COMFORT, Alex(ander)

(1920-)

   UK writer and medical doctor who has published significant popular work in the fields of sexology and gerontology, being perhaps best known for The Joy of Sex (1972). Before WWII he established an extremely precocious reputation for poetry, fiction and a pacifism he espoused rigorously during the years of conflict. One early novel, No Such Liberty (1941), edges into parable in its description of the wartime internment of Germans; Cities of the Plain (1943) is an anti-capitalist DYSTOPIAN play; Tetrarch (1980 US), a fantasy, takes its protagonists magically into a political and sexual UTOPIA named Los, where they must find their true shapes; and Imperial Patient (1987) infuses a tale of the emperor Nero with mythical elements. His first genuine sf novel, Come Out to Play (1961), is a near-future SATIRE on scientism narrated by a smug sexologist. The Philosophers (1989), set in a NEAR FUTURE UK, savages a decrepit Tory hegemony.

   JC