Really good questions, Gwilym (and you’re right, this piece is, as it stands, truncated: part of a longer-form project). To pick up one of your points: Dracula is particularly interesting in this context: Bram Stoker published his novel of aristocratic-foreigner vampires in 1897: at exactly the same time H G Wells serialised (in Pearson’s Magazine April-Dec 1897) War of the Worlds. The two men weren’t friends, didn’t swap ideas or anything, yet there is synchronicity in this: these two versions of this powerful and enduring new myth, a way of representing the sense of something simultaneously other and superior, coming here to feed on our ordinary blood. The difference of course is that Stoker’s predator actualises the crushing power of the past, of class privilege bolstered by all that is old and traditional and deep-rooted; where Wells’s predators both represent an in-story future and actualise a wider apprehension that technology, especially the connected technologies of motility and warfare, are going to sweep away all that old class-historical inertia. As of course they did, in World War 1.