Johnson, Stanley

Entry updated 31 July 2023. Tagged: Author.

(1940-    ) UK politician, businessman, environmentalist and author. His novels, beginning with Gold Drain (1967), tend to be political/spy thrillers, some of which are sufficiently explorative to be thought of as Technothrillers. The Marburg Virus (1982; vt The Virus 2020) follows the efforts of an epidemiologist to trace an incipient Pandemic back to its source, with a Cold War subplot threatening to take centre stage. In Icecap (1999; vt The Warming 2015), a long embattled chase/quest, from Brazil to Antarctica, pits the protagonist and his allies against international mining consortia in a race to discover a new mineral, falconite; what may have seemed a McGuffin in 1999 seems less of a pretext in later decades, as falconite can be used massively to increase the oceans' carbon-absorbing function (see Climate Change). Kompromat (2017), is a roman à clef Satire on contemporary politics, perhaps insufficiently benefiting from the fact that Johnson is the father of Boris Johnson (1964-    ), UK prime minister from 2019. [JC]

Stanley Patrick Johnson

born Penzance, Cornwall: 18 August 1940

works (selected)

• Gold Drain (London: Heinemann, 1967) [hb/]
• Panther Jones for President (London: Heinemann, 1968) [hb/]
  • The Presidential Plot (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968) [vt of the above: hb/]
• The Doomsday Deposit (New York: E P Dutton, 1979) [hb/]
• The Marburg Virus (London: Heinemann, 1982) [hb/]
  • The Virus (London: Black Spring Press, 2020) [vt of the above: pb/Edwin Smet]
• Icecap (London: Cameron May, 1999) [hb/Cally Browning]
  • The Warming (New York: HarperCollins/Witness Impulse, 2015) [vt of the above: pb/]
• Kompromat (London: Oneworld Publications/Point Blank, 2017) [hb/]

links

• Stanley Johnson
• Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Picture Gallery

previous versions of this entry

• Internet Archive