Duffy, Maureen
Entry updated 8 June 2026. Tagged: Author.
(1933-2026) UK author, active from around 1950, several of whose books focused on London, including Capital (1975), a complex set of era-switching meditations – including a Neanderthal man's thoughts about the future – on the deep mythos of the city. The novel influenced Michael Moorcock's Mother London (1988) (as the author acknowledged clearly), and similar later works by Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and John Lanchester. Scarborough Fear (1982) as by D M Cayer is a supernatural fiction. In general Duffy's novels tend to explore marginalized figures, many of them women viewed from a Feminist angle, as in Alchemy (2004), whose contemporary protagonist becomes psychically entwined in a case of seventeenth-century witchcraft. The male protagonists of The Orpheus Trail (2009) suffer similar immersions in worlds whose beat is chthonic.
Of more sf interest, the protagonist of Gor Saga (1981; vt First Born 2024) – televised as First Born in 1988 – is the child of a gorilla mother fertilized by human semen (see Apes as Human), who grows into articulate adulthood in an alienating UK. In Times Like These (2013), set in the Near Future up to about 2030, portrays an independent Scotland, a demoralized England, and a culture that has begun to lose its tolerance of "deviant" behaviour.
Duffy's nonfictional The Erotic World of Faery (1972) takes a Freudian view of the development of the topos of Faerie from medieval times to the present. The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn 1640-89 (1977) is an engaged study of Aphra Behn. [JC]
see also: Anthropology; Genetic Engineering; Women SF Writers.
Maureen Patricia Duffy
born Worthing, Sussex: 21 October 1933
died London: 27 May 2026
works (selected)
- Gor Saga (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981) [hb/nonpictorial]
- First Born (London: Gollancz, 2024) [vt of the above: in the Gollancz SF Masterworks series: pb/Yuriy Nedopekin]
- Scarborough Fear (London: MacDonald and Company, 1982) as by D M Cayer [hb/uncredited]
- Alchemy (London: Fourth Estate, 2004) [pb/uncredited]
- The Orpheus Trail (London: Arcadia Books, 2009) [pb/James Nunn]
- In Times Like These (London: Jonathan Clowes, 2013) [pb/Liz Mathews]
nonfiction
- The Erotic World of Faery (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972) [nonfiction: hb/Peter Rivers]
- The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn 1640-89 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977) [nonfiction: Aphra Behn: hb/from Peter Lely]
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