Phelps, Gilbert
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1915-1993) UK broadcaster and author who spent much of his career in the BBC, as a radio producer and in other roles between 1945 and 1960. His first story, "I Have Lived a Hundred Years" in The Faber Book of West Country Stories (anth 1951), prefigured the thematic material of his first sf novel, The Centenarians (1958), whose protagonists attempt – in the end unsuccessfully – to translate their eminence in the arts and sciences into lives safely prolonged beyond World War Three. The Winter People (1963), a very late example of the Lost-Race tale, describes a tribe in the Andes which has survived at peace for centuries through hibernation and other adaptations to extreme circumstances, including progress. Tenants of the House (1971) is a good-tempered Fabulation in which a labyrinthine house and its landlord are conflated. [JC]
see also: Anthropology.
Gilbert Henry Phelps Jr
born Gloucester, Gloucestershire: 3 January 1915
died Finstock, Oxfordshire: 15 June 1993
works
- The Centenarians: A Fable (London: Heinemann, 1958) [hb/Rosalind Hoyte]
- The Winter People (London: The Bodley Head, 1963) [hb/]
- Tenants of the House (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1971) [hb/Tony Bulley]
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