War of the Worlds
Just playing with Sora One thing I was curious about was whether the title War of the Worlds influenced people to start saying "First World War." It sounds like a play on "world war," but the timing doesn’t work — so it must actually be the other way around, right? Anyway, I poked around a bit and found a whole bunch of authors from the 1880s and 1890s writing what we’d now call Tom Clancy-style techno-thrillers. They were science fiction, but focused more on wargaming — near-future scenarios where the great powers go to war and use cutting-edge technology to win. This genre, which Wells was clearly into (he wrote stuff in that mode himself, like The War in the Air and Chapter 6 of Anticipations, and he loved wargaming), actually uses the term "world-war" to describe the coming conflict they were imagining. Kind of like how we’ve called a hypothetical nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia "World War III" since the 1950s — even though it hasn...
