John Rankine (born Douglas Rankine Mason 26 September 1918) is a British science fiction author, who has written books as John Rankine and Douglas R. Mason. Rankine was born in Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales and first attended Chester Grammar School and in 1937 went to study English Literature and Experimental Psychology at the University of Manchester, where he was a friend of Anthony Burgess (mentioned in Little Wilson and Big God, AB's autobiography).
We know little of his life until 1966, when his first short stories and novels were published while he was in his mid-forties. The novels have a very 1960s and 1970s feel to them. One theme he worked with was that of a shorter life span, possibly borrowed from William F. Nolan's Logan's Run, but while the background and theme seemed similar, The Resurrection of Roger Diment took the concept in a totally different direction.
Rankine also wrote television novels in the Space: 1999 universe.
Famous quotes containing the word john:
“No such sermons have come to us here out of England, in late years, as those of this preacher,—sermons to kings, and sermons to peasants, and sermons to all intermediate classes. It is in vain that John Bull, or any of his cousins, turns a deaf ear, and pretends not to hear them: nature will not soon be weary of repeating them. There are words less obviously true, more for the ages to hear, perhaps, but none so impossible for this age not to hear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)