GRATACAP, Louis Pope

(1851-1917)

   US naturalist and writer whose first sf novel, The Certainty of a Future Life on Mars: Being the Posthumous Papers of Bradford Torrey Dodd (1903), remains his best known. Dying in the conviction that deadhumans transcendentally ascend to a Martian REINCARNATION as embodied spirits, the narrator's father is soon communicating from there by radio with his son. Martian society, he reports, is UTOPIAN - with natives of the planet as servants - and Mars itself has canals; an essay on MARS by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) closes the volume. A Woman of the Ice Age (1906) is a turgid prehistoric romance. The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream (1908) pins itsexpectations of catastrophe on the completion of the Panama Canal; the ensuing mini Ice Age persuades the UK monarchy to transplant itself to Australia. The Mayor of New York: A Romance of the Days to Come (1910) isset in AD2000, when "suicidariums" gently gas the willing and anarchism threatens the independent state of New York. In The New Northland (1915) a lost race (LOST WORLDS) of Hebrew-speaking dwarfs inhabits a clement hollow in the Arctic, where their possession of vast amounts of radium seals their fate, for the protagonist decides that these riches must be exploited. LPG's range was wide, incorporating much material which has become central to sf, but his books are overlong, choked by his compulsive didacticism, and consequently unreadable today.

   JC

   Other works: The End: How the Great War was Stopped (1917), a fantasy in which the risen dead terrify the living into stopping the war.