This book places major emphasis on the 'predictive' aspects of the future war genre and on the important role that writers played in official US military think-tanks after the Second World War. From the profusion of future war fictions in Victorian England which paralleled the British Empire's struggle to convert itself into the first modern superpower, to the USAAF future war-planning conference (where almost a quarter of the invitees were authors of military science fiction), Rumors of War and Infernal Machines provides a detailed political, historical and literary analysis of the American and European ever-increasing fascination with mechanised warfare.