"The golden age of science fiction started in America in the 1930's". Astounding Science Fiction was the magazine with many well known writers such as Isaac Asimov. Professor Adam Roberts and Professor Dinah Birch guide us through the pioneering technology. They mention Asimov's The Last Question and we hear extracts from Arthur C Clarke's Starchild with "history drawing to a close". Scary. We hear about the background to Clarke who Dinah mentions as a gay man. His The Nine Billion Names of God is set in a Tibetan monastery and the extracts we hear is a story about the end of the world.
After a piece about Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, we rush forward to The Sentinel with its inhospitable lunar landscape. Not forgetting Star Trek, this is the usual mess I mentioned in Episode 1. When sci fi had exhausted "the excitement of the Apollo" missions, it turned to home with Which Way to Inner Space by J G Ballard, Kingdom Come and more. But isn't Solaris in space? A mention of Aldous Huxley and we hear the unforgettable opening words of George Orwell's 1984. The movie used them too. On to Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (and the film version) then his The Martian Chronicles. And why, finally, do we hear about Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? Weird. Other contributors include Professor Farah Mendelsohn and Professor Kiera Vaclavik.
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