(1932-2011) UK physician (non-practising), entrepreneur, screenwriter and author, whose first work of sf interest was his collaboration, with his brother Hugh Woodhouse, as screenwriter for twenty-two of the twenty-six scripts for the first season of the weekly television puppet series Supercar (1961-1962) in 1961. The next year he began to write scripts for The Avengers (1961-1969), and in 1963 scripted for television Emerald Soup (1963), an sf series involving Ecology, designed for young viewers. Woodhouse is also of sf interest for the Giles Yeoman sequence of Technothrillers beginning with Tree Frog (1966) and ending with Moon Hill (1972), all of them pressing the envelope of the Near Future through tales involving the highly proficient Yeoman in making and/or tracing the effects of Inventions whose deployment affects the course of the Cold War. The Medici historical novels written with Robert Ross (1918- ), beginning with The Medici Guns (1974), might be termed historical technothrillers in which Leonardo Da Vinci's inventions – notably Weapons – help save the city-state of Florence. As an entrepreneur, Woodhouse was involved in the creation of some the first Ebooks, in 1987; his firm, Illumination Publishing, produced a number of titles before 1995. [JC/DRL]
Martin Charlton Woodhouse
born Romford, Essex: 29 August 1932
died 15 May 2011
works
series
Giles Yeoman
- Tree Frog
(London: Heinemann, 1966) [Giles Yeoman: hb/] - Bush Baby (New York: Coward-McCann, 1968) [Giles Yeoman: hb/]
- Mama Doll (London: Heinemann, 1972) [Giles Yeoman: hb/]
- Blue Bone (London: Heinemann, 1973) [Giles Yeoman: hb/]
- Moon Hill (London: Macmillan, 1972) [Giles Yeoman: hb/]
Medici
links
Previous versions of this entry