Poitier, Sidney
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Film.
(1927-2022) US-born actor, director, statesman (Bahamian ambassador to Japan 1997-2007) and author, in the Bahamas from infancy; active mainly as an actor in films (where he became world-famous) for about sixty years, beginning with his first credited role in 1950. His movies were all nonfantastic – the nuclear Cold War calamity that climaxes The Bedford Incident (1965) directed by James B Harris was entirely possible in the year of its making. He is of sf interest for his only novel, Montaro Caine (2013), in which a mysterious coin, clutched in the hand of a newborn child, seems inexplicably to be of Extraterrestrial origin. Twenty-six years later, the eponymous protagonist of the tale comes across a coin made from the same substance incorporating some unknown Element, and stamped with an image of the galaxy from an unknown perspective. It is clearly of Alien manufacture. It seems to generate a pacific psychic aura. There is a possibility of First Contact, and perhaps, given Homo sapiens's desperate plight in the ruins of Earth, some element of Uplift. [JC]
Poitier was presented with an honorary knighthood in the Order of the British Empire, minus the privilege of being addressed as Sir, in 1974. [JC]
see also: Percival Everett.
Sidney Poitier
born Miami, Florida: 20 February 1927
died Los Angeles, California: 6 January 2022
works (selected)
- Montaro Caine (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2013) [hb/]
links
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