Balchin, Nigel
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1908-1970) UK author, industrialist and wartime scientific adviser to the Army Council; married (1933-1951) to Elisabeth Ayrton. From the beginning of World War Two his fictions specialized in the creation of psychologically and physically crippled "competent men", as in The Small Back Room (1943), and were plotted around scientific problems at the verge of sf; A Sort of Traitors (1949), in particular, nears new territory as its boffin protagonists come close to releasing a cure to viral epidemics, which are described in terms very cautiously proleptic of Pandemics; but shy from its potential Cold War misuse. Though his first novel, No Sky (1934), is of marginal genre interest, his only sf novel proper is Kings of Infinite Space (1967), a rather weak Near-Future look at the US space programme. [JC]
see also: Space Flight.
Brigadier Nigel Marlin Balchin
born Butts Potterne, Wiltshire: 3 December 1908
died London: 17 May 1970
works (selected)
- No Sky (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1934) [hb/]
- A Sort of Traitors (London: Collins, 1949) [hb/nonpictorial]
- Kings of Infinite Space (London: Collins, 1967) [hb/]
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