Balsdon, Dacre
Entry updated 3 October 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1901-1977) academic, historian and author, who signed his nonfiction as J P V D Balsdon, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford 1927-1969; his sf novels are humorous Satires on contemporary mores, little allowance being made for technological, social or behavioural change. The most imaginative, Sell England? (1936), is a Dystopia set 1000 years hence in which the UK is inhabited solely by a decadent aristocracy, while the other echelons of society live in Africa under a totalitarian dictatorship. His two educational satires, Have a New Master (1935) and The Day They Burned Miss Termag (in Oxford Life, coll 1957, ed anon, as "Mr Botteaux's Story"; exp 1961), are set, respectively, in a school 30 years hence and in an Oxford of the immediate future (see Education in SF). Their humour is intramural, and they have had little influence. [JE]
John Percy Vyvian Dacre Balsdon
born Bideford, Devon: 4 November 1901
died Oxford, Oxfordshire: 18 September 1977
works (selected)
- Have a New Master (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1935) [hb/uncredited]
- Sell England? (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1936) [hb/uncredited]
- Bedlam House (London: Jarrolds, 1947) [marginal sf: hb/Alec Jardine]
- The Pheasant Shoots Back (London: Jarrolds, 1949) [a Beast Fable (see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy): hb/Michael ffolkes]
- The Day They Burned Miss Termag (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961) [hb/Gaynor Chapman]
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