Erasmus Darwin - Appearances

Appearances

• Charles Sheffield, an author noted largely for hard science fiction, wrote a number of stories featuring Darwin in a manner quite similar to Sherlock Holmes. These stories were collected in a book, The Amazing Dr. Darwin.
• Darwin's opposition to slavery in poetry was included by Benjamin Zephaniah in a reading. This inspired the establishment of the Genomic Dub Collective, whose album includes quotations from Erasmus "Ras" Darwin, his grandson Charles Darwin and Haile Selassie.
• The forgetting of Erasmus' designs for a rocket is a major plot point in Stephan Baxter's tale of alternate universes, Manifold: Origin.
• Phrases from Darwin's poem The Botanic Garden are used as chapter headings in The Pornographer of Vienna by Lewis Crofts.
• British poet J.H. Prynne took on the pseudonym Erasmus W. Darwin for his "plant time" bulletins in the pages of Bean News (1972).
• A building on the Nottingham Trent University Clifton Campus is named after him. It is the centre for science teaching, academic offices and study space.
• Erasmus Darwin appears as a character in Sergey Lukyanenko's novel New Watch as a Dark Other and a prophet living in Regent's Park Estate.