SCIENCE FICTION

Edwin Abbott Abbott

Location: Wellside, Well Walk, Hampstead, NW3 1BT.

J.G. Ballard

Location: 36 Old Carlton Road, Shepperton, Middlesex, TW17 8AT

Reality TV Killed The Video Stars

The two members of the band Buggles shared an appreciation for radio company. It inspired what became the opening line of the song Video Killed The Radio Star. Nothing else followed immediately. Once the music had begun to fall into place, Trevor Horn wrote the rest of the lyrics swiftly. They were informed by his reading works by J.G. Ballard (1930-2009). The song s video was the first one to be played on MTV. With time, the network largely stopped playing music videos. This was because advertisers believed that alternative formats, such as reality TV and cartoons, could attract larger audiences.

J.D. Beresford

(Relative of Elizabeth Beresford, the creator of The Wombles.)

Arthur C. Clarke

Website: https://arthurcclarke.org www.clarkefoundation.org

The Arthur C. Clarke Awards

The Arthur c. Clarke Award

Website: https://clarkeaward.com

E.M. Forster

E.M. Forster's (1879-1970) novella The Machine Stops (1908) envisaged a world in which a parallel world in which people lived in cells that linked to a series of pipes extended from Somerset to Sumatra. It can be argued that book drew upon people s initial fears of the then new deep-level lines. Britons were aware that technologically they had been overtaken by the Americans and the Germans. The deep-level lines were powered by a new electronic technology and financed in large by Americans.

The American novelist Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was an Anglophobe. His Trilogy of Desire (1912-1945) trilogy was based upon the life of Charles Tyson Yerkes. In the third volume, The Stoic (1945), he asserted that the Tube was incontrovertible proof that America was remaking Britain in its own image.

Location: Arlington Park Mansions, 33a Sutton Lane North, W4 4HE

Website: http://society.emforster.de

William Golding

William Golding regarded Paradise Lost (1667) as being science fiction.

Website: https://william-golding.co.uk https://michaelhall.co.uk

Michael Moorcock

Jeremiah Jerry Cornelius in L. Cornelius named after a greengrocers Cornelius of London in Kensington High Street. Moorcock, sitting in a cafe, saw an early long-haired young man walking along the other side of the street.

New Worlds

Under the editorship of Michael Moorcock New Worlds focussed on Inner Space. The writers whom the magazine published included J.G. Ballard (1930-2009).

George Bernard Shaw

A number of George Bernard Shaw's plays, e.g. Man and Superman (1903), can be regarded as having been science fiction.

Location: 29 Fitzroy Square, W1T 6LQ (orange, pink)

Website: www.shawsociety.org.uk

H.G. Wells

H.G Wells was a science graduate who had worked as a science educator. He kept himself abreast of scientific developments. His belief in evolution caused him to engage with constant change. His futuristic fiction often contained an element of unease. In The Time Machine (1895) the Time Traveller experiences nausea when travelling through time.

Website: http://hgwellssociety.com

The Time Machine

H.G. Wells The Time Machine's (1895) articulation of time as the fourth dimension may have been derived from a work fiction of Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907), who was also an academic mathematician.

The War of The Worlds

The novel The War of The Worlds (1897) may have been prompted by an appreciation of the impact that Europeans, with their technology, had had upon Tasmania's Aboriginal population. The latter had appeared to have become extinct. (In the late 20^thC it became apparent that were people on the island who were descended from that population.)

It was in Primrose Hill that the world was saved from a Martian invasion.

Death Rays

The death ray was an extension of Oliver Heaviside's achievement in 1884 of reducing James Clerk Maxwell's equations from twelve to four.

Mars

William Herschel delivered a paper to the Royal Society in about 1784 in which he speculated what life might be like on Mars. It soon came to be appreciated that the planet was smaller than Earth and that therefore gravity was weaker there. This prompted it to be concluded that Martians were probably taller than humans.

The wealthy American Perceval Lowell took Giovanni Scaparelli s observation of canali (channels) on Mars to be canals.

The World Set Free

H.G. Wells read Frederick Soddy's (1877-1956) The Interpretation of Radium (1909) account of radioactivity. It occurred because of the huge amount of energy that was contained in atoms. This led Wells to write The World Set Free (1914). In the novel he set out the possibility of a uranium-based atomic bomb. It was he who coined the term atomic bomb.

Le Szil rd read Wells. Autumn 1933 Kingsway. When the scientist went to Los Alamos he gave a copy of Wells's book to its library.

See Also: NUCLEAR WEAPONS

The White Horse Tavern

In the 1950s a group of science fiction writers used to gather in The White Horse Tavern on Thursday evenings. The market for their work was in decline.

Location: The White Horse Tavern, 90 Fetter Lane, EC4A 1JP (blue, pink)

John Wyndham

Brian Aldiss described a strand of British science fiction as being the cosy catastrophe . In this the protagonists did not seem traumatised by the existential threats that they might be facing. John Wyndham's output can be viewed as lying within this.

Location: The Penn Club, 21-23 Bedford Place, WC1B 5JJ. John Wyndham lived in the Club for 40 years. (In 2021 the Club left Bloomsbury and became part of the Royal Foundation of St Katharine.) (red, yellow)

David Backhouse 2024