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Green, Martin

(1927-2010) UK academic and author, in US from 1952. Some of his early studies of the linkages between culture and literature – like "Science and Sensibility" and "Science Fiction" (in Science and the Shabby Curate of Poetry: Essays About the Two Cultures, coll 1964), and Children of the Sun: A Narrative of "Decadence" in England after 1918 (1976; rev 1977) – express a remote interest in Genre SF, as filtered through his Roman Catholic faith, which he himself deemed relevant to mention; The Robinson Crusoe Story (1990) – with studies of various Island tales including James Fenimore Cooper's Mark's Reef; Or, the Crater (1847 3vols), Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island (1874), William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) and Michel Tournier's Friday (1967) (see Robinsonade) and Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of a Major Genre (1991), though its focus remains mainly associational, shows a mind that was increasingly sensitive to the structures underlying genre writing; its comments on Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers (1844), for instance, do that tale some justice.

Green's one attempt at fiction, The Earth Again Redeemed: May 26 to July 1, 1984, on This Earth of Ours and its Alter Ego: A Science Fiction Novel (1977), uneasily posits an Alternate History whose Jonbar Point is the Roman Catholic Church's successful attempt in 1665 to block the development of science, and where a visiting Cyborg from our own Ruined Earth timeline detects clear signs of coming disaster. [JC]

Martin Burgess Green

born Brentford, Middlesex [now London]: 21 September 1927

died Cambridge, Massachusetts: 14 April 2010

works

nonfiction (selected)

links

Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 02:27 am on 27 April 2024.
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