Meet Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton, army official and engineer, major member of the think-tank that give us the tank. Every man need to be a hobbyist and this man was a science fiction nerd. Of course, the idea of an armoured tactic vehicle was already in the mind of thousand of people over the past four-five centuries, including Leonardo Da Vinci, but these men have never heard of the scientifiction of writers like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. And thus, in the same way some juvenile fiction like Tom Swift give us the prompt for the taser rifle, a short story called “The Land Ironclads” serves as ignition for the tank.Â
There’s more? There’s more. Ernest Swinton fought in the second Anglo-Boer war and wrote, under pseudonym, a retrospective of the events AND a military tactical book with a narrative twist called “The Defence of Duffer’s Drift: A Few Experiences in Field Defence for Detached Posts which may Prove Useful in the Next War”, a book “couched as a sequence of fantasticated dreams in which Lt. Forethought repeat the title’s imaginary Boer War battle again and again in a kind of Time Loop discovering via successive dreams that five increasingly canny plans for defending the river-ford Duffer’s Drift end in disasters; his sixth plan is successful”. Remember something?
Oh, right. He also wrote one short novel (The Green Curve) and various short stories published in magazines like The Strand and collected in a short story collection (The Great Tab Dope) under the pseudonym “Ole Luk-Oie“ (from the danish “Closed Eye”, a fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen)
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