The secret of the league (Ernest Bramah)

„The secret of the league” is a dystopian novel written by Ernest Bramah in 1907. It was first published as „What might have been: the story of a social war”, but later was republished in 1909 as „The secret of the league. „The Secret of the League” is kind of an underground oddity of a novel. It’s a prophetic-warning novel, science fiction before that term was coined, largely sociopolitical but also with some charming technical extrapolations. The story centers around one man’s daring and ingenious plan, enacted through a mysterious alliance called the Unity League, to stop the workings of the nation’s elected government in order to restore some measure of lost freedom and greatness, even at the risk of civil war. Its plot is developed rather patchily, and like most warning novels, was overtaken aby real events and didn’t come true. „The Secret of the League” was written, when the growth of the labour movement was beginning to terrify the middle class, who wrongly imagined that they were menaced from below rather than from above.