CONDON, Richard (Thomas)

(1915-)

   US writer, formerly in advertising, best-known for works outside the sf field such as Money is Love (1975), a rococo fantasy, though many, including most notably The Manchurian Candidate (1959), employ some sf elements in the complex generic mix characteristic of his fiction. Later made into a well known film, The MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), this novel combines a superior kind of brainwashing and elements of the political thriller (POLITICS) in a story of the attempted assassination of the US President. So extreme is RC's rendering (and rending) of the US political scene that it is fair to think of much of his work as occupying a series of ALTERNATE WORLDS, as in the savage Winter Kills (1974), which features the assassination of a JFK-like US President at the behest of his own father; in Mile High (1969), which argues the premise that Prohibition was created as the Mafia's answer to market insecurity; in The Star Spangled Crunch (1974), in which a 142-year-old tycoon manipulates the world through oil crises; in The Whisper of the Axe (1976), which augurs a successful overturning of the US Government, as does The Emperor of America (1990); in Death of a Politician (1978), which castigates unto death with Swiftian (Jonathan SWIFT) vigour a Nixon-like figure; and in The Final Addiction (1991), which is set in a grotesquely corrupt NEAR FUTURE. All presume a USA subtly but distinctly other than our own. In all of RC's work, an almost magic-realist intensity of attention to the turns of plot combines with an unerring eye for the hypnotic surface of things to gloss over his profound cynicism about the human animal. But the abyss beneath never shelves.

   JC

   About the author: "Fantastic Non-Fantastic: Richard Condon's Waking Nightmares" by Joe Sanders, Extrapolation 25.2 (1984).

   See also: FANTASY; PARANOIA.