Six degrees of separation from French electronic music band M83

M83, the French electronic outfit whose space-age, future pop sound shot them to fame in 2011, when the Grammy-nominated Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming LP arrived, are due to play in Hong Kong on Wednesday. The band are not named after a motorway or an assault rifle, but the spiral-shaped star system Messier 83, which is visible from Earth with binoculars. Why that galaxy and not Ursa Major? Who knows with those crazy French! M83 composed the soundtrack for the 2013 movie Oblivion, which stars Tom Cruise …

Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, the actor, Scientologist and couch leaper extraordinaire has never allowed his image to be used for video games, action figures or other toys. Nevertheless, his appeal in video/toy-obsessed Japan is such that October 10 is recognised there as Tom Cruise Day, honouring the fact that he’s visited that country more than any other Western actor. In 2005, Cruise worked with Steven Spielberg on War of the Worlds, a loose adaptation of the novel of the same name by H.G. Wells …

Called variously “the Father of Futurism” and “the Father of Science Fiction”, British novelist Herbert George Wells was definitely father of something, and not just the four sprogs he sired with three women. In 1938, Orson Welles broadcast The War of the Worlds on American radio, the show presented as a bulletin announcing the landing of aliens in New Jersey. Popular myth has it that the broadcast caused widespread panic, but that has largely been debunked. In the 2006 television docudrama HG Wells: War with the World, the author is played by Michael Sheen …