le grand poulet ecailleux
Date added: 29-Jan-05
Last updated: 30-Jan-05
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Yet it must be admitted that the stories of space travel form an exception to this general rule. Althought the earliest works, such as Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyages to the Moon and the Sun, were pure fantasy, most of the tales written in the past hundred years were based as far as possible upon accurate science and forseeable technology. Their writers did believe that they were predicting the future, at least in general terms. More than that, the pionneers of astronautics used fiction in a deliberate attempt to spread their ideas to the general public. Tsiolkovsky, Oberth and von Braun all wrote space fiction at one time or another. In so doing, they were not merely predicting the future, they were creating it. Arthur C. Clarke. prelude to space, Post Apollo Preface, 1976
