BOWEN, John (Griffith)

(1924-)

   UK novelist and playwright active in tv and radio; he often derives his novels from his plays, some of which, like the Year-King fantasy "Robin Redbreast" (produced by the BBC 1970; in The Television Dramatist [anth 1973] ed Robert Muller), are of strong genre interest. Such was the case with his first, also a fantasy, The Truth Will not Help Us (1956), in which an 18th-century piracy trial is depicted, with much anachronistic verisimilitude, as an example of McCarthyism, and with his first sf novel proper, After the Rain (1958), in which a lunatic inventor starts a second Flood. Most of the novel takes place on a satirically convenient raft of fools, where survivors of the DISASTER act out their humanness and win through in the end only because of the dour fanaticism of one person. The stage version was later published as After the Rain: A Play in Three Acts (1967 chap). No Retreat (1994) is a classic HITLER WINS tale, set in an ALTERNATE HISTORY 1990s United Kingdom governed by a triumphant Germany; the plot involves an attempted revolution under the auspices of the British government in exile, which is housed in the United States. JB is a supple, subtle, sometimes profound writer.

   JC

   Other works: Pegasus (1957) and The Mermaid and the Boy (1958), both juvenile fantasies; as Justin Blake (with Jeremy Bullmore), the Garry Halliday children's sf sequence comprising Garry Halliday and the Disappearing Diamond (1960), Garry Halliday and the Ray of Death (1961), Garry Halliday and the Kidnapped Five (1962), Garry Halliday and the Sands of Time (1963) and Garry Halliday and the Flying Foxes (1964).

   See also: HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; McGUFFIN.