military.

The first book to come out is Invasion by BBC Security correspondent Frank Gardner. The book takes in British spies, Hong Kong and an impending invasion of Taiwan that Gardner’s main character Luke Carlton is tasked with preventing. Fortunately for the UK and the wider world, our intelligence services have not been asleep and have a mole within the Chinese Communist Party. The book is realistic and does the job of the previous generation of raising the profile of a clear danger to world peace and providing a solid literary backdrop.

The second book that has just come out is Christopher Howarth’s The Durian Pact. Howarth’s focus is Westminster politics, which as a long serving researcher for the Tory European Research Group he knows well. His book, echoing Invasion 1910 places a junior MP as the unlikely hero. Unlike pre WWI books, there are few heroes on the inside of the establishment and far from the UK having spies in China, the number of news stories of Chinese espionage suggest the tables are very much turned. Everyone from senior politicians, civil servants, and security officials appear to be frequently tempted by Chinese gold. Far from the British having a plan, it’s the Chinese that make the running and inroads into the weaknesses that pervade modern Britain. Despite the greater physical distance of the Chinese mainland, the spying brings the danger closer to home in a way that the novels pre WWI appeared to do. Who can we trust in the British establishment to guard Western and British interests? Interestingly, the Durian Pact came out shortly before the UK establishment decided to hand the Diego Garcian military base to China’s ally Mauritius, but given it features heavily in the book as a strategic base and the spectre of Chinese infiltration of the British establishment, you can probably guess who Howarth blames for handing it over.

So where does this genre go now? Frank Gardner’s book is more a traditional adventure where the British establishment are undoubtedly the good guys out to save the world, whereas the Durian Pact could be interpreted as a call for more attention to the Navy and awareness of Chinese penetration into the soggy British state.  Bond-esque escapism vs a didactic novel? Not quite, but not totally off the mark. Sadly we’re living in a darker world, where old certainties have been exchanged for one where it’s difficult to tell who is on which side, and  the British establishment are not unquestionably acting in the UK’s best interests.

Will this genre develop? That may depend a bit on the geo politics, but if tension mounts in the far east a whole new slew of spy and invasion literature may be coming our way.