Cole, Robert W
Entry updated 18 November 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1869-1937) UK photographer (having changed his mind after studying law at Balliol, Oxford, with a view to becoming a barrister) and author who was active during the first decade of the twentieth century. His first and best novel, The Struggle for Empire: A Story of the Year 2236 (1900), takes the Future War story to its logical, grim conclusion. The Anglo-Saxon Federation – ostensibly a Utopia with London as its "superb capital" but in truth a class-ridden Dystopia where the rich in their insatiate greed have plundered the planet (see Ecology; Imperialism), whose axis they shift to keep Europe warm – expands ominously into other solar systems in search of raw material to exploit (see Colonization of Other Worlds). At this point interstellar warfare breaks out between Earth and an equally ambitious race from the Sirius system. The descriptions of space battles, with opposing armadas armed with Antigravity devices, and of an Earth surrounded by a barrage of space torpedoes and mines while Scientists struggle to perfect the ultimate Weapon, make it – as Everett F Bleiler argues in Science-Fiction: The Early Years (1990) – the precursor to and equal of many of the Space-Opera stories of the 1930s.
Cole's later novels are anticlimactic. His Other Self (1906) is a mildly humorous tale of a man bedevilled by an alter ego which possesses his body and makes him watch as that body behaves immorally; The Death Trap (1907) is a harsh Future War account of a German invasion of the UK, successfully repulsed at crippling cost to both countries; The Artificial Girl (1908), a tale of cross-dressing, is not of genre interest. [JC]
see also: Fantastic Voyages; Galactic Empires; Stars.
Robert William Cole
born Heston, Middlesex: 16 April 1869
died Dawlish, Devon: 12 November 1937
works
- The Struggle for Empire: A Story of the Year 2236 (London: Elliot Stock, 1900) [hb/]
- His Other Self (London: Greening and Co, 1906) [hb/]
- The Death Trap (London: Greening and Co, 1907) [hb/]
links
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