Bax, Martin
Entry updated 29 April 2024. Tagged: Author, Editor.
(1933-2024) UK doctor of medicine, publisher, editor and author. His life can be separated into two careers. As an innovative paediatrician, he was a significant figure within the National Health Service of Great Britain, authoring medical texts and editing from 1978 until 2003 the journal Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology. As a literary figure, he was co-founder in 1959 and long-time editor (until his retirement in 2013) of the literary magazine Ambit, for which J G Ballard served as a fiction editor, and to which he contributed stories. "You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe" (1966 Ambit 27) expectably aroused the ire of a Conservative MP.
In Bax's first novel, The Hospital Ship (1976), a narrative clearly evocative of the classical tale of the Narrenschiff or Ship of Fools, a group of experimental doctors sail the world's oceans after a Holocaust, applying triage techniques to the surreal world they find: curing those they can cure, stashing in the ship's mortuary those they definitely cannot, and applying a variety of techniques, many sexual, to the in-betweens; Ballard's influence is readily detectable. The imaginary Fantastic Voyages that shape the protagonist's liminal reveries in Love on the Borders (2006) hint at sojourns in Fantastika, but make no formal entrance. Some of the tales assembled in Memoirs of a Gone World (coll 2010) convey Memes of bad omen from similar purlieux. [JC]
Martin Charles Owen Bax
born Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: 13 August 1933
died London: 24 March 2024
works (selected)
- The Hospital Ship (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976) [hb/Michael Foreman]
- Love on the Borders (Bridgend, Wales: Seren, 2006) [pb/]
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