TODD, Ruthven

(1914-1978)

   UK writer and Blake scholar whose Tracks in the Snow: Studies in English Science and Art (1946) effectively argued the imaginative power - when joined - of the two subtitled categories; he was author, as R.T.Campbell, of several detective novels, and as RT of two metaphysical tales: Over the Mountain (1939), whose quest plot is consanguineous with a search for political self-understanding, and the surrealist The Lost Traveller (1943), in which the protagonist, lost in a strange country,finds himself questing for a great bird which, at the final moment, he himself becomes. In his introduction to the 1968 reprinting of the latter, RT recognized influences from Rex WARNER to Wyndham LEWIS.

   JC

   Other works: The Space Cats series of juvenile sf novels, Space Cat (1952 chap US), Space Cat Visits Venus (1955 chap US), Space Cat Meets Mars (1957chap US) and Space Cat and the Kittens (1958 chap US).

   See also: DYSTOPIAS; FANTASTIC VOYAGES.