FAWCETT, E(dward) Douglas

(1866-1960)

   UK writer and mystical thinker, long resident in Switzerland. His first (and best-known) sf novel, Hartmann the Anarchist, or The Doom of the Great City (1893), illustrated by Fred T. JANE, features a 1920s anarchist revolution against a wicked, capitalist UK, with London being destroyed by airships; but, in the face of opposition and gripped by guilt, the rebel Hartmann eventually destroys himself and the Attila, his fearsome airship, and all is well. The HOLLOW EARTH featured in Swallowed by an Earthquake (1894), a juvenile, is non-Symmesian (John Cleves SYMMES) and uncompellingly cluttered with prehistoric reptiles. The Secretof the Desert, or How We Crossed Arabia in the "Antelope" (1895) is about a secret amphibious tank which crosses Arabia, finding there a lost race (LOST WORLDS) of Phoenicians.

   JC