Marghanita Laski

• Updated from MyHeritage Family Trees via father Neville Jonas Laski by SmartCopy: Dec 20 2014, 4:14:05 UTC

UK author, born Esther Pearl Laski (she never used her original given names), between 1958 and 1986 one of the most prolific contributors of material to the Oxford English Dictionary, supplying over 250,000 quotations to help establish historical usage patterns for words to be defined. Though she was not an avowed author of sf, her work often edged snappishly into the fantastic, and she early demonstrated an uncircumscribed sense of good writing in The Patchwork Book: A Pilot Omnibus for Children (anth 1946), whose sf contents included several stories by H Rider Haggard, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne and others. Love on the Super-Tax (1944) borders on sf in its depiction of a wartime transformation of the UK. Tory Heaven: Or, Thunder on the Right (1948) depicts a class-ridden spoof Utopia set in an Alternate-History UK in which the Conservative Party has won the 1945 election. In The Victorian Chaise Longue (1953), two invalids, a century apart, are subjected to an Identity Exchange, though the tale focuses primarily on pregnant Melanie from 1953, who suffers an imprisoning Timeslip into the body of Milly in 1864 where, tubercular, dying, condescended to (see Women in SF), separated from her infant because she is a single mother, and preached to by the man who had impregnated her (see Religion; Sex), she sinks into a desperate torpor, which Laski clearly intends her readers to understand would be the natural reaction of modern women if they were subject to the oppression their sisters endured in earlier times. The underlying horror for women of Timeslip, or for that matter Time Travel of any sort into the past, is here conveyed with singular intensity.

The Offshore Island (written 1954; 1959 chap) is a strongly pacifist sf play set in a UK continuing to suffer the effects of nuclear Holocaust after ten years of World War Three. It stingingly condemns (while linking) the political ruthlessness and sexual prudery of the great powers – the USSR and the USA have agreed to use nuclear weapons only on their weaker allies; the action closes with the Americans about to bomb the farm where the action has taken place, partly in the mistaken belief that incest has taken place there. Two volumes of nonfiction – Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences (1961) and Everyday Ecstasy (1980) – deal sympathetically with categories of experience often used within the genre as agents or symbols of transition to a better world.