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Lewis, Roy

Entry updated 1 July 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1913-1996) UK economist, publisher, author and journalist, editor of New Commonwealth 1953-1954, later with the Economist and The Times, and the author of several political/sociological studies. His Prehistoric SF novel, What We Did to Father (1960; vt The Evolution Man; or, How I Ate My Father 1960; vt The Evolution Man 1963; vt Once Upon an Ice Age 1979), amusingly concentrates human cultural Evolution during the Pleistocene into the hands of one man, the narrator's father, all of whose Discoveries and Inventions are seen in terms of their negative extrapolated effects. Not surprisingly, the parricide plus anthropophagy which ends the book is nothing if not proto-neo-Freudian; see in particular Totem and Taboo (1913). The Extraordinary Reign of King Ludd: An Historical Tease (1990) is an Alternate History story, a Satire on Utopia in which Queen Victoria abdicates in 1849 and International Socialism triumphs. A Walk with Mr Gladstone (1991 chap) is a Gaslight Romance [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] featuring the UK prime minister and other characters, some historical, some Recursive, at the end of the nineteenth century; set around 1850, Cock of the Walk: A Mid-Victorian Rumpus (1995) similarly spoofs its targets, though without any literal fantasy content. [JC]

see also: Origin of Man.

Ernest Michael Roy Lewis

born Felixstowe, Suffolk: 6 November 1913

died London: 9 October 1996

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