Search SFE    Search EoF

  Omit cross-reference entries  

Yates, Dornford

Entry updated 19 February 2024. Tagged: Author.

Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com

pic

Pseudonym of UK lawyer and author Cecil William Mercer (1885-1960), Saki's first cousin; in active service during World War One, 1914-1917, and in World War Two; in France and Africa from the early 1920s. Some short stories in his well-known and once very popular Berry sequence of English social comedies contain fantasy elements, including dowsing (see ESP), dream-portents and Precognition; some titles in the linked Chandos thriller sequence have a Ruritanian air. Both Anthony Lyveden (1921) and Valerie French (1923), which are standalone novels, contain supernatural elements.

The Stolen March (August 1925/May 1926 The Windsor Magazine, each episode surtitled "Etchechuria"; coll of linked stories/fixup 1926) is set in a Lost World, the Ruritanian kingdom of Etchechuria, a polder (see Zone) between Spain and France that is only reachable when those searching for it understand that it is hidden by compass-jamming magnetic mountains. This sf frame soon devolves into Fantasy as the kingdom turns out to be a kind of comic fairyland that echoes children's books – in particular the verbal whimsy and logic-chopping of Lewis Carroll's Alice tales – with a traditional panoply of magic devices, including Invisibility, and unwelcome metamorphoses for those who break the highly arbitrary rules [for Wonderland see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The four demurely madcap but safely married protagonists, entranced by a land whose regulations they cannot long survive, discover the Philosopher's Stone (see Transmutation), which they sell to the British government (which destroys it to save capitalism), and settle into an ideal country estate adjacent to the land of dreams. It might not be taking The Stolen March too seriously to think of it as a contrarian response to the cultural disillusion that succeeded World War One (see Scientific Romance). [JC/DRL]

Cecil William Mercer

born Upper Walmer, Kent: 7 August 1885

died Umtali, Southern Rhodesia: 5 March 1960

works (highly selected)

  • Anthony Lyveden (London: Ward, Lock, 1921) [hb/]
  • Valerie French (London: Ward, Lock, 1923) [hb/]
  • The Stolen March (London: Ward, Lock, 1926) [coll of linked stories/fixup: first appeared August 1925/May 1926 The Windsor Magazine: each episode surtitled "Etchechuria": hb/S F Campbell]

collections and stories

about the author

links

previous versions of this entry



x
This website uses cookies.  More information here. Accept Cookies