Stanley Bennett Hough

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Stanley Hough Bennett (born on 25. February 1917 in Preston , Lancashire , died in February 1998 in Falmouth , Cornwall ) was a British writer, best known for under the pseudonym Rex Gordon wrote science fiction novels.

Life

Hough was the son of Simeon Hough, a senior executive, and teacher Eva Hough, nee Bennett. After graduating from Preston Grammar School, he attended Radio Officers College in Preston, where he qualified as a radio operator. From 1936 on he worked as a radio operator on merchant ships, initially as an employee of the Marconi Radio Company , then until 1945 for the International Marine Radio Company . From 1946 to 1951 he ran a boating company and was then a creative writing teacher with the Workers' Educational Association in Cornwall.

In 1938 he married Justa Elisabeth Cecilia Wodschow.

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Hough's first novel Frontier Incident was published in 1951. This and some of the following novels ( Mission in Guemo , 1953, Extinction Bomber , 1956, and Beyond the Eleventh Hour , 1961) appeared under Hough's name and are not designated science fiction, although they are SF elements be used.

The actual SF novels all appeared under the pseudonym Rex Gordon. The first of these six novels was Utopia 239 (1955), in which the protagonists escape a nuclear holocaust by traveling back in time to a future utopia in which peace and sexual liberation are realized and in which advanced technology is used to overcome the consequences of the nuclear disaster .

His best known and most valued work is the novel No Man Friday (1956, published in the US under the title First on Mars ). He takes the Robinson Crusoe motif of stranded in unfamiliar surroundings in a similar way to how the current novel The Martian by Andy Weir . Here Gordon Holder is the only survivor of the crash landing of the first expedition to Mars . Like Robinson Crusoe before him, Holder finds numerous useful things in the shipwreck. But he finally sets out to explore Mars on a kind of self-constructed bicycle. On this trip he meets intelligent Martians, very different from the Martian fantasies of Edgar Rice Burroughs , but they are in no way human-like, but so incomprehensible and strange that they have no interest in technology, humanity in general or Holden's fate Have special. In 1957, he received the Infinity Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year for No Man Friday .

After the success of First on Mars , the US editions of other Hough novels were titled First ... pattern. This includes The Worlds of Eclos (1959), published in the USA as First to the Stars , in which the stranded theme is taken up again, only here it is a man and a woman who are on a strange world with no prospect of one Finding a return and being faced with the task of establishing a future for yourself and your possible descendants. This task is complicated by the fact that the two of them have a deep dislike for each other.

The Time Factor (1962), in the USA as First Through Time , deals again with the time travel topic, whereby the aim here is not to escape a current catastrophe into the future, but to avert a future catastrophe.

Hough's SF novels, and even more so the other novels, are largely forgotten today. Three novels have been published in German, two of which are presumably abridged booklet editions. In addition to his science fiction and other fiction novels, Hough also wrote several budget travel guides and a creative writing textbook.

From 1974 to 1977 six of the Kommissar X magazine novels or paperbacks were published by Pabel-Verlag under the author's name Rex Gordon . But this is a pseudonym of the publisher Hans E. Ködelpeter and not Hough.

bibliography

Novels
  • Frontier Incident (1951)
  • Moment of Decision (1952)
  • Mission in Guemo (1953)
  • Sea Struck (1953, also as Sea to Eden , 1954, as Bennett Stanley)
  • The Seas South (1953)
  • The Alscott Experiment (1954, as Bennett Stanley)
  • The Primitives (1954)
  • Utopia 239 (1955, as Rex Gordon)
  • Extinction Bomber (1956)
  • Government Contract (1956, as Bennett Stanley)
  • No Man Friday (1956, also as First on Mars , 1957, as Rex Gordon)
    • German: Der Mars-Robinson. Moewig (Terra special volume # 79), 1964.
  • The Bronze Perseus (1959)
  • The Worlds of Eclos (1959, also as First to the Stars , as Rex Gordon)
    • English: Lost in the cosmos. Moewig (Terra special volume # 69), 1963.
  • Beyond the Eleventh Hour (1961)
  • The Time Factor (1962, also as First Through Time , as Rex Gordon)
    • German: The time factor. Goldmann's Space Paperback # 069, 1966.
  • Dear Daughter Dead (1965)
  • Utopia Minus X (1966, also as The Paw of God , 1967, as Rex Gordon)
  • Sweet Sister Seduced (1968)
  • The Yellow Fraction (1969, as Rex Gordon)
  • Fear Fortune, Father (1974)
Non-fiction
  • A Pound a Day Inclusive: The Modern Way to Holiday Travel (1957)
  • Expedition Everyman: Your Way on Your Income to All the Desirable Places of Europe (1959)
  • Expedition Everyman (1964)
  • Where? An Independent Report on Holiday Resorts in Britain and the Continent (1964)
  • Creative Writing: A Handbook for Students, Tutors and Education Authorities (1983)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to Don D'Ammassa: Gordon, Rex . In: Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers. Chicago 1991, p. 326 and Robert Reginald: Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature. Detroit 1979, p. 917. The exact price and who the awarding institution was could not be clarified.
  2. ^ The relevant titles of the paperback series are: 515 The Mafia plot (1974); 528 coffin nails with skulls (1975); 532 In the crosshairs of the killer (1975); 538 Celia and the Kidnappers (1976); 546 A Shot in the Red (1976); 559 The Airplane Gang (1977). See Ingo Löchel: Hans E. Ködelpeter on Zauberspiegel-online , accessed on March 2, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Hough, Stanley Bennett
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gordon, Rex (pseudonym); Hough, SB (alternative spelling); Stanley, Bennett (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 25, 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Preston , Lancashire
DATE OF DEATH February 1998
Place of death Falmouth , Cornwall