Richard Aldington (1892-1962)

Оriginal name EDWARD GODFREE ALDINGTON, poet, novelist, critic, and biographer who wrote searingly and sometimes irascibly of what he considered to be hypocrisy in modern industrialized civilization.

Educated at Dover College and London University, he early attracted attention through his volumes of Imagist verse. In 1913 he married Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), the U.S. Imagist poet. His best and best known novel, Death of a Hero (1929), to which All Men Are Enemies (1933) was a sequel, reflected the disillusionment of a generation that had fought through World War I. In The Colonel's Daughter (1931) he satirized sham gentility and literary preciousness so outspokenly that two lending libraries refused to handle the novel. In his long poems A Dream in the Luxembourg (1930) and A Fool i' the Forest (1925) he inveighed against the mechanization of modern man more lyrically, with bittersweet romanticism, and his translations from an­cient Greek and Latin poets revealed his love for earlier civilizations.

His critical works, uneven in quality, included Literary Studies (1924) and French Studies (1925) and biographies of Voltaire, D.H. Law­rence, Norman Douglas, and Wellington. Lawrence of Arabia (1955), one of his last books, was an uncompromising attack on T.E. Law­rence. Late in life Aldington became a best-seller in the U.S.S.R., where he celebrated his 70th birthday. A Passionate Pilgrim: Letters to Alan Bird from Richard Aldington, 1949-1962 was published in 1975.

ISAAC ASIMOV (1920-1992)

American author and biochemist, a highly successful and prolific writer of science fiction and of science books for the layperson. He published about 500 volumes.

Asimov was brought to the United States at the age of three. He grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., graduating from Columbia University in 1939 and taking a Ph.D. there in 1948. He then joined the faculty of Boston University, with which he remained associated thereafter.

Asimov began contributing stories to science-fiction magazines in 1939 and in 1950 published his first book, Pebble in the Sky. His trilogy of novels, Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation (1951-53), which recounts the collapse and rebirth of a vast interstellar empire in the universe of the future, is his most famous work of science fiction. In the short-story collection I, Robot (1950), he developed a set of ethics for robots and intelligent machines that greatly influenced other writers' treatment of the subject. His other novels and collections of stories included The Stars, like Dust (1951), The Currents of Space (1952), The Caves of Steel (1954), The Naked Sun (1957), Earth Is Room Enough (1957), Foundation's Edge (1982), and The Robots of Dawn (1983). His " Nightfall " (1941) is thought by many to be the finest science-fiction short story ever written. Among Asimov's books on various topics in science, written with lucidity and humour, are The Chemicals of Life (1954), Inside the Atom (1956), The World of Nitrogen (1958), Life and Energy (1962), The Human Brain (1964), The Neutrino (1966), Science, Numbers and I (1968), Our World in Space (1974), and Views of the Universe (1981). He also published two volumes of autobiography.

JAMES GRAHAM BALLARD (b. 1930)

J.G. Ballard is a British writer. He was a prominent member of the New Wave in science fiction. His best known books are the controversial Crash, and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, both of which have been adapted to film.

J.G. Ballard used his own childhood in a Japanese prison camp as the basis for his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun. As a young man he settled in Shepperton, England and, after studying medicine, began a career as a writer. Though Empire of the Sun is a fairly mainstream story, Ballard's other books are not easily classified; some call them science fiction, others simply creepy or disturbing. They generally combine sex, surgery and technology as part of a psychoanalytical depiction of the modern human condition. Ballard is also the author of Crash (1973), which was made into a 1996 movie starring Holly Hunter and James Spader. (Empire of the Sun had already been made into a movie in 1987, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring a young Christian Bale as the Ballard-like boy, Jim.) Ballard's other books include The Crystal World (1966), High-rise (1975), The Day of Creation (1987) and Cocaine Nights (1996).

The adjective "Ballardian", defined as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in JG Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psycho­logical effects of technological, social or environmental develop­ments", has been included in the Collins English Dictionary.

Ballard's fiction is sophisticated, often bizarre, and a constant challenge to the cognitive and aesthetic preconceptions of his readers. As Martin Amis has written: "Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different – a disused – part of the reader's brain." Because of this tendency to upset readers in order to enlighten them, Ballard does not enjoy a mass-market following, but he is recognized by critics as one of the UK's most prominent writers.

RAY DOUGLAS BRADBURY (b. 1920)

American author of science-fiction short stories and novels, nostalgic tales, poetry, radio drama, and television and motion-picture scre­enplays. His highly imaginative science-fiction stories blended social criticism with an awareness of the hazards of runaway technology.

Bradbury published his first story in 1940 and was soon contributing widely to magazines; his stories have been published in more than 700 anthologies. His first book of short stories, Dark Carnival (1947), was followed by The Martian Chronicles (1950; motion picture 1966; television miniseries 1980), generally accounted a science-fiction classic in its depiction of materialistic Earthmen exploiting and corrupting an idyllic Martian civilization. Bradbury's other important short-story collections include The Illustrated Man (1951), The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953), Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The October Country (1955), A Medicine for Melancholy (1959 ), The Machineries of Joy (1964), and I Sing the Body Electric! (1969). His novels include Dandelion Wine (1957) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). He wrote stage plays and several screenplays, including Moby Dick (1956; in collaboration with John Huston). In the 1970s Bradbury wrote several volumes of poetry, and in the 1970s and 80s he concentrated on writing children's stories and crime fiction.

AGATHA CHRISTIE (1891-1976)

English detective novelist and playwright whose books have sold more than 100,000,000 copies.

Educated at home by her mother, she began writing detective fiction while working as a nurse during World War I. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), introduced Hercule Poirot, her eccentric and egotistic Belgian detective, who reappeared in about 25 novels and many shorter stories before returning to Styles, where in Curtain (1975) he died. The elderly spinster Miss Jane Marple, her other principal detective figure, first appeared in Murder at the Vicarage (1930). Christie's first major recognition came with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), which was followed by some 75 novels that usually made best-seller lists and were serialized in popular magazines in England and the United States. Her plays include The Mousetrap (1952), which set a world record for the longest continuous run at one theatre (8,862 performances – more than 21 years – at the Ambassadors Theatre, London) and then moved to another theatre; and Witness for the Prosecution (1953), which, like many of her works, was adapted into a very successful film (1958). Other notable film adaptations include Murder on the Orient Express (1934; 1974) and Death on the Nile (1937; 1978).

Agatha Christie domesticated murder perhaps no other author had done before or since and transformed it into nothing more perilous than an intrigue game of chess or a satisfactory crossword puzzle. All her life she abhorred violence and blood and constantly confessed that she had no knowledge of the usual implements used for murder. "I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides poisons are neat and clean and really exciting... I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body in the face. It is the means that I am interested in. I do not usually describe the end, which is often a corpse."

Her first marriage, to Colonel Archibald Christie, ended in divorce in 1928. After her marriage in 1930 to the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, she spent several months each year on expeditions in Iraq and Syria with him. She also wrote romantic, nondetective novels, such as Absent in the Spring (1944), under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Her Autobiography (1977) appeared posthumously. She was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1971.