James Graham Ballard was born on November 15, 1930 in Shanghai, where his British family had moved because of his father’s job.

The publication of his article “Which Way to Inner Space” on the magazine “New Worlds” marked the birth of the British New Wave science fiction literary movement. The base topic of this movement is the inner space with great attention to psychic pulsions.

Ballard’s fame grew up in 1962 with the publication of his second novel, “The Drowned World”.

Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr., better known as Frank Herbert was born on October 8, 1920. Herbert’s first career was in journalism starting from the ’40s. Herbert started a research for a magazine article about the sand dunes near the city of Florence, Oregon, but he ended up with far too much material to write about and the interest in the desert derived from the research led him to develop during the early ’60s what became his masterpiece: “Dune”, a very long novel for the standards of the time, one of the reasons why after it was serialized in Analog in two parts it was then published in book only by a small publisher after being rejected by many other ones.