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Lymington, John

Pseudonym of UK author John Newton Chance (1911-1983), prolific author from 1935 under his own name, most of this output being detective-thrillers; as John Drummond he wrote numerous Sexton Blake (see Sexton Blake Library) tales between 1944 and 1955, and as Desmond Reid (a House Name) his only sf contribution to that series, Anger at World's End (1963). His first sale, however, was a short story for BBC Radio, which ran several of his stories and plays before he moved to novels and story papers in 1933. His first novels of genre interest were the Bunst sequence of juvenile tales (see Children's SF), comprising The Black Ghost (1947) as by David C Newton and The Dangerous Road (1948) as by David C Newton; the remaining titles – Bunst and the Brown Voice (1950), Bunst the Bold (1950), Bunst and the Secret Six (1951) and Bunst and the Flying Eye (1953) – being published under his own name. Sf elements pervade the series, though they are casually deployed. A later sf novel, The Light Benders (1968), as by Jonathan Chance, is unremarkable.

Chance's first novel as Lymington, later made into a film (see The Night of the Big Heat), was The Night of the Big Heat (1959), about an alien Invasion, and much of his subsequent work constituted a set of variations on the theme of alien or natural menace to Earth, though not at the imaginative level of his predecessors (and likely models), John Wyndham and John Christopher. Lymington's use of genuine science is minimal and most of his books (many of which feature Monsters) operate at the level of B-grade sf/horror films (see Horror in SF), where menace strikes unexpectedly in a lazy, rural setting, evoking a constant Paranoia. Some of the better titles of this sort are The Giant Stumbles (1960), Froomb! (1964) – probably his best single novel of societal collapse (the title is an acronym for "fluid's running out of my brakes") – The Green Drift (1965), Ten Million Years to Friday (1967) and Give Daddy the Knife, Darling (1969). He wrote with some verve but little style, and there are many Clichés of character. His short stories, collected in The Night Spiders (coll 1964), are routine. It might be said that Lymington's main deficiency as a writer of sf was a lack of interest in the forward thrust of the genre; he was, at heart, a Horror writer. [JC/PN]

John Newton Chance

born London: 21 April 1911

died Liskeard, Cornwall: 3 August 1983

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Entry from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2011-current) edited by John Clute and David Langford.
Accessed 22:29 pm on 18 September 2024.
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