Is everything normal now? "Well he hasn't got religious mania, and he isn't running around in a circle spouting Gilbert and Sullivan, so I suppose he… - Isaac Asimov

The British science fiction writer Herbert George Wells proceeded to make use of the notion and, in 1898, published The War of the Worlds, the first significant tale of the invasion and attempted conquest of Earth by more advanced intelligences from another world (in this case, Mars). I have always thought that Wells, in addition to wanting to write an exciting story with an unprecedented plot, was also bitterly satirizing Europe. At the time he wrote, Europeans (the British, particularly) had just completed dividing up Africa without any regard for the people living there. Why not show the British how it would feel to have advanced intelligences treat them as callously as they were treating the Africans?

There is a longing for a supposedly simple and virtuous past that is almost universal among the people of a complex and vicious society.

Often, this has only meant a change in tyranny. In other words, one ruling class is replaced by another — sometimes by one that is more efficient and therefore still more capable of maintaining itself — while the poor and downtrodden remain poor and downtrodden or become even worse off.