Dudbroke
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
Or Montague Dudbroke, narrator of the one novel attributed to this name. Pseudonym of an unidentified UK author (? -? ) – E F Bleiler in Science Fiction: The Early Years (dated 1990 but 1991) suggests that the author may have been a biologist – whose The Prots: A Weird Romance (1903) uncannily prefigures Karel Čapek's The War with the Newts (1935), though it is very unlikely that the Czech author saw an English title of this obscurity. A biologist successfully creates in the laboratory a protoplasmic form of life (see Evolution); these "Prots" evolve with extreme rapidity, and are transferred to a South Pacific Island where they breed with threatening rapidity, growing into smoothish four-feet high creatures with bulging eyes. At this point – in contrast to the later triumph of the Čapek newts – a melodramatic denouement wipes them out. [JC]
"Montague Dudbroke"
born
died [the author was alive in 1908]
works
- The Prots: A Weird Romance (London: S H Bousfield and Co, 1903) [illus/hb/Phil Ebbutt]
links
previous versions of this entry