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SUMMARY:Messaging Mars and the dead: technology and fiction in Britain\, 1
 900–1939 - Richard Noakes (University of Exeter)
DTSTART:20210304T153000Z
DTEND:20210304T170000Z
UID:TALK156421@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Helen Curry
DESCRIPTION:In his 1948 novel _No Highway_\, Nevil Shute featured a protag
 onist Theodore Honey who\, like Shute himself\, was a British aeronautical
  engineer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment. When not researching aircra
 ft design\, Honey also dabbled in the spiritualist practice of automatic w
 riting which ultimately helped him locate a plane that had crashed owing t
 o a fatal design flaw about which he had been warning his employers. Both 
 Honey and Shute capture aspects of early twentieth British engineering cul
 ture overlooked in the historiography\, not least engineers' interest in w
 riting fiction and in other-worldly communication (both planetary and spir
 itual varieties). We tend to associate this convergence of engineering\, o
 ther-worldly communication and fiction in the 1920s and '30s with cheap Am
 erican magazines or 'pulps' that came to define science fiction as literar
 y genre. As John Cheng has argued\, these serials encouraged readers to wr
 ite their own fiction and pursue more speculative lines of scientific and 
 engineering research typically neglected by professionals. Although Britai
 n didn’t have its dedicated science fiction magazines until the late 193
 0s there were many British authors writing novels and short fiction featur
 ing science and engineering in the three decades after H. G. Wells's 'scie
 ntific romances' of the 1890s. This paper analyses the careers of those au
 thors with strong engineering and scientific backgrounds and what insights
  this yields into questions of the functions of the technological imaginat
 ion\, the relationships between 'amateur' and 'professional' engineering\,
  and the foundation\, in 1933\, of the British Interplanetary Society.
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