The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven which was the main teaching of Jesus is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought.

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.

He who negates present society and seeks social conditions based on the sharing of property is a revolutionary whether he calls himself an anarchist or a communist.

What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.

In the 18th century James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.

Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts his own inclinations society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.

In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint.

The birth of science as we know it arguably began with Isaac Newton's formulation of the laws of gravitation and motion. It is no exaggeration to say that physics was reborn in the early 20th-century with the twin revolutions of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.

A permanent base on Mars would have a number of advantages beyond being a bonanza for planetary science and geology. If as some evidence suggests exotic micro-organisms have arisen independently of terrestrial life studying them could revolutionise biology medicine and biotechnology.

My point has always been that ever since the Industrial Revolution science fiction has been the most important genre there is.