Higgs, John. Stranger than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, 2015. --- # Science Fiction Ken Campbell, a theatre director who formed the Science Fiction Theatre Company of Liverpool in 1976, said, "When you think about it, the entire history of literature is nothing more than people coming in and out of doors. Science fiction is about everything else." This is wonderful hyperbole. Recounted by John Higgs in Stranger Than We Can Imagine. Tom Swift books written by a series of ghostwriters between 1910 and 1941 under the pseudonym Victor Appleton. The Taser was inspired by the book Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (1911). It stands for Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle. Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone (1914) predicted the fax machine. The Motion Picture Patents Company claimed intellectual ownership of the sprocket holes which mark the edges of each roll of film. The movie industry moved from the East Coast to California to get as far away from its lawyers as possible. Who would have thought that you could classify sprocket holes as intellectual property. [[Intellectual property rights are the legal coding of human ingenuity]]