COLLIER, John (Henry Noyes)

(1901-1980)

   UK novelist, poet and short-story writer who also spent time in the USA writing filmscripts. He was known mainly for his sophisticated though sometimes rather precious short stories, generally featuring acerbic snap endings; many of these stories have strong elements of fantasy or sf, in particular No Traveller Returns (1931 chap), whose protagonist visits a DYSTOPIAN future, and The Devil and All (coll 1934), whose contents are exclusively FANTASY. His best-known title, Fancies and Goodnights (coll 1951 US; cut vt Of Demons and Darkness 1965 UK), assembles new material plus a selection of tales from Presenting Moonshine (coll 1941) and The Touch of Nutmeg (coll 1943 US)-itself a compendium drawn from the previous volume and from The Devil and All; until the release of The John Collier Reader (coll 1972 US; cut vt The Best of John Collier 1975 US), Fancies and Goodnights remained the handiest presentation of the kind of short fiction with which JC has been identified: highly polished magazine stories, adroit, world-weary, waspish, often insubstantial. It won the first INTERNATIONAL FANTASY AWARD.Radically dissimilar to his most familiar work is Tom's A-Cold (1933; vt Full Circle 1933 US), a remarkably effective post- HOLOCAUST novel set in the 1990s, long after an unexplained disaster has decimated England's (and presumably the world's) population and thrust mankind back into rural barbarism, a condition out of which the eldest survivors, who remember civilization, are trying to educate the young third generation. The simple plot plays no tricks on the reader: the young protagonist, a born leader, rises through raids and conflict to the chieftainship, undergoes a tragedy, and reconciles himself at the novel's close to the burdens of a government which will improve the lot of his people. Throughout the novel, very movingly, JC renders the reborn, circumambient natural world with a hallucinatory visual intensity found nowhere else in his work. Along with Alun LLEWELLYN's The Strange Invaders (1934), Tom's A-Cold can be seen, in its atmosphere of almost loving conviction, as a genuine successor to Richard JEFFERIES's After London (1885); and it contrasts markedly with JC's earlier No Traveller Returns (1931 chap), a harsh dystopian novella set in a deadened world.

   JC

   Other works: His Monkey Wife, or Married to a Chimp (1930), a fantasy; Green Thoughts (1932 chap) and Variation on a Theme (1935 chap), both assembled with other stories in Green Thoughts and Other Strange Tales (coll 1943 US); Witch's Money (1940 chap US); Pictures in the Fire (coll 1958); Milton's "Paradise Lost": Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind * (1973).

   See also: APES AND CAVEMEN (IN THE HUMAN WORLD); DISASTER; EC COMICS; HISTORY OF SF; HUMOUR; SATIRE.