Sunday, 30 December 2012

Why 'The Eidoloscope'?

As the purpose of my bloggings are to promote the works of  Robert Duncan Milne it seemed appropriate to reference one of his stories in the blog title.

I had initially fancied 'Into the Sun' but thought it sounded too vague, or worse like a weather report! As the Eidoloscope was not only the title of a story but the name of a device RDM dreamed up which was able to look at past events in a specific space I thought this to be far more fitting, analogous as it is with what I hope to do through these blogs and posts.

The Eidoloscope was also the name given to a film projection system built by Woodville Latham and 'presented publicly in 1895' (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edshift.html). As RDM's story was first published in 1890 this would suggest that this may be an example of life imitating art- surely a sign of successful science fiction writing?

There's much more to say about both the story and this apparent convergence of science and fiction (or vice versa) but that's for another day.




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