The Cthulhu Encryption by Brian M. Stableford

To Challenge Chaos ( 1972), the last example of Stableford's juvenilia, is an overextravagant adventure set on the chaotic hemisphere of a planet that intersects another Dimension short stories associated with this novel are 'The Sun's Tears' (October 1974 Amazing), 'An Offer of Oblivion' (December 1974 Amazing) and 'Captain Fagan Died Alone' (in The DAW Science Fiction Reader, anth 1976, ed Donald A Wollheim).

Based on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the trilogy was dismissed as cynical hackwork (not least by Stableford himself) although the narrative has verve, it clearly does not attempt to pay due homage to its source. The early Dies Irae trilogy – The Days of Glory ( 1971), In the Kingdom of the Beasts ( 1971) and Day of Wrath ( 1971) – mixed these usual space-opera trappings with Sword and Sorcery.

This lack of fit between daring and sometimes arduous speculation, often governed through extrapolations based on the theory of Evolution, has marked his career throughout at its least effective, the attempted marriage of Genre SF idioms and the Scientific Romance gives off a sense of barely concealed impatience with the former.

In these early works, and in most of his subsequent sf novels, Stableford put his knowledge of biology to good use, constructing a long series of outrageous but plausible Ecologies whose intricacy sometimes overwhelmed the Space-Opera formats to which he generally adhered over the first fifteen years of his career, even those tales placed in the relatively stable frame of the Planetary Romance. His first novel, Cradle of the Sun ( 1969 dos), a quest story set in the Far Future, is notable for its colourful imagery The Blind Worm ( 1970 dos), hastily written, is in the same vein. Stableford soon dropped the Brian Craig pseudonym, using it again only in the late 1980s when he undertook to Sharecrop some Ties for a Game-World enterprise (see Games Workshop and listing below). He began his writing career early, collaborating with a schoolfriend, Craig A Mackintosh (writing together as Brian Craig), on his first published story, 'Beyond Time's Aegis' for Science Fantasy #78 in 1965 much expanded, it was eventually published in book form as Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future ( 1994), where the initial Dying Earth ambience is carried to its logical conclusion: everyone dies.

(1948- ) UK academic, critic, translator and author, with a degree in Biology and a doctorate in Sociology, which he taught 1977-1988 before turning to writing full-time.

The Cthulhu Encryption by Brian M. Stableford