By Phil Spalding

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Science fiction has often been used by people to explore their moments of “What if …?”. Short stories have been the driver of a lot of that effort. Arthur C. Clarke, a British Engineer and science fiction writer, was considered to be one of the big three of twentieth century science fiction, the others being Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlem. I am unfamiliar with Robert Heinlem as an author not having read any of his works. Both Clarke and Asimov were part of my bookshelf in childhood and early teenage years. Lord of the Rings also featured after I first encountered J.R.R Tolkeins works through The Hobbit. The works of George Orwell such as Animal Farm were reflections of the Inter World War years. The time where Spain became a destination for young British idealists, but not for the purposes of tourism.

The next six years of World War saw an unprecedented explosion of technological endeavour. Arguably this is where the twentieth century that we know of Internet, AI and moving from candle light and gaslight globally started to become reality. Even in post war Britain we still had some people without electricity or running water in their homes. Home life could still be illuminated by gaslight in some of our cities.

As we fully embrace the Silicon Age of the now, science fiction can be a great recorder of that journey from the past. In the Lord of the Rings the Eye of Sauron is able to search out and appear in the most unexpected places. A manifestation of the future technology of Artificial Intelligence. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries authors such as H.G.Wells were still influenced by the mainly classical educations that they received. The recycling of parts of the age old stories of Greece and Rome was a common theme. As academic curiosity progressed the fashionable pursuit was archeology, a science. If you have an ology you are a scientist according to an advert of the 1980s staring Maureen Lipman.

For my own entertainment I have started writing science fiction short stories. It may be that they appear in blogs and videos from time to time. The project I have been running for the last 17 years, Cambridge Online Learning Community can be itself to a point be a bit of futurology as well as a chronicle of technological change. The hot topic of the Internet of Things (IoT) that was going to revolutionise our lives, has been superceded in the public mind by Artificial Intelligence. Alexa controlling your heating is a given. Some ideas over that time that I have witnessed become every day technology can be traced back to early industrial revolution era fiction that popularised science. In effect a reading community for curious and impressionable minds of all ages. The dawn of that freedom of the thought of “What if….?”