The War of the Worlds is one of H. G. Wells’s early scientific romances: books which helped to lay the groundwork for modern science fiction. One adaptation was supposedly mistaken for a real news broadcast reporting an actual invasion, although we will come to that later on. The War of the […]
Tag: Science Fiction
A Summary and Analysis of H. G. Wells’s ‘The Country of the Blind’
‘The Country of the Blind’ is one of H. G. Wells’s finest short stories, published in The Strand magazine in 1904 and then collected in Wells’s short-story collection The Country of the Blind and Other Stories in 1911. It belongs to his early phase, when – during the ten or […]
The Machine Restarts: Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Asimov’s second Robot novel which eerily prefigures our world On the planet of Solaria, people don’t ‘see’ each other: ‘seeing’ is viewed as abnormal, even dirty, because it means coming into contact with other people’s breath, germs, and […]
A Summary and Analysis of Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’
Writers can get ideas from the strangest of places. Omelas, the distinctive-sounding but entirely fictional city in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, came from her reading a road sign for Salem, Oregon, (‘Salem, O.’) in her car’s rear-view mirror. But the […]
John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar: The Novel That Predicted Our World
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle celebrates one of the great science-fiction achievements of the 1960s What’s the most prophetic book you can name? Nostradamus’ notebooks? In my book The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History, which gave its name to this […]