Messaging Mars and the dead: technology and fiction in Britain, 1900–1939

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Richard Noakes (University of Exeter)
• Thursday 04 March 2021, 15:30-17:00
• Zoom.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Helen Curry.

In his 1948 novel No Highway, Nevil Shute featured a protagonist Theodore Honey who, like Shute himself, was a British aeronautical engineer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment. When not researching aircraft design, Honey also dabbled in the spiritualist practice of automatic writing which ultimately helped him locate a plane that had crashed owing to a fatal design flaw about which he had been warning his employers. Both Honey and Shute capture aspects of early twentieth British engineering culture overlooked in the historiography, not least engineers’ interest in writing fiction and in other-worldly communication (both planetary and spiritual varieties). We tend to associate this convergence of engineering, other-worldly communication and fiction in the 1920s and ‘30s with cheap American magazines or ‘pulps’ that came to define science fiction as literary genre. As John Cheng has argued, these serials encouraged readers to write their own fiction and pursue more speculative lines of scientific and engineering research typically neglected by professionals. Although Britain didn’t have its dedicated science fiction magazines until the late 1930s there were many British authors writing novels and short fiction featuring science and engineering in the three decades after H. G. Wells’s ‘scientific romances’ of the 1890s. This paper analyses the careers of those authors with strong engineering and scientific backgrounds and what insights this yields into questions of the functions of the technological imagination, the relationships between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ engineering, and the foundation, in 1933, of the British Interplanetary Society.

This talk is part of the Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge talks
• Department of History and Philosophy of Science
• Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science
• Featured lists
• History and Philosophy of Science long list
• Philosophy Events
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• Zoom
• hc446
• jer64's list

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.