Edmonds, Harry
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1891-1989) UK author, in active service during World War One, who is of sf interest for several adventure tales and of some Near-Future novels, beginning with The North Sea Mystery: A Story of Naval Intelligence Work (1930), which features land-launched torpedoes that threaten to sink the entire Royal Navy. In The Riddle of the Straits (1931), a Future War story set in 1935, the UK and Japan find themselves pitted against the USSR and the USA; a Channel Tunnel saves the UK from embargo. In Red Invader (1933), Russia and Germany are once again involved, this time in intrigues against the UK. In his first Scientific Romance, The Professor's Last Experiment (1935; rev vt The Secret Voyage 1946), a vast war is halted when the protagonist broadcasts a "radiation" wave (see Rays) which stops all the engines of conflict.
After World War Two, Edmonds continued in the same vein, though with a darker sense of things, as the World War Three/Hugh Brodie sequence – comprising The Clockmaker of Heidelberg: Or, the Strange Affair of Hugh Brodie, Englishman (1949), The Rockets (Operation Manhattan) (1951) (Manhattan being a small town in Illinois) and The Orphans of Brandenburg (1953) – hints at an approach to, but does not quite delineate, the violent end of all civilization with the outbreak of World War Three. The books are loaded with Inventions – new forms of submarine propulsion, rockets across the Atlantic, and so forth – but the Near Future depicted, despite a neo-Nazi germ-warfare plot centred in Brazil and some hyperbolic European intrigues, lacks speculative intensity. [JC]
Harry Morton Cyril Edmonds [middle names have also been given as Moreton Southey]
born Merthyr Tydfil, Glamorgan: 14 April 1891
died Shepway, Kent: [registered] 11 November 1989
works
series
World War Three/Hugh Brodie
- The Clockmaker of Heidelberg: Or, the Strange Affair of Hugh Brodie, Englishman (London: Macdonald and Co, 1949) [World War Three/Hugh Brodie: hb/uncredited]
- The Rockets (Operation Manhattan) (London: Macdonald and Co, 1951) [World War Three/Hugh Brodie: hb/uncredited]
- The Orphans of Brandenburg (London: Ward, Lock and Co, 1953) [World War Three/Hugh Brodie: hb/]
individual titles
- The North Sea Mystery: A Story of Naval Intelligence Work (London: Ward, Lock and Co, 1930) [hb/Abbey]
- The Riddle of the Straits (London: Ward, Lock and Co, 1931) [hb/uncredited]
- Red Invader (London: Ward, Lock and Co, 1933) [hb/uncredited]
- The Death Ship; Or the Tragedy of the "Valmiera" as Related by Chief Officer James Stanley (London: John Lane, 1933) [hb/H H Hartley]
- The Death Ship; Or the Tragedy of the "Valmiera" as Related by Chief Officer James Stanley (Manchester, England: Withy Grove Press, 1941) [chap: cut version of the above: pb/]
- Wind in the East (London: Ward, Lock and Co, 1935) [hb/]
- The Professor's Last Experiment (London: Rich and Cowan, 1935) [hb/]
- The Secret Voyage (London: Macdonald and Co, 1946) [rev vt of the above: hb/]
links
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