Tuesday, January 20, 2009

SF authors born 1884-1893: 1893

1. Eimar O'Duffy

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Eimar O'Duffy

Eimar O'Duffy was an Irish satirist, poet, playwright, and novelist, and was the author of the Cuanduine trilogy and Life and Money.

British engineer C. H. Douglas (1879–1952) launched the Social Credit movement when he wrote a book by that name in 1924. According to Douglas, the true purpose of production is consumption, and production must serve the genuine, freely expressed interests of consumers. Each citizen is to have a beneficial, not direct, inheritance in the communal capital conferred by complete and dynamic access to the fruits of industry assured by the National Dividend and Compensated Price. The concept of economic democracy through Social Credit had immediate appeal in literary circles. Names associated with Social Credit include Charlie Chaplin, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, Storm Jameson, Eimar O'Duffy, Sybil Thorndyke, Bonamy Dobrée, Eric de Maré and the American publisher James Laughlin. In 1933 O'Duffy published Asses in Clover, a science fiction fantasy exploration of Social Credit themes. His Social Credit economics book Life and Money: Being a Critical Examination of the Principles and Practice of Orthodox Economics with A Practical Scheme to End the Muddle it has made of our Civilisation, was endorsed by Douglas.

Eimar O'Duffy's Aloysius O'Kennedy (or Cuanduine) sequence "makes satirical points about contemporary civilization... by assessing modern life through the eyes of characters who are, or claim to be, figures of Irish legend. The second volume mounts its comparatively sustained satire through its heroes' voyage to a utopia where everything is, not unusually, inverted. The third, set like the first in Ireland after 1950, musters the forces of legend to defeat US capitalism in the form of the egregious King Goshawk." (Encyclopedia of SF)

* King Goshawk and the Birds (1926)

* The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1929)

* Asses in Clover (1933)

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