Turner, W J
Entry updated 1 December 2024. Tagged: Author, Theatre.
(1889-1946) Australian-born poet, music critic, playwright and author, in the UK from around 1907, in active service during World War One; he is of some sf interest for his Henry Airbubble sequence, comprising Blow for Balloons: Being the First Hemisphere in the History of Henry Airbubble (1935), Henry Airbubble, in Search of a Circumference to His Breath: Being the Second Hemisphere of the History of Henry Airbubble (1936) and The Duchess of Popocatapetl (1939), which focuses for the most part on the fantasticated history of the Balloon-manufacturing firm of Blow and Blow, though the last volume is a Lost Race tale, with a civilization of ancient Greeks discovered in Mexico. Fables, Parables and Plots: Revolutionary Stories for Young and Old (coll 1943) contains some tales with sf elements.
Some of Turner's plays are of genre interest, such as The Man Who Ate the Popomack: A Tragi-Comedy of Love in Four Acts (1922 chap; rev vt The Man Who Ate the Popomack: A Tragi-Comedy of Love in Two Acts 1929 chap), a nightmarish fantasy in which the eponymous impossibly rare and delicious fruit curses its eater with a permanent stink intolerable to others, turning him into a kind of Basilisk. In Landscape of Cytherea: Record of a Journey into a Strange Country (coll of linked poems 1923 chap), the Greek island of Cythera is evoked – though without any shaping articulation – in Dying Earth language. There are as well three book-length poems of uninsistent interest: Marigold: An Idyll of the Sea (1926 chap), featuring Neptune at a sea-side resort and love-death in salt waters; Miss America: Altiora in the Sierra Nevada (1930 chap), a mild Satire of the modern world narrated by a woman who is explicitly depicted as the Statue of Liberty come to life, and who is unusually frank (for the time) about Sex; and Jack and Jill (1934 chap), an ethereal allegorization of the story of an Adam and Eve facing and defeating a mechanized Dystopian future. [JC]
see also: To-day and To-morrow.
Walter James Redfern Turner
born Melbourne, Victoria: 13 October 1889
died Chiswick, Middlesex: 18 November 1946
works
series
Henry Airbubble
- Blow for Balloons: Being the First Hemisphere in the History of Henry Airbubble (London: J M Dent and Sons, 1935) [Henry Airbubble: hb/Edward Bawden]
- Henry Airbubble in Search of a Circumference to His Breath: Being the Second Hemisphere of the History of Henry Airbubble (London: J M Dent and Sons, 1936) [Henry Airbubble: hb/Edward Bawden]
- The Duchess of Popocatapetl (London: J M Dent and Sons, 1939) [Henry Airbubble: hb/Edward Bawden]
individual titles
- The Man Who Ate the Popomack: A Tragi-Comedy of Love in Four Acts (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Basil Blackwell, 1922) [play: chap: in the publisher's British Drama League Library of Modern British Drama series: hb/nonpictorial]
- The Man Who Ate the Popomack: A Tragi-Comedy of Love in Two Acts (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929) [play: chap: rev vt of the above: hb/uncredited]
- Landscape of Cytherea: Record of a Journey into a Strange Country (London: Chatto and Windus, 1923) [coll of linked poems: chap: hb/nonpictorial]
- Marigold: An Idyll of the Sea (London: The Fleuron, 1926) [poem: chap: hb/nonpictorial]
- Miss America: Altiora in the Sierra Nevada (London: Mandrake Press, 1930) [poem: chap: hb/uncredited]
- Jack and Jill (London: J M Dent and Sons, 1934) [poem: chap: hb/nonpictorial]
- Fables, Parables and Plots: Revolutionary Stories for Young and Old (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1943) [coll: hb/uncredited]
nonfiction
- Orpheus; Or, the Music of the Future (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Company, 1926) [nonfiction: chap: in the publisher's To-day and To-morrow series: hb/nonpictorial]
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