(1912-2010) Irish businessman, journalist and author whose first novel, The Landslide (1943), is of sf interest, being a PARALLEL-WORLD fantasy of some complexity in which primeval eggs, exposed by the titular event, begin to hatch into dragons; his second sf novel, Monkeyface (1948), movingly explores the familiar territory of the self-aware ape (> APES AS HUMAN); his third, The Burnaby Experiments: An Account of the Life and Work of John Burnaby and Marcus Brownlow (1952), examines "psychic translocation", a kind of TELEPORTATION via dreams. For the next fifteen years he concentrated on his family firm, McCausland's, which he had joined in the 1930s.
There is at this point a confusion in the printed record. It seems to be the case that the name Stephen Gilbert is not pseudonymous, and that Gilbert continued a well-attested life and career in the UK, including his role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Northern Ireland, of which he was a founding member (a full obituary appears in The Independent for 2 July 2010). But the next novel published under his name, Ratman's Notebooks (1968; vt Willard 1969 US), which The Independent cites as by him, has been ascribed to Northern Ireland-born writer Gilbert Alexander Ralston (1912-1999), writing as Stephen Gilbert. What is not in doubt is that Ralston wrote under his own name the screenplay for Willard (1971), the film of the 1968 novel; and that in the 1970s he wrote several Westerns, also under his own name. Ralston seems, however, to have lived in the US for many years, and to have been active in the film industry. It is fairly likely, therefore, that two separate writers have been confused, partly because of Willard, and partly because they were both born in County Down, Northern Ireland, in 1912. There remains, all the same, a possibility that the real Stephen Gilbert ceased writing in 1952, and that the real Gilbert Ralston wrote Ratman's Notebooks as by Gilbert. The confusion awaits clarification. The novel, in any case, is fundamentally a horror tale (> HORROR IN SF); Ratman conceives a special relationship with rats, comes precariously to dominate and commune with them, and leads their vengeful incursions on the world at large; but there is a comeuppance as they gain INTELLIGENCE.
Stephen Gilbert – whether real, or both real and pseudonymous, or simply a pseudonym – should not be confused with the painter Stephen Gilbert (1910-2007), the mystery writer Michael Gilbert (1912-2006), or the playwright, theatre critic and journalist W Stephen Gilbert. [JC]
born Newcastle, County Down, Northern Ireland: 22 July 1912
died Whiteabbey, Northern Ireland: 23 June 2010