Cancel the Information Age! A UKTV survey of 3,000 people reveals that 23 percent think World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. And despite the many hours devoted to him on the History Channel, 47 percent believe Richard the Lionheart was a myth.

In Stewart Robb’s satirical “Letter from a Higher Critic” (Analog, November 1966), intellectuals scoff at the notion World War II actually occurred. Arguing that the leaders are merely archetypes whose names, like de Gaulle (“of Gaul”, which is France) and Churchill (“The Church on the Hill”, symbol of old England) are obvious inventions, a scholar makes it all sound as improbable as Homer’s Trojan War. (The very kind of assumption Robb was targeting.)

As a teenaged reader, I considered it perfectly likely that the future would misunderstand the 20^th Century to that degree. But I never expected to be living in that future.