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Wallace, Irving

Entry updated 28 August 2023. Tagged: Author.

(1916-1990) US screenwriter and author, active from before World War Two with a series of bestselling novels beginning with The Chapman Report (1961). His first of several works of sf interest is The Three Sirens (1963), a tale with Lost Race implications set in an unknown Polynesian Island whose inhabitants are descendants of an Englishman. His embrace of the mores of those he meets (see Sex) has extravagant consequences in the twentieth century, after a team of Anthropologists arrives. In The Man (1964), a Black man becomes President of the United States through a series of accidents; it was filmed as The Man (1972) written by Rod Serling and directed by Joseph Sargent. The fifth Gospel unearthed in The Word (1972) may have been forged. The R Document (1976) is a Near Future politico-legal thriller featuring a plot – initiated by the head of the FBI – to introduce a 35th Amendment to the US Constitution which would suspend and override the Bill of Rights during any national domestic crisis, laying the groundwork for a coup d'état and subsequent dictatorship; this plot is ultimately defeated. The Discovery of the Fountain of Youth (see Immortality) in The Pigeon Project (1979) generates a chase plot that climaxes in Venice with a Technothriller-style ending: the formula is destroyed. The Virgin Mary is predicted to manifest herself in Lourdes, in The Miracle (1984), with the resulting stampede of the rich and famous seeking cures generating the plot, which is both improbable and enjoyably rambunctious, in line with all of Irving's work. [JC]

Irving Wallace

born Chicago, Illinois: 19 March 1916

died Los Angeles, California: 29 June 1990

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