The Science and the Fiction

IT WAS QUITE AN EVENT when the Americans brought off that tremendous gamble in 1969 and succeeded in landing two men on the moon and bringing them safely back. It was even more of an event to find science‐fiction writers such as Ray Bradbury and Brian Aldiss brought specially on to TV programmes to add their comments on this feat. Ten or twenty years ago, this would have seemed ridiculous, an unheard‐of thing, as science‐fiction writers were obviously just pie‐in‐the‐sky dreamers who wrote imaginative rubbish!