On This Day: John Brosnan

The film critic and SF writer John Brosnan was born on this day in Perth, Western Australia, in 1947.

The author of James Bond in the Cinema (1972), Movie Magic: The Story of Special Effects in the Cinema (1974), The Horror People (1976) and Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (1978), Brosnan had been writing about cinema for almost a decade before his first SF novel, Skyship, appeared in 1981.  He wrote most of the film entries in the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and continued, on-and-off, to produce film books alongside his SF novels.

John Brosnan’s pen fell silent for a decade after The Opoponax Invasion (1993) but he made a return to SF with the ambitious and innovative Mothership in 2004.  Mothership, set on a huge generation ship whose inhabitants are largely unaware of the true nature of their world, was the first of a projected trilogy. Sadly, John Brosnan died of acute pancreatitis in 2005, leaving the trilogy incomplete.

You can find John Brosnan’s SF via his Author page on the SF Gateway website and read more about him in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.