Lesley Visser

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

The '50s in general are written off as a boring decade following the turmoil of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath - the postwar Labour government, the cold war, the arrival of the New Look in fashion, etc. But I remember it as a very exciting time - a pioneering, rule-breaking time, especially for the young.