2011 books

14) Desmond Leslie & Patrick Moore, How Britain Won the Space Race, 1972
I think I was first made aware of this via a chat with Dave Hardy a few years ago. I never expected to come across it as it's known to be rather rare, but I picked it up for a few quid in Oxfam last week. Written just a few years after Apollo 11, it's the illustrated story of how Britain beat the Americans to the moon in 1969 (landing the same day, but earlier) by using good old-fashioned British ingenuity and engineering. While the story takes place in the 1950s and ’60s the tone is emphatically Victorian, the pioneers are all quaintly English or moustachioed Germans, and all research is of course done outside the cricket season. And it's illustrated mostly with drawings of pre-twentieth century esoteric Victoriana (demonstrations of strange experiments, Montgolfier balloons, cannons for rockets, Kew-style glasshouses...), which tells me this really deserves to be slotted in as a perfect example of late proto-steampunk, yet in that context it strangely doesn't get a mention anywhere. And in an alternate history vein it also prefigured Warren Ellis's Ministry of Space by thirty years. How Britain Won the Space Race is still funny as well, which means it's going on my shelf for keeps. Ad astra, chaps!