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We are pleased to announce that conference’s first keynote will be at 10.00am on Saturday 9 July in the Kemp Room:

Stephen Baxter
“‘It’s like something out of H.G. Wells!’: The Continuing Influence of H.G. Wells and The War of the Worlds“

The enduring impact of Wells’s great novel was driven home to me when I researched my own novel of the Second World War, and found that many eyewitnesses referred to Wells’s books as a comparison for their experiences: “It’s like something out of H.G. Wells.” In this talk I will explore a century of reactions to The War of the Worlds in follow-ups, restagings and reimaginings of Wells’s novel, even in whole sub-genres deriving from it.
Stephen Baxter is the author of The Time Ships (1995) – a sequel to The Time Machine (1895) – and is a Vice-President of the HG Wells Society.

He was born in Liverpool, England, 13 November 1957 and now lives in Northumberland. Stephen has degrees in mathematics, from Cambridge University, engineering, from Southampton University, and in business administration, from Henley Management College. He has taught maths and physics and worked for several years in information technology. He is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society.

He began professional publishing of sf with “The Xeelee Flower” in Interzone (Spring 1987) as by S. M. Baxter, a story that was to form part of his Xeelee Sequence of future history, and included novels such as Raft (1991), Timelike Infinity (1992), Flux (1993) and Rim (1994). In 1991 he had applied to become a cosmonaut and visit Mir, but lost out to Helen Sharman. He consoled himself with writing an alternate history novel about NASA, Voyage (1996); other alternate histories by Stephen include Anti-Ice (1993), his Mammoth trilogy Mammoth: Silverhair (1999), Longtusk: Mammoth Book Two (2000) and Icebones: Mammoth Book Three (2001), his Manifold trilogy Manifold 1 (1999 1999), Space: Manifold 2 (2000) and Origin: Manifold 3 (2001) and the Northland Trilogy Stone Spring (2010), Bronze Summer (2011) and Iron Winter (2012).

Baxter has also collaborated with other sf writers, including Arthur C. Clarke (Time’s Eye (2003), Sunstorm (2005) and Firstborn (2008), and with Terry Pratchett (The Long Earth (2012), The Long War (2013), The Long Mars (2014) and The Long Utopia (2015). As well as writing for adults he has written for children, for the shared world The Web (The Web: Gulliverzone (1997) and The Web: Webcrash (1998), and even a Doctor Who novel (The Wheel of Ice (2012)).

In addition to over forty volumes of fiction, he is author of the non-fiction Deep Future (2001) and Omegatropic (2002).

He is currently working on a continuation of The War of the Worlds (1898), provisionally titled The Massacre of Mankind.

His website is http://www.stephen-baxter.com/.