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(1869-1954) US baseball player (a pitcher very briefly in the National Baseball League in 1890), opponent of the Ku Klux Klan (he attempted to break the colour bar in professional baseball), aviator and businessman (founder of Lawson Aircraft Company in 1919), inventor (mainly of the Pseudoscience Lawsonomy, a unified field principle that explains physics in terms of "zig-zag and swirl" and other principles: "Suction is the female of movement and Pressure is the male of movement", for instance), and author of an sf novel, Born Again (1904), whose protagonist, shipwrecked on a mysterious Island, discovers in an Underground City a sleeping giantess – the last of a race of Supermen whose demise in a vast Disaster had caused the Great Flood – whom he awakens with a kiss. Her Psi Powers allow her to explain to him that Homo sapiens is a subsequent race of apes (see Apes as Human), and to offer Utopian solutions to the world's ailments. [JC]
born London: 24 March 1869
died San Antonio, Texas: 29 November 1954
works (fiction only)
links
Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 12:22 pm on 7 October 2026.
<https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/lawson_alfred_william>