TABORI, Paul

   Working name of Hungarian writer Paul Tabor or (variously) Pal Tabori (1908-1974), who gained a doctorate in economic and political science in 1930 and then worked as a literary agent. He moved to the UK before the outbreak of WWII, about which he would publish several works, including They Came to London (1943), a marginally NEAR FUTURE tale involving theSecond Front, and The Frontier (1950), which reworked the terrible history of Germany in an ALTERNATE-WORLD frame. He cowrote the script for FOUR-SIDED TRIANGLE (1953), adapted from William F. TEMPLE's novel. Someof his later (and increasingly commercial) fiction was sf, the best example being The Green Rain (1961 US), a sour comedy about chemically polluted rainfall turning people green. Sex and the occult infused much of his later work, like The Cleft (1969 US), the fissure of the title being nearly as symbolic as the crack in Emma TENNANT's The Time of the Crack (1973). PT was an effective writer who sometimes allowed haste to spoilhis results.

   JC

   Other works: Solo (1948); The Talking Tree (1950); The Survivors (1964), a post- HOLOCAUST tale; the Hunters series, comprising The Doomsday Brain (1967 US), The Invisible Eye (1967 US) and The Torture Machine (1969 US); The Demons of Sandorra (1970 US); Lily Dale (1972); The Wild White Witch (1973) as by Peter Stafford.

   See also: HUNGARY.