PRIESTLEY, J(ohn) B(oynton)

(1894-1984)

   UK novelist, playwright and man of letters, formidably productive from the teens of the century until about 1980; he wrote over 70 plays, many extremely popular in their day, and as many books, thoughhe is now remembered chiefly for The Good Companions (1929), a huge picaresque novel in praise of the English. He was married to Jacquetta HAWKES. A surprising amount of his work makes use of sf or fantasy themesand devices, though sometimes in a delusional frame, as with Albert Comes Through (1933), whose eponymous hero's experiences in an absurd cinematicuniverse are explained as a fever-dream. The Thirty-First of June (1961) is a fantasy for young-adult readers. But sf concerns do propel Adam in Moonshine (1927) and Benighted (1927; vt The Old Dark House 1928 US) -both assembled as Benighted and Adam in Moonshine (omni 1932) - The Doomsday Men (1938), where HOLOCAUST threatens; some of the stories abouttime (a recurring theme) in The Other Place (coll 1953); The Magicians (1954), JBP's closest approach to a full-fledged sf novel, featuring theuse of a wonder drug to spiritually invade the mind of a tycoon; Low Notes on a High Level (1954), about the Dobbophone and other self-consciously daft instruments of MUSIC; Saturn Over the Water (1961), a thriller with sf overtones; The Shapes of Sleep (1962), which posits the use of compulsively evocative shapes in advertising; and a juvenile, Snoggle (1971), in which three children and an old man save an ALIEN pet frombigoted Wiltshire locals and are thanked for their troubles by its masters, advanced beings in a flying saucer (UFOS).Nevertheless, JBP never showed much aptitude for the traditional sf tale, and much of his work has an effect more of bullying noise than bluff energy. His ideas about the nature of the genre were unkindly. "They Come from Inner Space" (1953 New Statesman) - later assembled in Thoughts in the Wilderness (coll1957), which also contains an sf story, "The Hesperides Conference" - makes what may be the first use of the term INNER SPACE in print, and goes on to declare that the essential outward movement of sf was "a move, undertaken in secret despair, in the wrong direction". Fittingly, of JBP's considerable sf output, the most interesting titles are those tales and plays which derive their motor impulse from the consolatory time theories of J.W. DUNNE, who felt that various moments in time - whose relationships to one another were, in a sense, geographical - could, in that sense, be visited. Plays like Time and the Conways (1937) and I Have Been Here Before (1937), both assembled as Two Time-Plays (omni 1937), along withDangerous Corner (1932), all assembled as Three Time Plays (omni 1947), made extensive use of Dunne's theories. Other plays concerned with time included Johnson over Jordan (1939), whose hero posthumously prepares himself for Heaven, and Summer Day's Dream (1950). In the nonfiction Man and Time (1964) and the essays in Over the Long High Wall (1972) JBP meditated speculatively on the same themes. In the end, perhaps surprisingly for a writer so otherwise aggressive, sf served not as a technique to mount challenges but as a form of adjustment.

   JC

   Other works: At least 2 of JBP's teleplays are of genre interest: "Doomsday for Dyson" (1958), about atomic holocaust, and "Linda at Pulteney's" (1969), afantasy.

   About the author: J.B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author (1970) by Susan COOPER; J.B. Priestley (1988) by Vincent Brome.

   See also: HISTORY IN SF; THEATRE; TIME TRAVEL.