Swayne, Martin
Entry updated 29 December 2025. Tagged: Author.
Pseudonym of Scottish-born UK psychiatrist and author Henry Maurice Dunlop Nicoll (1884-1953), who wrote nonfiction as Maurice Nicoll; in active service during World War One as a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps at Gallipoli and elsewhere. The Apes as Human creature in an early story, "Sir Clifford's Gorilla" (24-31 July 1913 Strand Magazine), is a hoax. Some later stories – like "The Sleep Beam" (March 1918 Strand), in which the eponymous Ray stops the Germans from sleeping and thereby they surrender, and "The Whistling" (October 1918 Lloyd's Magazine), where it may be that something like Gaia generates a sound that stops war in its tracks – directly respond to his war experiences. Less directly, but perhaps more consequentially, "A Sense of the Future" (August 1924 Strand) instances the Great War as a predictive model through which to anticipate catastrophic change; the tale itself depicts the automobile (see Transportation; Pollution) as a source of congestion and noise; its disappearance when fossil fuels suddenly run out saves civilization from the brutality attendant upon the triumph of the car. (American Genre SF, for which this theme is alien, did not then yet conspicuously exist.)
Of Swayne's several books, the nonfiction In Mesopotamia (1917) depicts the Eastern Front in language evocative of Arabian fable. His only Scientific Romance, The Blue Germ (1918) is set explicitly in a world that has been experiencing the 1918 Spanish Flu. Well-wishing Scientists infect the world with a viral Pandemic that turns folk immortal, lethargic and blue; they also almost universally resent being locked into their current lives without much hope of change. After the Psychological effects of Immortality have played direly upon the cast, the virus proves ultimately to cause a lethargy in its victims which deepens into coma. They then awaken, rejuvenated. The novel ends before the protagonists are able to work out if immortality has survived this trauma, or if Homo sapiens is doomed to the old mortal treadmill.
Nicoll's initial interest in the work of Carl Jung (1875-1961), which he advocated in his best-known work, Dream Psychology (1917) as Nicoll, was supplanted in his later career by his espousal of the "Fourth Way" metaphysical psychology of P D Ouspensky (1878-1947). [JC/MA]
Henry Maurice Dunlop Nicoll
born Kelso, Scotland: 19 July 1884
died Great Amwell, Hertfordshire: 30 August 1953
works (highly selected)
- The Blue Germ (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918) [hb/uncredited]
nonfiction
- In Mesopotamia (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918) [nonfiction: illus/hb/Martin Swayne]
links
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