E.C. Large

[Declan]

Ernest Charles Large was born in London in 24 June 1902. He worked as a botanist and published three novels. The first two Sugar in the Air and Asleep in the Afternoon have been reissued by the London based Hyphen Press. 'Sugar in the Air' (published in 1937) has been described as, "a notable and original sf novel bitterly describing the conflicts which arise between scientific and commercial interests during the development of an industrial process of artificial photosynthesis." 'Asleep in the Afternoon' is described on the Hyphen Press website as "the novel that the ‘hero’ (ironically conceived) of 'Sugar in the air' then writes. The book has quite a complex structure: a novel about a device that can bring on sleep, the woman who becomes a missionary advocate for this sleep as a social palliative; and the story, told in parallel, of the writer and his wife and young family, living through the making and production of this novel."

In his third novel, "the more adventurous sarcastic fantasy, 'Dawn in Andromeda' (1956), God translocates a representative sample of humanity to an uninhabited planet by way of experiment; the political evolution of the community and the spontaneous regeneration of Religion confound the Utopian schemes of the original group but cannot suppress mechanical progress." As yet this hasn't been reissued.

Hyphen Press has also published About E.C. Large, "a selection of his shorter writings – travel essays, reportage, reveries, reviews, critiques, autobiographical pieces – which reveals the extent of his achievement."