It's Always More Complicated

And I will concede that it was a very niche and perhaps rather too constrained question, but nonetheless, I think it is a question and responding very generally with swathes of sff writers who had some experience with WW1 is not perhaps addressing it?

Or maybe I am just being a bit grumpy.

Anyway, somebody over on bluesky posted a link to a blogpost on Tolkien and the Battle of the Somme, and a little light flickered on in my mind and I went, hey, AA Milne, also at the Battle of the Somme.

Both of them, it turns out, Signals Officers.

I have mentioned the Milne thing before when reading a book on children's lit that claimed that Milne, unlike so many writers for The Young, had not had a traumatic childhood. We depose that he hardly had a life free of trauma, hmmmm?

Anyway, was wondering about the impact in particular of the Battle of the Somme on post-war British fantasy (were any other writers in the genre present?).

Apparently there is work somewhat more generally on the Western Front and fantastic literature: Croft, Baptism of Fire: The Birth of the Modern British Fantastic in World War I and various ongoing research.

I think that the fantasy that emerged was different from what e.g. Cicely Hamilton was doing in Theodore Savage - modern aerial warfare bombs the world back into primitive existence, or other works which were riffing off Modern Science and Where Will It All Take Us.