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disappeared, and the new writers of adventure stories preferred to work in the more traditional mode of historical romance, or to experiment in fantasy and science fiction. It is significant that even the one great exception to this decline, W. E. Johns, who did retain his popularity into the 1960s, himself turned to writing science fiction from 1954. 6 The earliest writers in the pre-1914 phase owe a good deal
? Would higher be mightier? Might there be an imperial role for aviation in the fashion that military officials and science fiction writers had been suggesting since the mid-1880s? 1 Antecedents In London, sentiment for maintaining imperial tradition was strong. Indeed, in a precocious step that mimicked the establishment of the Navy League, the Aerial League of the British Empire
a liberal response to apartheid, which he grounded in a Christian view of human fraternity. For Gordimer, Livingstone similarly provided a voice with which to critique racism, but at the same time he granted her a means by which to reveal the failure of radical vision in the liberal politics of her protagonist. Possible or implausible worlds? Livingstone in science fiction
to employ audiogenic sounds. A sizeable body of Science fiction takes off from Himalayan peaks. A yearning for paradise, for a real but remote contemporary world where values are clearer, life is simpler and good triumphs over obvious evil is the essence of escape literature, as these works were. And the less one knows of history, the more one believes in the possibility of finding such a paradise on
, Oxford, 1987, p. 179, and John Huntington, ‘The science fiction of H. G. Wells’, in Patrick Parrinder (ed.), Science Fiction: A Critical Guide , London, 1979, p. 47. 28 ‘When electricity runs amok’, Pearson’s Weekly , 14 March 1907, p. 617; ‘1914 Ailments’, Pearson’s Weekly , 18 April
. 25 Sandy Wilson’s follow-up to The Boyfriend was The Buccaneer (Lyric, Hammersmith, September 1955) and used the editorial offices of a ‘boy’s own’ paper dealing with imperial adventures as its setting. The magazine is in decline – science fiction has become the popular topic – and the musical comically attempts to stem the haemorrhage of
their Use (Glasgow 1904), three volumes, is an early survey. 14 The ‘Tardis’ is the time-travelling machine, larger inside than outside, in the longrunning British television science-fiction series ‘Doctor Who’. 15 Michaela Giebelhausen (ed.), The
unprecedented crisis in the imperial formation catalysed a loss of confidence in progress, and in the context of a measured scientific valorization promoted by social Darwinism, degeneration took on dramatic new significance. The attractions were obvious. Degeneration was a fluid category; it shifted readily and was thereby reconstituted between the human sciences, fiction and social commentary, rendering it
the recovered money. It was not unexpected that, at the end of the story, the ‘new friend’ would ‘naturally’ return to his own country. 43 Early science fiction stories, set again outside the boundaries of English life, also allowed more positive images of the Chinese in their characterisations. The crews of winged motor cars and sophisticated submarine vessels might contain Chinese within their
, further explaining the workings of what was essentially a garden city for a million people. The whole was enhanced by electrical effects and working models, reducing the seriousness of the conception as an exercise in city planning. It would be a mistake though to see it merely as science-fiction fantasy; Democracity was a political statement made by an America grown confident in the vision of itself as