Green, Martin
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.

(1927-2010) UK academic and author, in US from 1952. Some of his early studies of the linkages between culture and literature – like "Science and Sensibility" and "Science Fiction" (in Science and the Shabby Curate of Poetry: Essays About the Two Cultures, coll 1964), and Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "Decadence" in England after 1918 (1976; rev 1977) – express a remote interest in Genre SF, as filtered through his Roman Catholic faith, which he himself deemed relevant to mention; The Robinson Crusoe Story (1990) – with studies of various Island tales including James Fenimore Cooper's Mark's Reef; Or, the Crater (1847 3vols), Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island (1874), William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) and Michel Tournier's Friday (1967) (see Robinsonade) – and Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of a Major Genre (1991), though its focus remains mainly associational, shows a mind that was increasingly sensitive to the structures underlying genre writing; its comments on Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers (1844), for instance, do that tale some justice.
Green's one attempt at fiction, The Earth Again Redeemed: May 26 to July 1, 1984, on This Earth of Ours and its Alter Ego: A Science Fiction Novel (1977), uneasily posits an Alternate History whose Jonbar Point is the Roman Catholic Church's successful attempt in 1665 to block the development of science, and where a visiting Cyborg from our own Ruined Earth timeline detects clear signs of coming disaster. [JC]
Martin Burgess Green
born Brentford, Middlesex [now London]: 21 September 1927
died Cambridge, Massachusetts: 14 April 2010
works
- The Earth Again Redeemed: May 26 to July 1, 1984, on This Earth of Ours and its Alter Ego: A Science Fiction Novel (New York: Basic Books, 1977) [hb/Rus Anderson]
nonfiction (selected)
- Science and the Shabby Curate of Poetry: Essays About the Two Cultures (London: Longmans, 1964) [nonfiction: coll: hb/Yvonne Skargon]
- Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "Decadence" in England after 1918 (New York: Basic Books, 1976) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "Decadence" in England after 1918 (London: Constable, 1977) [nonfiction: rev of the above: hb/]
- Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (New York: Basic Books, 1979) [nonfiction: hb/Vincent Torre]
- The Triumph of Pierrot: The Commedia dell'Arte and the Modern Imagination (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1988) with John Swan [nonfiction: hb/]
- The Robinson Crusoe Story (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of a Major Genre (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Prophets of a New Age: The Politics of Hope from the Eighteenth Through the Twenty-First Centuries (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992) [nonfiction: hb/Paul Gamarello]
links
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