A fair number of these tales are collected in a fascinating volume called The Tale of the Next Great War, 1871-1914, edited by I. F. Clarke. In 1907, in his story "The Trenches," a British army officer, Capt. C. E. Vickers, foretold the invention of the tank. His colleague, Major (later Major General) Sir Ernest Swinton-also a writer of such tales-must surely have seen this piece; when World War I broke out, he was one of the people who helped devise the actual armored fighting vehicle. Here fiction may well have influenced later fact. Others of that period who worked in this subgenre include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, and A. A. Milne, who is better known-and deservedly so-for Winnie-the-Pooh than for tales such as his 1909 story "The Secret of the Army Aeroplane."

Drawing a hard and fast line between technothrillers and science fiction proper has never been easy, and probably never will be. The one I'd try to make is that technothrillers tend to be interested in gadgetry for its own sake, while science fiction examines not only the machinery but its influence on the society that's invented it. And if people are now lining up to tear me rhetorical limb from limb, well, so be it.

After the experience of World War I, far fewer people were interested in predicting what a second world war might be like. The short answer-dreadful-seemed obvious to everyone: and, indeed, everyone was right. Instead, conflicts set in distant times and against strange aliens took pride of place for a while. John W. Campbell, later the tremendously influential editor of Astounding and its later incarnation, Analog, was one of the champions of this invent a weapon today, mass produce it tomorrow, and use it to beat the enemy the day after school of writing.

A writer who stuck closer to home, and one whose influence on the entire field of science fiction was also incalculably large, was Robert A.