McConnell, Frank
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Critic.
(1942-1999) US academic and critic, a professor of English at Northwestern University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, who wrote extensively on sf and many other subjects; his writings included a regular media column for Commonweal magazine and four detective novels, and he served four times on the committee that awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His work in the genre included editing The Time Machine/The War of the Worlds: A Critical Edition (omni 1977) by H G Wells, an accomplishment diminished because, as he later acknowledged, he employed a corrupt text of The War of the Worlds (1895). He examined Wells's work at greater length in The Science Fiction of H G Wells (1981). His essays on the genre, always witty and insightful, were posthumously collected as The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science: Collected Essays on SF Storytelling and the Gnostic Imagination (coll 2009) edited by Gary Westfahl. [DRL/GW]
Francis DeMay McConnell
born Louisville, Kentucky: 20 May 1942
died Santa Barbara, California: 17 January 1999
works (highly selected)
- The Science Fiction of H G Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) [nonfiction: hb/Kelly Freas]
- The Science of Fiction and the Fiction of Science: Collected Essays on SF Storytelling and the Gnostic Imagination (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Publishers, 2009) [nonfiction: coll: edited by Gary Westfahl: foreword by Neil Gaiman: pb/Photodisc]
works as editor
- H G Wells. The Time Machine/The War of the Worlds: A Critical Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) [omni of the indicated titles: an expurgated 1951 school edition of The War of the Worlds was unfortunately chosen as copy text: pb/]
links
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