By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘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 so years following the publication of his first book, The Time Machine, in 1895 – he produced the majority of his best work.
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 sweaty bodies. Instead, Solarians ‘view’ each other via screens, being in different buildings – or even different rooms in the same building – when they converse with each other. Inhabitants of Solaria quite literally cannot bear to be in the same room as each other, even their own spouses or children.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
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.
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
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores a forgotten work of post-apocalyptic fiction
March opened on a comparatively milder note, but there was still no thaw. Food prices, which had been rising for some time, began to rocket, and there was a wave of strikes throughout the country. … The Government, which had proclaimed a State of Emergency and taken necessary powers, showed no sign of yielding them again. There was strict censorship, and the police were armed. Rationing and price controls were introduced for a wide range of foods; patient queues lengthened in the grubby snow outside provision shops. Press and television called on the people to endure, to show their ancient phlegm. ‘If winter comes,’ quoted the Prime Minister in his clipped and confident voice, ‘can spring be far behind?’
This passage comes near the beginning of Chapter 7 of The World in Winter, a novel, now thankfully back in print as The World in Winter (Penguin Worlds)
