Have you ever been to a quiet, peaceful and unexciting place and pictured it in your mind as the scene of a colossal disaster? This is the imaginative journey that Sir George Tomkyns Chesney was inviting his readers to make with his 1871 novella The Battle of Dorking. As a high-ranking army officer with a keen interest in politics, he had become concerned about the fragility of Britain’s defences and the complacency of the British public at a time of turbulence in Europe and he decided that creative fiction was the means by which to sound his warning.