Ball, Frank P
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1908-1970) US solicitor, publisher and author whose self-published Utopia, My Wondrous Dream (1923), may be set in Atlantis, as its protagonist falls asleep while reading Ignatius Donnelly's Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), though his adventures soon depart radically from any Donnellian hypothesis, taking off from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726; rev 1735), as he finds himself a giant (see Great and Small) in a Lilliputian land. At this point the tale becomes morally unacceptable for later readers, as it extols the enslaving of Blacks (see Race in SF; Slavery). Miscegenation is punished by death. The theory of Evolution is anathema. An absolute monarchy rules a land without politics. [JC]
Frank P Ball
born Southend on Sea, Essex: 6 February 1908
died Suffolk: 5 November 1970
works
- My Wondrous Dream (New York: Frank P Ball, 1923) [pb/]
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