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The Science Fiction of Torquay’s Edward Douglas Fawcett

Kevin Dixon by Kevin Dixon
October 30, 2018
in History
The Science Fiction of Torquay’s Edward Douglas Fawcett

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Here at WASD we like to remember Torquay folk who have made their mark on the world.

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This time it’s the science fiction pioneer and St Marychurch resident Edward Douglas Fawcett (1866-1960). Along with his writing Edward was also was also an innovator in colour photography, motoring, mountaineering, aeronautics and philosophy.

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It was his brother, the Torquay explorer Percy Harrison Fawcett, who in 1925 led an expedition into the Amazonian rainforest in search of a fabled city… and was never seen again.

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Edward wrote science fiction novels that were strikingly predictive. In 1893 he published ‘Hartmann the Anarchist’ which related the story of a terrorist who bombs London in a series of air raids. The idea that air power could devastate cities was a decade before the Wright brothers first flew, and the storyline predated HG Well’s ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ by 40 years.

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Incidentally, the illustrator of ‘Hartmann the Anarchist’, Fred Jane, became the founder of Jane’s Fighting Ships.

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Another of Edward’s books ‘The Secret of the Desert’, or ‘How We Crossed Arabia in the Antelope’, was possibly the first fictional account of an armoured fighting vehicle – two decades before the first tank appeared.

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