Swayne, Martin

Entry updated 4 November 2024. Tagged: Author.

Pseudonym of Scottish-born UK psychiatrist and author Henry Maurice Dunlop Nicoll (1884-1953), who wrote nonfiction as Maurice Nicoll; in active service during World War One as a Captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps at Gallipoli and elsewhere. TheApes as Human creature in an early story, "Sir Clifford's Gorilla" (24-31 July 1913Strand Magazine), is a hoax. Some later stories – like "The Sleep Beam" (March 1918Strand), in which the eponymousRay stops the Germans from sleeping and thereby they surrender, and "The Whistling" (October 1918Lloyd's Magazine), where it may be that something likeGaia generates a sound that stops war in its tracks – directly respond to his war experiences.

Of Swayne's several books, the nonfictionIn Mesopotamia (1917) depicts the Eastern Front in language evocative of Arabian fable. His onlyScientific Romance,The Blue Germ (1918) is set explicitly in a world that has been experiencing the 1918 Spanish Flu. Well-wishingScientists infect the world with a viralPandemic that turns folk immortal, lethargic and blue; they also almost universally resent being locked into their current lives without much hope of change. After thePsychological effects ofImmortality have played direly upon the cast, the virus proves ultimately to cause a lethargy in its victims which deepens into coma. They then awaken, rejuvenated. The novel ends before the protagonists are able to work out if immortality has survived this trauma, or ifHomo sapiens is doomed to the old mortal treadmill.

Nicoll's initial interest in the work of Carl Jung (1875-1961), which he advocated in his best-known work,Dream Psychology (1917) as Nicoll, was supplanted in his later career by his espousal of the "Fourth Way" metaphysical psychology of P D Ouspensky (1878-1947). [JC/MA]