Lionel Fanthorpe

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Cover of Fortean Times issue 107 (February 1998), featuring Lionel Fanthorpe

The Reverend Robert Lionel Fanthorpe is, among other things, a priest and entertainer. He was born in Dereham, Norfolk in the UK, and has at various times worked as a journalist, teacher, television presenter, author and lecturer. He currently lives in Roath, Cardiff, South Wales, UK and is married to Patricia Fanthorpe.

1 Achievements
2 Writing
3 Further reading
4 External links

[edit] Achievements

Amongst Fanthorpe’s accomplishments are:

Being a fully ordained Anglican priest.
Being author or co-author of more than 250 books.
Being president of the British UFO Research Association and the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena.
Presenting Channel 4's Fortean TV.
Making many appearances at Fortean Times magazine's UnCon, most recently in October 2004 when he gave a talk on "The Knights Templar and their Ancient Secrets".
Member of the high IQ society Mensa.
Being a Dan Grade martial arts instructor and a weight training instructor.

[edit] Writing

Lionel Fanthorpe’s output can be grouped under three broad headings, as follows:

Approximately 180 paperback novels and short story collections, in the science fiction and supernatural genres, produced for the UK publisher Badger Books during the 1950s and 1960s.
Numerous books on Christian themes, including the "Thoughts and Prayers" series.
Compilations of Forteana (generally with the word "mystery", "mysteries" or "mysterious" in the title), co-written with his wife Patricia.

Cover of Fanthorpe's Hand of Doom (Badger Books SF-44, 1960)

During his time at Badger Books, Fanthorpe was essentially a small cog in a large publishing machine[1]. The way the company worked was to acquire the cover art before the book was written, and send it to the author who then had to write a story around the cover. In some cases, Badger Books re-used cover art that had been produced to illustrate completely different novels. For example, Fanthorpe's 1960 novel Hand of Doom was written to suit a cover that had been produced to illustrate John Brunner's Slavers of Space, which formed one half of Ace double D-421.[2]

Fanthorpe’s novels were written under a range of pseudonyms. Some of these were house names which were used by other authors: Victor La Salle, John E. Muller, and Karl Zeigfreid. Pseudonyms exclusive to Fanthorpe's short story output include Neil Balfort, Othello Baron, Noel Bertram, Oben Leterth, Elton T. Neef, Peter O'Flinn, René Rolant, Robin Tate and Deutero Spartacus. Names he used for novels include Erle Barton, Lee Barton, Thornton Bell, Leo Brett, Bron Fane, L.P. Kenton, Phil Nobel, Lionel Roberts, Neil Thanet, Trebor Thorpe, Pel Torro, and Olaf Trent.

Although generally based on situations and plots familiar from pulp fiction, the novels are noteworthy for the unashamedly "nerdy" way they draw on a vast range of academic and pseudo-academic facts to fill out their background, including the mythology of Ancient Egypt (The Eye of Karnak), Babylon (Unknown Destiny), India (Vengeance of Siva) and Greece (Negative Minus). The stories also flaunt the author’s wide knowledge of Fortean subjects, such as vimanas (The Negative Ones), Chase Vault and The Devil's Footprints (U.F.O. 517), the disappearances of Benjamin Bathurst (Time Echo) and the crew of the Mary Celeste (Barrier 346), as well as the career of Charles Fort himself (The X-Machine). Another novel that discusses Charles Fort explicitly (both in the text and in the back-cover blurb) is Forbidden Planet. This latter novel has no connection with the famous film of the same title, but instead describes a vast interstellar chess game played by superhuman entities using human beings as pawns. Other novels are pastiches of accepted works of the Western Canon - Beyond the Void is a loose rewrite of Shakespeare's play The Tempest, and in Negative Minus the characters Suessydo and Epolenep reenact Homeric tales.

Fanthorpe’s work for Badger Books was produced at high speed (each 150-page book taking a month or less to write), and quality often suffered as a result. However, even at its best his work was diametrically opposed to the anti-establishment New Wave movement that was dominating British science fiction in the 1960s, and the opinion-formers of the time were quick to dub him a "bad" writer. Justly or unjustly this reputation has stuck, and to this day Fanthorpe is widely cited as being the world's worst author of science fiction novels. The term "Fanthorpe" is used in science fiction fandom as a disparaging term for clumsily written books, or those lacking in style or worth.

[edit] Further reading

Cross, Debbie. Down the Badger Hole. R. Lionel Fanthorpe: the Badger years. Portland: Wrigley Cross, 1995. Includes a bibliography, an introduction by David Langford, and samples of Fanthorpe's writing.