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Working name of UK editor and author Kathleen Elsie Dick (1915-2001). She edited The Windmill (1946-1948), a literary magazine, as by Edward Lane; and published three anthologies as by Jeremy Scott, the second of them, At Close of Eve: An Anthology of New Curious Stories (anth 1947), being an Original Anthology of some interest. A late work, They: A Sequence of Unease (fixup 1977 chap), resembles thematically and in its experimental structure much of her previous fiction, but is set in a Dystopian Near-Future England where freedom of travel is restricted and cultural activities are actively persecuted. Constructed as a set of closely interlinked stories that mirror one another through the eyes of an unnamed narrator, They describes an Entropic tyranny which sanctions a youth-culture whose yobbish behaviour saps creative values (and middle-class individualism); in relating these levels of meaning, Dick sets up a very moving, though abstract, model of humanistic response to a straitened future. The restrictions on expressive or creative behaviour in Howard Jacobson's J (2014) may reflect Dick's direct influence. Pierrot (1960) is a nonfiction study of its title theme [for Commedia dell'Arte see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. [JC]
born London: 29 July 1915
died Brighton, Sussex: 19 October 2001
works (selected)
nonfiction
works as editor
links
Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 12:37 pm on 12 May 2026.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/dick_kay>