As well as serving in the SS and a second act as a Nasa engineer, Wernher von Braun wrote a Martian sci-fi novel with a prescient twist… I recently read (and greatly enjoyed) V2 , Robert Harris’s absorbing second world war thriller about British attempts to locate and destroy the base in the Netherlands from which Hitler’s “Retaliation Weapon 2” – those devastating rocket-powered bombs aimed at London – were launched. Harris is famous for the meticulous research that underpins his plots andV2 is no exception. For me, a particularly interesting aspect of the novel was his portrayal ofWernher von...