Tom Shippey’s research while affiliated with Saint Louis University and other places

I. R Clarke’s demonstration of the debt owed by H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds to General Chesney’s till then forgotten best-seller The Battle of Dorking remains one of the most suggestive facts in the history of SR If science fiction is above all a ‘fabril’ mode, as I have suggested elsewhere/ then the area in which the fabril mentality first began to dominate European narratives was not that of SF exactly, but of futuristic military fiction — from which, however, there was an easy transit to the founding works of SF proper.