Adlard, Mark
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
Working name used by UK author Peter Marcus Adlard (1932- ) for all his books. Until his retirement in 1976 he was a manager in the steel industry, and his knowledge of managerial and industrial problems plays a prominent role in his Tcity trilogy: Interface (1971), Volteface (1972) and Multiface (1975). The series is set in a city of the Near Future. By calling it Tcity, Adlard plainly intended to confer on it a kind of regimented anonymity in the manner of Yevgeny Zamiatin, while at the same time punning on Teesside, the industrial conurbation in the northeast of England where he was raised (also, in some north-England dialects "t'city" means simply "the city"). With a rich but sometimes sour irony, and a real if distanced sympathy for the problems and frustrations of both management and workers, Adlard plays a set of variations, often comic, on Automation, hierarchical systems, the Media Landscape, revolution, the difficulties of coping with Leisure, class distinction according to Intelligence, fantasies of Sex and the stultifying pressures of conformity. The Greenlander (1978) was intended as the first volume of a projected non-genre trilogy, further volumes of which have failed to appear. His books are ambitious in scope and deserve to be more widely known. [PN]
Peter Marcus Adlard
born Seaton Carew, County Durham: 19 June 1932
works
series
- Interface (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1971) [Tcity: hb/Martin Walker]
- Volteface (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972) [Tcity: hb/]
- Multiface (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1975) [Tcity: hb/]
individual titles
- The Greenlander (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1978) [hb/]
about the author
- Andy Darlington. "The Many Faces of Adlard" (March 1978 Arena #7) [mag/]
links
previous versions of this entry