I suspect the post war lot were quite influenced by wartime neo-romanticism.

Trouble With Lichen is hilarious.

Last and First Men is a bit intimidating, but Odd John and Sirius remain warm and accessible.

Sirius in particular is a book no serious dog lover should miss—and by serious, I mean seriously interested in how the world might look to a dog with high-level human intelligence.

I’d assume British SF/Fantasy simply reflected the dominating trends in British literary and academic life at the time. Reflected and affected.

Wyndham, Kneale and co were certainly baptised in that flood tide.

Call me crazy, but I would be interested to read speculation as to why this might be so.

Wyndham, Kneale and co were baptised in that river.

Certainly from Richard Jeffries’ “After London” onwards. A Ballardian novel nearly a hundred years before people started using phrases like ‘Ballardian’.

Kneale is one of my heroes, and someone who could write his own teleplays, with consummate skill. He didn’t like being called a science fiction writer—he had this idea that meant space opera, and scantily clad girls wearing space helmets, being menaced by bug-eyed monsters. He was really writing rationalized ghost stories, influenced by the likes of M.R. James. He didn’t fit into any of the convenient little cubbyholes.

Yes, Doctor Who ripped him off, but acceptably. The real culprits were Yanks like Chris (The X-Files) Carter, who stole from him constantly, without so much as a doff of the cap, figuring nobody would notice. Compare the scene from “X-Files: Fight the Future” where Mulder and Scully find the cornfield with a bee-filled dome in it to the scene in “Quatermass 2” where they find the alien dome. It didn’t begin or end there.

John Carpenter actually tried to acknowledge his debt to Kneale when he credited his screenplay for “Prince of Darkness” to a Martin Quatermass. Kneale reportedly did not appreciate the joke. He didn’t like horror movies any more than he liked science fiction. And he was never compatible with Hollywood’s way of doing things.

His post-Quatermass work wasn’t always as good, but sometimes it was better. And he was uncanny at predicting trends—his “The Year of the Sex Olympics” basically predicts the rise of the reality gameshow. Also mass idiocy, but I guess that didn’t require much of a prophet.

No. It turns into a quite a sharp edged social satire when the politically, economically and media connected husbands of the women receiving the treatment start wanting it too and so are prepared to start changing laws and public opinion. Which is exactly what the female protagonist of the story had in mind all along.

There have been many since. Plant of the Apes (1963), by Pierre Boule, was another in the succession although it’s certainly arguable that credit for starting – or reviving – the genre really belongs to Albert Camus: La Peste (The Plague), published in 1947.

The development of the genre is manifest testimony to its popular appeal but what motivates this extensive appetite for reading about the consequences of catastrophe?

I’m not suggesting those are Wyndham’s sentiments, mind. He was probably just depicting his characters in a solidly unsentimental way. “Why, yes, they’re technologically advanced psychics – and, also, Nazis.”

From New Zealand, if memory serves.