GOLDING, William (Gerald)

(1911-1993)

   UK writer, awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize for Literature. He wrote a pre-WWII book of Poems (coll 1934), but remained a provincial schoolmaster until the publication of his first and best-known novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), later filmed twice as LORD OF THE FLIES (1963, 1990), a superficially simple story about a group of schoolchildren trapped on an ISLAND when their plane is shot down while evacuating them from a nuclearHOLOCAUST. Left alone, the boys - who bear the same names as the schoolboy heroes in R.M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858) - soon revert (DEVOLUTION) to tribal savagery. Beyond its obvious allegorizingrepudiation of its model, the novel constitutes a complex utterance about the darkness of the human condition and the shapes human nature takes when "free" to do so.WG's second novel, The Inheritors (1955), written in partas a reaction to H.G. WELLS's "The Grisly Folk" (1921), could be seen as anthropological sf (ANTHROPOLOGY; ORIGIN OF MAN); it views through the eyes of a Neanderthal the morally ambiguous triumph of Cro-Magnon Man. Pincher Martin (1956; vt The Two Deaths of Pincher Martin 1957 US) is asmuch sf as Ambrose BIERCE's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", with which it has frequently been compared. A castaway on a tiny rock in the ocean, Pincher seems to be surviving with desperate defiance; but, as the ending makes clear, the rock he clings to is the same shape as a diseased tooth he touches constantly with his tongue, and his "survival" may well be no more than a last flicker of pre-purgatorial consciousness. WG's contribution to Sometime, Never (anth 1956) ed anon, a book including also stories by John WYNDHAM and Mervyn PEAKE, is "Envoy Extraordinary", a long tale subsequently made into a play, The Brass Butterfly (1957 US; rev 1958 UK), about Alexandrian Greek inventor Phanocles' attempts to get his steamengine, gun, pressure-cooker and printing-press accepted by the Roman emperor, who in refusing these gifts proves philosophically wiser than the inventor. The story also appears in The Scorpion God (coll 1971) along with two fantasies.WG's relation to sf is as tangential as his relation to the conventional mainstream novel; especially in his early works, he treads the line between allegory and novel with astonishingly fruitful results.

   JC

   About the author: Critical literature on WG is extensive and widely available.

   See also: CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; HISTORY IN SF; HISTORY OF SF; SOCIOLOGY.