IIt had been because of science fiction that I had been able to gaze at the wonders of the world and think them unremarkable. I could understand that weight to power ratio was the magic that held aeroplanes up in the air because I could make them myself—from the humble paper dart through rubber band powered models and was ready to go to propeller power when my pocket-money was up to it. I had put firecrackers under tin cans and thereby understood that confined explosions in small metal cylinders could launch rockets or push pistons and turn shafts to make motor cars go.
        The telephone made perfect sense once I joined two tin cans with a length of string and spoke to friends at a distance, and I had built a crystal set with which I could listen to the cricket from England. Within a year or two I would launch several solid-fuel, two and three stage rockets into the stratosphere. And even if I hadn’t made one myself, I understood that there were gases that drew all the heat from everything around them and allowed refrigerators to exist. All quite normal, sensible, to-be-expected. I felt that I had the world and everything in it completely under control in my head. Then television happened and I was utterly floored. No matter how I tried, there was no making sense of that. The first true miracle had happened, the first great impossibility had become real.