science and later worked as a science teacher and science education journalist. Kingston and Richmond, in between, were affluent suburbs, considered at the time a safe and leafy escape from urban congestion.
up research impossible. The end of my sabbatical year finds me with a draft of a book manuscript in hand: Another One Writes the Dust: The New Earth Consciousness of Two Darwins, Dickens, Victorian Poets, and the authors of Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland, Dracula, Peter Rabbit, and War of the Worlds.
NOTES 1. James Hutton, “Theory of the Earth,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, v. 1 (1788): 209 – 303, 303.
2. Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits (London: John Murray, 1881): 183.
Wells set his scientific romances in the comforts of suburbia, but through novel 3. H.G. Wells The Time Machine, from twists of science-fueled fantasy turned My thanks to the Paideia program, H.G. Wells: Six Novels (San Diego: these places upside down. To stand not only for funding to carry out my Canterbury Classics, 2012): 1 – 57, 12. at the spots where Martians incinerresearch and writing, but also for 4. H.G. Wells, The Correspondence of H.G. ated Londoners with their heat ray I inspiration. My interest and knowledge Wells ed. David C. Smith 4 vols. double parked or defied residents-only of Frankenstein and the writings of (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998): parking restrictions, and then watched Charles Darwin have been fed by years v. 1, 261. carefully that I didn’t open my car door of teaching these works in Paideia 111: into oncoming traffic. The Tudor revival Enduring Questions. Also, I would not suburban villas that would have still have started reading H. G. Wells had looked raw and new in Wells’s days, I not, in 1990, been asked by colleague now have lichens and rising damp on Linda Shearing to join her and Dentheir foundations and front garden nis Barnaal in teaching what was then spaces bricked over to accommodate called a Paideia Two course: Speculative parking space for Audis and BMWs. As Fiction. Thanks Paideia, for making my for the place of rock and soil in Wells’s education an ongoing one, and one that book about a Martian invasion, he dein true Luther College fashion is both picted his Martians as having intellects interdisciplinary and multicultural. that made humans look like ants, and a human metropolis like London no more than an anthill, disturbed by Martian heat rays. The reason for Martian invasion involved geological history. In the novel, Mars, further out from the sun, is older than earth, and beginning to cool and die. The Martians, who happen to be interested in feasting on human blood, will also buy six million years of time by emigrating from their original planet to our newer (and still more molten) one. The explorations that West London site of Martian landing in H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds preceded my sabbatical year of research and writing neither put me behind bars nor left me trampled by a disgruntled bull, nor run down by congested suburban traffic. Instead, I was inspired. My only disappointment was that the Covid pandemic made my return for follow14
Agora/Fall 2020
