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Llewellyn, Alun

Entry updated 6 November 2023. Tagged: Author.

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(1903-1988) UK lawyer and author active in several genres, whose nonfiction generally focuses on Wales, as with his first known publication, "The Emperor of Britain": King Arthur and his Relation to Wales (lecture delivered 10 December 1930; 1930 chap). Work of some interest includes the political Satires assembled in Confound Their Politics (coll 1934), each tale set in a different imaginary country, and the amused faux-naif examination of London contained in Jubilee John: Being the Record of a Pilgrim's Progress Through an Arabian Night (1939). Of direct sf interest is The Strange Invaders (1934), a Scientific Romance that, like John Collier's Tom's A-Cold (1933), builds upon the deeply felt elegiac mood of Richard Jefferies's After London; or, Wild England (1885). Set in the moderately distant future where, long after a world war had nearly destroyed all life, incremental Climate Change has created a new ice age, The Strange Invaders depicts a tribal society in what was once the USSR, where the Stalinist Dystopia of the Communist twentieth century has been transmogrified into a Religion based on a Devolution of Christianity; Marx, Lenin and Stalin are revered as saints. Tartars soon drift northwards in flight from some horror inherent to this Ruined Earth, but are massacred, soon to be succeeded by an Invasion of the horde of inherently Alien giant lizards from which they had been fleeing. This new race – despite a last-ditch defence of their enclave by the surviving humans – is clearly destined to take over the evolutionary niche that Homo sapiens is no longer capable of occupying. The style of the tale is intensely worked, harsh, elated. [JC]

see also: Disaster.

David William Alun Llewellyn

born Lewisham [now London]: 17 April 1903

died Dublin, Ireland: 27 November 1988

works (selected)

nonfiction

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