Quatermass in Space

While there has been a growing acknowledgement of the existence of earlier examples of television science fiction, the typical history of the genre still privileges Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment (1953) as foundational. This was a significant production, and an effective piece of television drama, but it was not the first piece of British television science fiction, nor the first British television science fiction serial, nor even the first such serial to have a sequel. This paper will draw upon the early history of British television science fiction, particularly focusing on comparisons between the Quatermass serials and the first British TV SF serial, Stranger From Space (1951-1953), in considering the factors that lead to the ‘forgetting’ of particular productions, including marketing, adaptation and target audience. Stranger From Space was produced as ten-minute episodes within a children’s magazine programme, and written by Hazel Adair and Ronald Marriott. It was thus not associated with ‘serious’ programming for an adult audience and, while a novelisation was published, the serial was not recorded or adapted for the cinema, meaning it had very little afterlife, unlike The Quatermass Experiment. Despite Adair’s subsequent long career as a television writer and producer, Stranger From Space lacked a capable self-promoter and mythologiser like Nigel Kneale, whose presentations of British television before him have become important to television history, despite editing out key material, including his own pre-Quatermass adaptations of science fiction material. This paper will thus also engage with the wider issues of the construction of history.

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2011

A sequel to Shapin’s earlier work, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation again solves the problem of induction by observing that researchers are decent. Shapin dismisses most of the literature on both the philosophy of science and (more so) on the sociology of science as ideologically biased and as irrelevant. Approaches to the book as light reading and as serious scholarly reading are considered before a critical summary is offered as a conclusion.

This essay is an extension of my other, "The Legend of the Learned Man's Android," in that I query whether the posthumous attribution of robot-making to living persons just stops in the nineteenth-century, or emerges in different ways in the twentieth. The story attaches, it seems, to individuals who are prominent enough to have acquired cult status, like Descartes. The legend fractures, though, and emerges differently with famous men like Stephen Hawking (who appeared on a Star Trek episode as a holograph of himself). Why have the Learned Man and his robot disappeared?

2017

Annals of science, 2017

This examination of an important paper by Sydney Ross is the first in a projected series of occasional reflections on 'Annals of Science Classic Papers' that have had enduring utility within the field of history of science and beyond. First the messages of the paper are examined, some well known but others, particularly Ross's own contemporary concerns about the use of the word 'scientist', less so. The varied uses made of the paper by scholars are then traced before Ross's biography is examined in order to try to understand how a figure professionally marginal to the field of history of science came to write such a significant piece. Ross's interest in the topic appears to have been informed by a romantically tinged scientific progressivism and a deep concern with the importance of linguistic precision in science and in public affairs. The inspirations of the author and the interests of his audience have been only partially aligned, but the paper's i...

Journal of American Studies, 1995

Fast Capitalism

I have argued that the negative aspects of this ideal [of unlimited expansion] introduce certain dangers whose potential dimensions are so vast that it may be impossible to deal with them effectively once their nature becomes evident. These negative elements of the dominant ideal are inherent in its very structure and are magnified in direct proportion to the success and prosperity of the high-intensity market setting. [Leiss, 1976, 110.] Leiss's concerns of 1976 have hardly changed. The impossibility of envisioning a solution to these problems within any categories of thought we can accept remains his position, it seems. Thus, Leiss, in 1990: In China and elsewhere, people will face the bitter truth that they have no hope of escaping the age-old scourge of inadequate satisfaction for basic needs via the route mapped out by the richer nations, namely, by squandering fossil-fuel energy and dumping their wastes wherever they choose. Other crises will stem from the accumulated global residue of centuries of of earlier industrial development and environmental degradation […]. Moreover, many of these threats are of such a massive scale, and have such momentum driving them, that no action we take now, no matter how drastic, and no foreseeable political or technological remedy, no matter how sophisticated, can forestall their irresistible magnification. [Leiss, 1990, 147.] Leiss believed in 1990 that we had already accepted a fatalistic attitude to things, but that we could attempt a cure by understanding the nature of risk assessment. His faith in radical socio-political change is less apparent than in the 1970s. In fact, Under Technology's Thumb places its hopes, slim as they are, in the bureaucracies that were the problem in the first edition of The Domination of Nature. The "Alachlor Review Board" and the "Law Reform Commission of Canada," he suggests, may provide the sort of reliable risk information that could be a guide to the

Journal of Biosciences, 2002