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Koch, Eric

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

(1919-2018) German-born author and television producer, in UK from 1935, in Canada from 1940, several of whose novels are of some sf interest. In The French Kiss: A Tongue in Cheek Political Fantasy (1969), set in a Near-Future Canada threatened – as usual – by separatism, a Reincarnated colleague of Napoleon muses on de Gaulle's similarity to the long-dead Emperor. The Leisure Riots: A Comic Novel (1973) suggests Satirically that, in 1980, the enforced leisure of the executive class will trigger riots. In The Last Thing You'd Want to Know (1976) a "witch" becomes US President, sweeping all before her except one tortured ex-Nazi. Icon in Love: A Novel About Goethe (1999) – the first of a thematic sequence of fantasies of history, some of them genuinely estranged from the nonfantastic world (see History in SF) – is a tale of fantasticated reincarnation, in which Goethe accepts a Nobel Prize in 1992; Zade, the protagonist of Arabian Nights: 1914: A Novel about Kaiser Wilhelm II (2003), is a direct descendant of Scheherazade, living in the imaginary country of Ouda [for Scheherazade and Land of Fable, see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]; she is convinced that German-style modernization is essential for Ouda, but the imminence of World War One persuades her to travel to Germany to distract the Kaiser from beginning the conflict; the novel has a Slingshot Ending, leading to either an Alternate History or not one. Premonitions (2008), set in the same period, is nonfantastic. [JC]

Eric Koch

born Frankfurt, Germany: 31 August 1919

died 28 April 2018

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