HAMILTON, Cicely

   Pseudonym under which UK novelist, playwright, actress and feminist Cicely Mary Hamill (1872-1952) published all her adult work, though her children's fiction, including some stories for the Sexton Blake series, was written as by Scott Rae and by Max Hamilton. Her best-known plays are eloquently suffragist; they include How the Vote was Won (1909 chap) with Christopher St John (circa 1875-1960), in which the outcome predicted bythe title is achieved when those women without means go on strike. Her sf novel, Theodore Savage: A Story of the Past or the Future (1922; rev vt Lest Ye Die 1928), bitterly depicts a future WAR in whose aftermath thepeople of the UK, driven out of the cities, revert to superstitious barbarism. The ironically named protagonist lives to a great age in a small village full of savages who think of pre-collapse artifacts as obscene. CH is one of the first - and among the darkest - of those UK sf novelists whose vision of things was shaped by WWI, which they saw as foretelling the end of civilization.

   JC

   Other works: Little Arthur's History of the Twentieth Century (1933).

   See also: END OF THE WORLD; HISTORY IN SF.