CONNINGTON, J.J.

   Pseudonym for all his fiction of UK writer and chemistry professor Alfred Walter Stewart (1880-1947), best known for his detective novels. His one sf novel was Nordenholt's Million (1923). A prototype story of world- DISASTER being surmounted, it is realistic, reasoned, sociologically observed and credible. Fireball-mutated denitrifying bacteria destroy the world's vegetation, then die out. A multimillionaire secures the dictatorship of the UK, selects five million people, segregates them in the Clyde valley with supplies, and engineers the collapse of the rest of the country. On the Clyde, nitrogen is synthesized, moral crises take place, there is an atomic-energy breakthrough at the cost of lives, and the exhausted dictator dies. New cities are built. JJC's intellect tackles the scenario seriously and with feeling; though he is occasionally over-"literary", his imagination is firmly anchored in reality. Under his own name he wrote publications on chemistry and, about himself, Alias J.J. Connington (1947).

   DIM

   See also: END OF THE WORLD; HISTORY OF SF; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER.