I just realized that it’s been four months since I last posted an update on this blog. I’ve been too busy! Anyway, my Cold War book now has a working title – Rockets and Ray Guns: The Sci-Fi Science of the Cold War. I’m about two-thirds of the way through writing it – hopefully it should be out some time around the middle of 2018.
Basically the book is a follow-on to Pseudoscience and Science Fiction, which was published last year. While the first book looked at the way SF anticipated and cross-fertilized with various well-known tropes of the pseudoscience industry, the new one will do the same for the real (or in some cases, allegedly “real”) science of the Cold War.
The picture above gives a quick taster of the kind of thing I mean. The illustration on the left comes from a short story by John W. Campbell called “When the Atoms Failed”, from the January 1930 issue of Amazing Stories. The picture on the right is an artist’s conception of a space-based electromagnetic railgun, dating from July 1984. This was a real-world proposal for an anti-ballistic–missile defence system, using technology that had already been demonstrated in the laboratory.