HORNER, Donald W(illiam)

(1874-?)

   UK astronomer, meteorologist and writer who specialized in popular-science texts. Though published as boys' fiction, By Aeroplane to the Sun: Being the Adventures of a Daring Aviator and his Friends (1910) offers a numerate and complex vision of a high-tech NEAR FUTURE, featuring picturephones, tv and electric cars, and describing the protagonists' usual tour of the Solar System with prescient realism. The ship operates by a kind of ION DRIVE; its inhabitants, some of whom are women, use pressure suits when necessary; and the planets themselves, as well as the cool SUN, offer a wide range of challenges. Their Winged Destiny: Being a Tale of Two Planets (1912; vt The World's Double: Being a Tale of TwoPlanets 1913) expands the scope of the earlier book, sending its astronauts from a possibly doomed Earth to its double in orbit around Alpha Centauri. Both novels demonstrate the speed with which the advanceof science - DWH was of course no amateur - was engendering radical changes in the venues and plotting conventions that went to make up GENRE SF long before the founding of AMAZING STORIES in 1926.

   JC