WAUGH, Evelyn

(1903-1966)

   UK writer, known mostly for a series of black inter-War satires, such as Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), and for Brideshead Revisited (1945). Some of his early fiction, like Black Mischief (1932) and Scoop (1938), utilizes imaginary African countries forsatirical purposes, and Vile Bodies (1930) ends in an apocalyptic Europe torn by a final war, but it was only in some post-WWII works that he wrote fiction genuinely making use of sf displacements. Scott-King's Modern Europe (1947 chap) satirizes post-WWII totalitarianism through theimaginary state of Neutralia. Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future (1953 chap)-also included in Tactical Exercise (coll 1954US)-combines the chemical coercion of Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932) with the drabness and scarcity of the needs of life of George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949) in a brief but savage attack on the joylessness of a Welfare State UK a few decades hence. Miles Plastic, his free will bureaucratically threatened, his lover co-opted by the state, takes refuge in "gemlike, hymeneal, auspicious" acts of arson. It is a book, like most of EW's work, in which humour only brings out the more clearly a radical despair.

   JC

   See also: DYSTOPIAS.