Hartmann the Anarchist, or the Doom of a Great City

In 1892, when most people couldn't imagine flying machines, Edward Douglas Fawcett imagined something far more chilling: a fleet of airships raining fire upon London. Hartmann the Anarchist is uncanny science fiction, a novel that anticipated the horror of aerial warfare decades before the first bombs fell from the sky. Stanley, a wealthy young socialist who abhors revolution, finds himself unwillingly aboard the Attila, the coal-powered aeronef of the notorious anarchist Rudolph Hartmann, whose plot to bombard London from the heavens grows terrifyingly real. As the city below remains ignorant of its fate, tension mounts aboard the airship between ideological conviction and the machinery of destruction. Fawcett, a mountaineer and philosopher, wrote something more than adventure fiction: he wrote prophecy. The novel haunts because it imagined our age of strategic bombing before violence from above became a terrible reality.