On this day in 1920 the author and academic Isaac Asimov was born. A brilliant thinker and leading science fiction writer, he was fascinated by change and its effects on our future. A professor of biochemistry at Boston University, Asimov was a prolific writer and a brilliant lecturer. He wrote many textbooks on history and biochemistry as well as literature. Of course he loved to put a sci-fi slant on anything, including poetry. Here is the poem that he called ‘The most remarkable example of science fiction poetry that has ever been written.’ It is, rather surprisingly, from ‘Locksley Hall ‘ by Alfred Lord Tennyson:

For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world”

As he put it in his essay on ‘Poetry’:

‘Aerial commerce and aerial warfare (the “ghastly dew” might even be an unconscious foreshadowing of radioactive fallout) culminating in a world government are foreseen. Not bad for 1842!’

Today I reflect on how I view the world – that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.