Lunan, Duncan
Entry updated 13 January 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1945- ) Scottish author, generally of nonfiction books and articles in popular science, with a concentration on space exploration and related topics; titles [for subtitles see Checklist] include Interstellar Contact (1974), Man and the Stars (1974), New Worlds for Old (1979) and Man and the Planets (1983). The second of these presented and supported the hypothesis that historical radio anomalies might best be accounted for in terms of a Robot probe from an Alien culture parked at one of the Earth-Moon system's Lagrange Points; the anomalies have now been otherwise explained, but Lunan's exposition of his case, based on sound science rather than Pseudoscience, does not lack integrity. As an sf writer, Lunan began publishing stories with "Renaissance" for the Glasgow University Magazine in 1964, although his first fully professional sale, "The Moon of Thin Reality", did not appear until June 1970 in Galaxy. In Starfield: Science Fiction by Scottish Writers (anth 1989) Lunan demonstrated some of the range of sf currently being written in his home country. Children from the Sky: A Speculative Treatment of a Medieval Mystery – The Green Children of Woolpit (2012) examines the Green Child legend [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] in terms of Alien intervention and contact, postulating that the human children were raised by extraterrestrials in a kind of Zoo environment on Mars. [JC/JGr/DRL]
Duncan Alasdair Lunan
born Edinburgh, Scotland: 24 October 1945
works
nonfiction
- Man and the Stars: Contact & Communication with other Intelligence (London: Souvenir Press, 1974) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Interstellar Contact: Communication with Other Intelligence in the Universe (Chicago, Illinois: Henery Regnery, 1974) [nonfiction: vt of the above without colour artwork: hb/]
- The Mysterious Signals from Outer Space (New York: Bantam, 1977) [nonfiction: vt of the above: pb/]
- New Worlds for Old (Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles/Westbridge Books, 1979) [nonfiction: hb/Ed Buckley]
- Man and the Planets: The Resources of the Solar System (Bath, Avon: Ashgrove Press, 1983) [nonfiction: hb/Gavin Roberts]
- Children from the Sky: A Speculative Treatment of a Medieval Mystery – The Green Children of Woolpit (London: Mutus Liber, 2012) [nonfiction: pb/Sydney Jordan]
- From the Moon to the Stars (place not given: Other Side Books, 2019) [coll: pb/]
works as editor
- Starfield: Science Fiction by Scottish Writers (Kirkwall, Orkney: The Orkney Press, 1989) [anth: hb/Sydney Jordan]
links
previous versions of this entry