October the First Is Too Late

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When he was seven years old Fred Hoyle refused to be afraid of the dark. Close to his home in the Yorkshire village of Gilstead there was a narrow, winding lane bordered by high walls and deep woods. Even on a bright day it was dark there. Hoyle forced himself to walk along that lane—and he came to explore the mysteries of the night sky with the same energy that he walked the moors and hills that surrounded his home. It was appropriate that Hoyle was able to recall the event nearly seventy years later in his fascinating autobiography Home Is Where the Wind Blows (1994). He wrote: ‘I seemed to be in contact with the sky instead of the earth, a sky powdered from horizon to horizon with thousands of points of light… I became more and more aware—awed, I suppose—of the heavens… I remember looking upwards and deciding that I would find out what those things up there were.’ And it was ‘those things up there’ that would define Hoyle’s entire life, in his twin careers as a scientist and populariser of science; and as an artist, author of some of the most intense and stimulating science fiction ever written.

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