A. Bertram Chandler

Brief biography

A. Bertram Chandler was born in Aldershot, with the the United Kingdom. He was officer of the Merchant navy, sailing with the four corners of the world on sailing ships as on transport of troop. He emigrated in Australia in 1956, taking Australian nationality quickly. It ordered various vessels of the merchant marine of Australia and New Zealand and was the last commander of the Australian Porte-avions, HMAS Melbourne , the law providing that an officer is on his board whereas the vessel waited the port to be sent in China to be dismounted.

During its career, it signed more than 40 novels and nearly 200 news and other texts short. It is especially known for its series of novels putting in scene the character of John Grimes and for its cycle of the Monde of Rim ( the Rim World series ), characterized by an environment and naval sets of themes, trademark of the author. It the USA of its maritime knowledge to write fictions putting in scene futuristic spaceships. It receipt the price Ditmar (an Australian price of literature rewarding works for science fiction) with four recoveries: for its news The Bitter Pill (in 1971) and for three of its novels, False Fatherland (in 1969), The Bitter Pill (romantic adaptation of the news of the same name in 1975) and The Big Black Mark (in 1976).

Work and set of themes

Descriptions of the life on board spaceships and the relations between the members of a crew on mission signed by Chandler are characterized by a feeling of realism seldom read in other authors and come rather logically from its experiment in the merchant navy. The principal hero of Chandler, Grimes, is a enthusiastic sailor which saw occasional adventures on the seas of various planets. In its books, Chandler often refers to an obsolete type of spaceships, propelled magnetically, known under the name of Gaussjammer , that the older generations described in its texts remember with nostalgia. It is about an obvious reference to the Windjammer (technical term of the merchant navy indicating a type of large Voilier).

Less-known the The Deep Reaches off Space (1964) contains obvious traces of autobiography, since its principal protagonist is a sailor become writer of science fiction which travels in the future and uses of its nautical knowledge to save a group of human lost on a hostile planet.

The Australian nationality of Chandler day also a role in its writings, where its country of adoption becomes a major power in a futuristic world, carrying out world space exploration and installing colonies on various remote planets. Drongo Kane, a captain pirates who is the malicious one of service in several of his books, comes from the planet Austral and other books also mention the planet Australis , located in another part of the galaxy.

Its history The Mountain Movers (which belongs to the first texts putting in scene John Grimes) contains the song of the future adventurers of the Australian space, sung on the air of Waltzing Matilda . The first verse known as:

" When the Jolly Jumbuk lifted from Port Woomera/Out and away for Altair Three/Glad were we all to KIS the tired old Earth goodbye/Who' L like a-sailing in Jumbuk with me? "

The colonists who sing this anthem end up making revive one of the blackest pages of the Australian history by depriving the natives of the Olgana planets - humanoïdes described like resembling the indigenous Australian - their grounds. As that is meant in the climax of the history, the resemblance is not fortuitous.

Chandler made call of many times with the set of themes of the parallel universes in its career of writer, with for example of many adventures of Grimes putting in scene characters briefly failing in a " mauvaise" reality. In The Dark Dimensions , which is held in a place of space where several realities cross, Grimes (the commander of the cycle of the Monde of Rim ), meets not only another John Grimes which is always member of the Security service of the Federation, but also of the characters of the cycle of the Impératrice Irene ( Empress Irene ) and Dominic Flandry, one of the hero created by Poul Anderson.

In its ironic news The Cage , a band of shipwrecked men wandering naked in the remote jungles of a planet are captured by the extraterrestrial ones and are placed in a zoo (some are even dissected), failing in all their attempts to prove their intelligence. Resigning itself to their captivity, they adopt a small local rodent like pet and locks up it in their turn in a small cage. Seeing that, their geôliers excuse themselves and repatriate them on Earth. It seems indeed that only the intelligent creatures lock up other creatures in cages…

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