mountains of Switzerland, where he lived for many years, that he reflected and wrote upon a variety of philosophical idealism that became known as “Imaginism”.

Edward Douglas Fawcett was the elder son of of E. Boyd Fawcett, an equerry to the Prince of Wales (King Edward VII) and was the brother of Colonel Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the interior of Brazil.

He was a Queen’s Scholar at Westminster School and gave early evidence of imaginative power and precocious erudition in his first published poem, The Wrath of Ana, written at the age of 13. For fun and a bet, he surprised his Headmaster a few years later by winning a gold medal for Latin verse. But his passion for adventure dominated his youthful scholarship and from journalism he turnedto science fiction. He was well ahead of H. G. Wells: his Hartmann the Anarchist (1891) described the bombing of London from the air, and his Secret of the Desert (1894) was, surely, fiction’s first account of an armoured fighting vehicle in the modern sense.

His first marriage took him to Switzerland where he became a well-known mountaineer and pioneer skier. After showing his prowess in England as a racing motor cyclist, he made the first (and probably only) ascent of the mule track from Chamonix to the Mer de Glace in a De Dion of 8 horsepower. That was in 1904, and it opened up a new era of motor roads and tourism in Switzerland.

Living on in Switzerland after the death of his first wife, Fawcett devoted himself