Pseudonym – which he sometimes wrote out in full as Cecil Scott Forester – of Egyptian-born UK writer Cecil Lewis Troughton Smith (1899-1966), mostly in the USA from the mid-1940s. He is very much better known for his work outside the sf field, which includes The African Queen (1935) and the twelve Horatio Hornblower books, beginning with The Happy Return (1937); Hornblower himself, sensitive, acute, strategy-minded, self-doubting, ruthless when necessary, is an underlier figure for many sf and fantasy commanders (> Hornblower in Space), conspicuously excluding Captain Kirk, but certainly influencing the modelling of Captain Picard (> Star Trek for both captains); a particularly good late example is David Feintuch's Nick Seafort.
Forester wrote several sf stories, including "Modernity and Maternity" (in The Bedchamber Mystery, With Which is Included the Story of the Eleven Deckchairs and Modernity and Maternity, coll 1944 chap), which describes a hi-tech Utopian Britain; "The Wandering Gentile" (in The Nightmare, coll 1954), which envisions Adolf Hitler, who has survived World War Two, as doomed to spend eternity as a kind of Wandering Jew; and the substantial Hitler-Wins novella, "If Hitler had Invaded England" (16-30 April 1960 Saturday Evening Post), which was posthumously collected in Gold from Crete (coll 1971). He also published one sf novel, The Peacemaker (1934), about a pacifist mathematician and schoolteacher who tries to force peace on the world through his Invention of a magnetic disruptor that stops machinery. He fails, after his wife has betrayed him to a vengeful mob, at whose hands he dies. [JC]
see also: Crime and Punishment.
Cecil Lewis Troughton Smith
born Cairo, Egypt: 27 August 1899
died Fullerton, California: 2 April 1966
works (selected)
- The Peacemaker (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, 1934) [hb/]
- Poo-Poo and the Dragons (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, 1942) [hb/Robert Lawson]
- The Bedchamber Mystery, With Which is Included the Story of the Eleven Deckchairs and Modernity and Maternity (Toronto, Ontario: S J Reginald Saunders Publisher, 1944) [coll: chap: hb/uncredited]
- The Nightmare (London: Michael Joseph, 1954) [coll: hb/Peter Rudland]
- Gold from Crete: Short Stories (London: Michael Joseph, 1971) [coll: hb/Graham Humphreys]
links
Previous versions of this entry