Word: musketeer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Daniel Defoe conjured his sketch of a man at the edge of the unknown out of little but an island, a parrot, a goat, a musket and a Man Friday. The "science-fiction" writer, busy working the unknown nowadays, requires planets, galaxies, universes and all the latest portents of physics. He sets out, as Defoe did, to make the reader's imagination whirl with mingled curiosity and alarm; but where Defoe found novelty in a human footstep, the science-fictioneer stakes everything on such inhuman images as "a six-foot egg made of greenish gelatin" or "nine feet...
Cervantes' heroic determination helped Christendom to win one of history's decisive battles; it also got him three musket wounds, and one of them made his left arm useless for life. Later, on his way back to Spain, Moorish pirates captured him and held him for ransom in Algiers...