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Drury, Allen

Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

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(1918-1998) US author of the Advise and Consent sequence of novels depicting US political (see Politics) life from a point roughly similar to real-life 1960 and growing into a full-fledged though ultimately short-winded Future History. The bent is conservatively anti-communist, and the Satirical effects are often telling, though sometimes tendentious. The series comprises Advise and Consent (1959), which won a Pulitzer Prize, A Shade of Difference (1962), Capable of Honor (1966) and Preserve and Protect (1968), which amount to a mildly estranged Alternate History of 1950s and 1960s America; plus (more interestingly) two mutually incompatible sequels, in which the same Jonbar Point generates two different futures, depending on which of two politicians is assassinated. In Come Nineveh, Come Tyre: The Presidency of Edward M. Jason (1973), world communism topples an unready America into chaos; and in The Promise of Joy (1975) – a fuller title, The Promise of Joy: The Presidency of Orrin Knox, appears only in dustjacket copy – the outbreak of World War Three, initially between the USSR and China, further challenges the pacifist- and liberal-ridden republic; but President Knox finally decides to enter the war, at the risk that America's intervention will signal the End of the World. The Throne of Saturn (1971), in which the Russians attempt to sabotage the USA's first manned expedition to Mars, is similar in tone but otherwise unconnected to the series. The later Hills of Summer sequence, comprising The Hill of Summer: A Novel of the Soviet Conquest (1981) and its sequel, The Roads of Earth (1984), breaks no new ground. [JC]

Allen Stuart Drury

born Houston, Texas: 2 September 1918

died San Francisco, California: 2 September 1998

works

series

Advise and Consent

Hill of Summer

individual titles

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