The first thing that came to mind was Beowulf. He goes to help defeat Grendel, and then Grendel’s mother and much later a Dragon. Maybe not exactly saving the world thought at the time it was written (~700 AD) a kingdom might qualify as such.
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But while Grendel and his mother are connected (though is Grendel his mother’s minion?), the dragon probably isn’t.
Professor Moriarty only shows up in two canonical Holmes stories – The Final Problem and then much later (and inconsistently) in The Valley of Fear. He’s the leader of a huge criminal underworld, not a world-conqueror. He does have his minions. But I don’t think he’s the droid you’re looking for.
Fu Manchu does have world-conquering ambitions and lots of minions. He’s the original “Yellow Peril” racist fantasy, and he arguably fits. He first appearec in 1912, and continued for a surprisingly long time.
There were lots of other pulp characters who might fit. Abraham Merritt’s The Moon Pool features a lost race and frog people with super-science (including a hand-held ray gun predating Buck Rogers’) that want to take over. The two stories that make it up appeared in 1918 and 1919
H. Rider Haggard specialized in lost races and super science. His 1919 novel When the World Shook (1919) also features a powerful ancient super-science character named Oro who can destroy our civilization with a super-earthquake and create a new golden age with the survivors. His daughter sacrifices herself to thwart the plan. Oro does have an island full of worshippers, if not minions.
A possibly earlier example is C.J. CVutcliffe-Hyne’s The Lost Continent (1899) , about Atlantis. The queen Phorenice is bent on world domination with her Atlanteans, but the island continent ends up destroyed.
The strange part is that the “Yellow Peril” came at a time when far from expanding or being able to threaten Western interests, Imperial China was rapidly declining and would soon collapse altogether.
I’d say that’s a classic hero kills monster trope.
In fact (having actually read Beowulf unlike most of the other books discussed here) the one thing that stood out to me is how the monsters are not portrayed as universal “baddies” that must be destroyed for the good of the world. There is a lot of time spent discussing the specific beef Beowulf has with them, including IIRC refusal to pay weregeld for the people they killed (which made me wonder if there is another less successful epic poem lost to history where they pay the weregeld and everyone settles into peaceful coexistence)
It’s not that strange. It has nothing to do with geopolitics it was always a racist thing. Specifically the belief that asian races are “scientifically” predisposed to untrustworthy scheming and plotting.
Plus, it provided a social justification for the imperialism aimed at China.
That’s an interesting one, I can’t see a good plot synopsis online but from what I can see it seems to be more of the “hero returns home and must battle usurper(s) who have seized power in his absence” trope which is a lot older (the Odyssey being the obvious example of this)
That is a good point regarding Beowulf. I wonder though how The Lord of the Rings fits in. Sauron is the evil baddie with the orcs being his minions, and a group of heroes defeat him thus saving the world. It is not a single hero, even though an argument could be for Gandalf since a lot of the defeat is based on his planning. Not as old as some of the examples provided here though.
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Oh, well, then, how about Jesus, up through to the Book of Revelation?
So I’d say thats a conscious subversion of the trope by Tolkien by making the hero who saves the world from the big bad guy, not the great wizard or the powerful warrior, but the ordinary little hobbit.
Also the Hobbit is consciously much more like a classical story where a hero goes on a quest and does stuff, and battles happen due to powerful people falling out, with less of an obvious “bad guy”.
I think The Wizard of OZ sorta fits with the wicked witch of the West and her flying monkeys and odd- tailed guards. She doesn’t seem to have a plan much farther than getting ruby slippers,…maybe she plans on world domination once she gets them??
I’d buy that, although my main knowledge of the story comes from the cartoon version if the story where everyone involved is anthropomorphic dog, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in my response.
It’s also actively anti racist (the original book not the dog-based cartoon). The heroic deeds of the musketeers are based on Dumas’ father who was a mixed race French revolutionary era general (whose mother was Haitian), who struggled against racism, which (as it exists today) was actually invented during his lifetime.
Nah, aside from the fact that the wicked witch isn’t particularly looking to expand her power base, the main plot is Dorothy’s attempt to get home. Defeating the witch is a side quest.
Yeah, The Hobbit definitely isn’t an example of this trope, because while it does have a Big Bad, Smaug, he isn’t at all connected to any of the other antagonists the heroes fight, like the Mirkwood spiders, or the trolls, or the goblins. Lord of the Rings is, because most of the enemies are minions/pawns of Sauron, but of course it’s much later than many of the other examples.
I have read the book, and I don’t think there’s any mention of race at all. The fight against it certainly isn’t a main theme of the book. It doesn’t even really have “good guys” and “bad guys” at all, just competing political factions.
Yeah but Dumas explicitly said the heroic deeds of the musketeers were based on his father, whom he revereed.
He did not actively draw attention to his own mixed race heritage or AFAIK discuss it in his books, as by his lifetime (unlike his father’s) the “established wisdom” that humans were divided into “Superior” white people and “inferior” black people was firmly established.
In my fading memory of the 3 Musketeers, D’Artangnan and Richelieu mostly reconcile in the end, and the real villain turns out to be the woman with the Fleur de Lis.
I think John Buchan’s spy adventure novels fit this trope, especially The Thitry-nine Steps (1915). Although the main enemy is WWI-era Germany, the hero Richard Hannay is working to defeat a ring of spies called Black Stone, and particularly its brilliant leader and master of disguise … whose name I forget. I think maybe he only ever had aliases. He does somehow escape and is back to face Hannay again in Mr Standfast.
There were also the Club Foot stories of Valentine Williams, which were similar but, IMHO, not as well written.
I’m pretty sure that the one which launched all the others was the 1871 Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, published anonymously by Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, yes, the bad writing competition Bulwer-Lytton.
It’s got it all, more than Stefon could ever have imagined. The Vril-ya live in the Hollow Earth and are a race with various superpowers, plus the mysterious "all-permeating"fluid called vril that is the source of their power and powers. Having fled the surface after the great flood, they now want to come back, destroying mankind in need be. And they would have succeeded if it weren’t for those meddling kids.
The book was a blockbuster. Go to that Wiki link above and read about its influences. Bovril, the British national drink, took its name from the book. Every science fiction book for the rest of the century was credited to it, as in this Guardian review.
“The influence of the author of The Coming Race is still powerful, and no year passes without the appearance of stories which describe the manners and customs of peoples in imaginary worlds, sometimes in the stars above, sometimes in the heart of unknown continents in Australia or at the Pole, and sometimes below the waters under the earth. The latest effort in this class of fiction is The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells.”
The twentieth century mined its occult emanations for even wilder batshit. Cults within cults.
It’s thankfully forgotten now. Or is it…
I don’t get “get hero saves world from villain and his minions” from that. A bit “ancient aliens” (well ancient earth’s core dwellers) and definitely “powerful king is pissed his daughter has fallen in love with the hero”. I mean he doesn’t even save the earth from them, he just mentions near the end that the Vyir are going to have to come and steal our planet one day.