Also, why would they have to give the actual paper back at all? Why not just tell the person the grade? And why not ask for all the copies and notes and swear the writer to secrecy? The person is in the Academy; presumably they’re somewhat trustworthy. And if not, you can shoot them. Legally.
It’s a great story but I also don’t believe a word of it. It belongs in the FOAF category of urban legends.
)
Well, he said this happened to him with one of his papers. I’m inclined to believe him because he told the story back when he was still quite sound mentally, and he’s never been big on repeating urban legends.
I think Mark Twain might have been the first to push a SF novel.
Enola Straight wrote: "Suppose I come up with a way to crack codes by factoring large primes into/out of Public Keys, or tap into Quantum Entangled transmissions.
I don’t actually break into classified files…I just publish my creation."
A subplot of one of Robert J. Sawyer’s books had a guy who’d kill you if you even looked like you might do that.
And what’s Jules Verne - chopped liver?
There’s a huge literature on early science fiction with, of course, a huge variety of differences in what people will include in the term. The monumental Science-Fiction: The Early Years by Everett F. Bleiler contains over 400 entries from before 1889 when A Connecticut Yankee appeared. It’s astoundingly, amazingly (heh) complete for a pre-Internet work but using today’s newspaper databases I’ve found some stories he missed so the actual number is certainly higher than 500.
Please: Pâté de foie gras. 
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is generally considered to be the first Science Fiction novel.
There were novels written before then that contained elements of science fiction, with some dating all the way back at least to ancient Greece. Most of these stories are generally considered to be in the Fantasy genre rather than Science Fiction, however.
Some of this is arguable, though. Johannes Kepler, the guy famous for Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion, also wrote a novel called Somnium, in which the protagonists conjure a daemon which takes them to the Moon. The story is a mixture of fiction about what creatures live on the Moon combined with some science like what the Earth would look like from the Moon. Some people consider this to be the first Science Fiction novel.
Frankenstein just happens to be my favorite book though, so I’m a bit biased as to which definition of “first” I happen to agree with. 
Sounds like an idea for a story in some kind of fiction genre dealing with speculative science… maybe if you posted in the Cafe Society you’d get some hits.
Brian Aldiss championed this in Billion Year Spree (1974) and there’s a school of historians who follow him. And of course there is a school that disagrees.
I’m among the disagreers. Aldiss selected *Frankenstein *because he considered science fiction to come out of the gothic novel tradition. That had, e.g., a year earlier produced E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman,” the first living automaton story, which has been as influential and imitated as Frankenstein.
I’m not happy with this distinction because it slights the science too much. In both those stories the scientific aspect is a grace note, not essential to the psychology. Victor might as well use magic to make his monster, even if he does study natural philosophy. Olympia, the automaton, is a stand-in for the grotesque rather than technology.
I admit I don’t have a favored first. I could go earlier or later than Frankenstein. Frankly (heh, again) a dime novel like The Steam Man of the Prairies prefigures modern science fiction much better than any literary effort.
The story goes that Mary Shelley took up with her boyfriend, later husband, the renowned Poet Percey Bysshe Shelley. they spent a wet summer on the continent, so one challenge to pass the time was to write a ghost story. She wrote “Frahnkensteen” (or was it -Stein?).
The irony is, a century later, everyone knows Frankenstein, maybe 1 in 20 could name a work by her husband. (I recognize only Ozymandius)
I believe you’re referring to the Bureau of Industry and Security; just a nit-pick. Carry on.
I doubt that very little would happen to you at least anything that was visable in public. Ideas for weapons systems are dime a dozen. If the idea is simple enough that an author could develop it, then its probably simple enough that enemy agents could easily think of it on their own. What the powers that be really want to keep secret is
Doing anything against the author will likely tip their hand as far as parts 1 and 2, so its far better to just leave it out there among the thousands of other fictional weapons systems rather than draw attention to it. There may be some effort to covertly check the author out to see if he could somehow have been leaked information, and if so find the leaker, but nothing that the author would be aware of.