Reginald Berkeley. Cassandra. London: Victor Gollancz, 1931. A workers’ uprising and a Soviet invasion (including the inevitable aerial bombardment), along with a future archaeologist digging through the ruins of London — as seen via clairvoyant visions of things to come! Looks like fun. Hamish Blair. Governor Hardy. London: Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, […]
Hamish Blair. 1957. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1930. Something a bit different — an air control novel, instead of a knock-out blow one; India ablaze instead of London. As the dust-jacket ominously says, ‘1857: Indian Mutiny. 1957: ?’ Luckily 1947 came first. John Ramsden. Don’t Mention the War: The British and the
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Fw 198. Image source: Current Aviation, 26 November 1943, via Model Airplane Kits. In the course of my research, I get to read many predictions about the future, partiularly the future of warfare. One of the reasons I like doing this is that it helps to restore the uncertainty of
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] This is the front cover of a book by J. M. Spaight on British airpower, called The Sky’s the Limit. It was published in 1940, a not-insignificant year for the RAF. In fact, this ‘New and up-to-date’ edition was published in August, right in the middle of the Battle of
Antony Beevor. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006. The Spanish Civil War was a crucial event in British airpower history. I have the first edition of this book, but I haven’t read it yet, so … Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage, eds. Imagining the Future:
Just as reading Orwell serendipitously led me to a reference to the next war in the air, so too has reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Here, Mustapha Mond, one of the Controllers of the world state, gives an impromptu history lesson (I’ve cut out unrelated, interleaved dialogue from another strand of the plot): ‘The
Scott W. Palmer, an associate professor at Western Illinois University, has a new book due out this month entitled Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. In 10 words or less, it’s about Russian airmindedness up to the end of 1945. This in itself is a good thing, but what
Nevil Shute’s 1939 novel What Happened to the Corbetts is, as you might expect, one of the most well-written of the knock-out blow novels; it’s certainly one of the few that is still read today (outside of H. G. Wells’ three contributions to the genre).1 Shute takes a different approach to most of his predecessors,
H. G. Wells. The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind. London: Macmillan and Co., 1914. The novel that unleashed atomic warfare upon the world. I actually already have a copy but it’s a modern edition, and I’d prefer to reference an original edition, where possible. Besides which, the University of Nebraska Press inexplicably changed
I’ve recently read a trilogy of novels about the next war, by Sydney Fowler Wright, a prolific but largely forgotten poet and novelist: Prelude in Prague (London: Newnes, 1935), Four Days War (London: Robert Hale, 1936), and Megiddo’s Ridge (London: Robert Hale, 1937). Only the first is a true knock-out blow novel: in 1938, after
