Cooper, Colin
Entry updated 13 January 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1926-2012) UK playwright, music critic and author, active as a scriptwriter for Television and Radio, who also wrote at least one crime novel as by Daniel Benson. His first sf was a six-part BBC radio serial, "Host Planet Earth" (1966). His first sf novels, The Thunder and Lightning Man (1968) – a humorous tale of Alien Invasion – and Outcrop (1969), have not had a strong impact on the field. The somewhat downbeat Dargason (1977) is a story of the Near Future in which, for mysterious reasons, listeners to Music become severely affected by a variety of psychologically extreme states; this was perhaps the only sf thriller before Paul H Cook's Tintagel (1981) to posit music as a Weapon. Cooper returned to sf in the year of his death with The Princess from Planet Alpha (2012 ebook), in which visiting aliens judge humanity and find it wanting; the titular female tries to persuade her fellow-visitors that their recommended sentence of extermination is too harsh and that reform may be possible. [JC/PN/DRL]
see also: Robert Hale Limited.
Colin Symons Cooper
born Birkenhead, Cheshire: 5 July 1926
died 25 August 2012
works
- The Thunder and Lightning Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1968) [hb/Charles Mozley]
- Outcrop (London: Faber and Faber, 1969) [hb/]
- Dargason (London: Dennis Dobson, 1977) [hb/Richard Weaver]
- The Epping Pyramid (London: Robert Hale, 1978) [hb/]
- The Princess from Planet Alpha (place not given: Kindle Edition, 2012) [ebook: na/]
links
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