“An End to Our Iron and Coal”: Resource Anxiety in Late Victorian Science Fiction

Abstract

As global social and environmental conditions deteriorate, growing ranks of scientists, environmentalists, and writers have pointed toward population growth and resource scarcity as primary conditions of ecological catastrophe. Studying the “Future War” subgenre of Late Victorian science fiction, I search for the origins of this contemporary concern with so-called “overpopulation” and resource scarcity. By examining George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) and H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1889), this paper explores how late Victorian anxieties about the relative decline of the British Empire, constellated around scarcity, continue to frame contemporary understandings of social and environmental crisis today.