GENONE, Hudor

   Pseudonym of US writer William James Roe (1843-1915) for his sf and fantasy; he also produced some non-genre work under his own name and as G. I. Cervus. He was a freethinker - a disposition of mind found withsurprising infrequency among 19th-century sf writers - and in Inquirendo Island (1886) he dramatized in unmistakable terms his negative feelingsabout Christianity. The protagonist, shipwrecked on the eponymous mid-Atlantic ISLAND, discovers that its inhabitants have constructed a topsy-turvy RELIGION, which they follow with pious zeal, out of their ancestors' bad memories of their own shipwreck and out of idolatry directed towards the arithmetic text which is the only printed book to have survived. Bellona's Husband (1887) takes its protagonists via spaceship to MARS, where they find a humanlike society distinguished from ours mainly by the fact that Martians live backwards in time; this may be the earliest example of the notion of time reversal being given full-fledged narrative form. Both novels stand out by virtue of the pungency of their thought and their story-telling clarity.

   JC

   Other works: The Last Tenet Imposed upon the Khan of Thomathoz (1892), a fantasy.