Clark, William
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1916-1985) UK journalist for newspapers – diplomatic correspondent for the Observer 1950-1955 – and television; served as press secretary for Sir Anthony Eden, but resigned in protest at the invasion of Egypt during the Suez crisis in 1956. His first novel of sf interest, Number 10 (1966), puts into a Near Future frame some of his feelings, but no details of the scandal; his second, Special Relationship (1968), pits a hawkish American president against a Europe hoping to prevent another world war, with dubious results. His later conviction that a central problem of the twentieth-century world was Third World poverty – he served with Robert McNamara and others in the World Bank 1968-1980 – was dramatized in Cataclysm: The North-South Conflict of 1987 (1984), a Future History which describes how the developing countries default on their debts and the world economy – unable to unshackle itself from the unresolved dilemmas of Imperialism – comes close to collapse; in the end, it appears that China will become the dominant power. [JC]
William Donaldson Clark
born Haltwhistle, Northumberland: 28 July 1916
died Cuxham, Oxfordshire: 27 June 1985
works
- Number 10 (London: Heinemann, 1966) [hb/]
- Special Relationship (London: Heinemann, 1968) [hb/]
- Cataclysm: The North-South Conflict of 1987 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1984) [hb/Peter Letts]
links
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