HEARD, Gerald

   Working name of UK author and speculative journalist H(enry) F(itzgerald) Heard (1889-1971), which he used for both fiction and nonfiction in the UK; in the USA, where he lived after 1937, he wrote his fiction as H.F. Heard. He is perhaps best remembered for his association with Aldous HUXLEY in investigations of the Vedanta cult and for such speculative studies as The Ascent of Humanity (1929) and The Third Morality (1937). His UFO popularization The Riddle of the Flying Saucers: Is Another WorldWatching? (1950; rev 1953), was well received, although time has passed it by. Some of his detective and horror fictions featuring Mr Mycroft-A Taste for Honey (1941; vt A Taste for Murder 1955), Reply Paid (1942) and The Notched Hairpin (1949) - are borderline-sf pastiches of Arthur ConanDOYLE's Sherlock Holmes stories; Murder by Reflection (1942) features a killing done by radiation poisoning. The title story of The Great Fog and Other Weird Tales (coll 1944; vt The Great Fog: Weird Tales of Terror andDetection 1946; with 2 stories added and 1 dropped, rev under first title 1947 UK) is a DISASTER tale, the mould-derived Great Fog destroying all civilization. In the title story of The Lost Cavern (coll 1948) a man is held captive by intelligent bats. Set in the 19th century, The Black Fox: A Novel of the 'Seventies (1950 UK) is a supernatural tale, the fox beingAnubis. Doppelgangers: An Episode of the Fourth, the Psychological, Revolution, 1997 (1947), which is sf, rather laboriously sets up a conflict among three factions, each of whose philosophies is in didactic opposition to the others'. Gabriel and the Creatures (1952; vt Wishing Well 1953 UK) recasts some of GH's evolutionary speculation in sf form forchildren.

   JC

   See also: DYSTOPIAS; ECOLOGY; EVOLUTION; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION .