James Follett

James Follett (born 1939 in Tolworth, England) is an author and screenwriter.

Follett became a full-time fiction writer in 1976, after resigning from contract work as a technical writer for the British Ministry of Defence. He has since written over 20 novels, several television plays, and many radio dramas. He is one of the 400 most popular British authors, measured by the numbers of books borrowed from public libraries in the UK.

Works

Follett's works include:

Novels

• The Doomsday Ultimatum (1976)
• Crown Court (1977)
• Ice (1978)
• U-700 (1979), based on his radio play The U-boat that lost its Nerve, in turn based on a true story during World War II.
• Churchill's Gold (1980)
• The Tiptoe Boys (1981) (filmed as Who Dares Wins)
• Earthsearch (1981) based on his radio drama Earthsearch
• Deathship (1982) based on his radio drama Earthsearch 2
• Dominator (1984)
• Swift (1985). Set in 1996, it foresaw the proliferation of Mobile phones
• A Cage of Eagles (1989)
• Mirage (1988). A fictionalised account of the transfer of practically all documents and drawings of the Mirage III to the state of Israel during a temporary French arms embargo in the 1960s, through Sulzer Aircraft in Switzerland. These events led to the creation of the later IAI Kfir jet fighter in the 1970s.
• Torus (1990)
• Trojan (1991). Set mostly in 1998, it foresaw the popularity of high-definition television, hard-drive video recording and keyboardless ‘pad’ computers According to WorldCat, the book is held in 255 libraries,^[1] and has been translated into Hungarian in 1994 as A trójai ^[2]
• Savant (1993)^[3][4]
• Mindwarp (1993), a prequel to the radio drama Earthsearch
• Those in Peril (1995)
• Sabre (1997)
• Second Atlantis (1998) (A revision of Ice)
• Temple of the Winds (2000)
• Wicca (2000)
• The Silent Vulcan (2002) hardback ISBN 0-7278-5712-6
• A Forest of Eagles (2004) hardback
• Return of the Eagles (2004) hardback

Radio

(AT indicates the play was heard on BBC Radio 4's Afternoon Theatre, a 60-minute slot; JBM that it was in Radio 4's Just Before Midnight 15-minute slot, and SNT: Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre of 90 minutes.)

• Rules of Asylum (1973*, 90 minutes), Wiped by the BBC, but kept in the form of a domestic FM recording by Follett himself and subsequently rebroadcast on BBC 7 and since 2011 on BBC 4 Xtra in three half-hour instalments.
• The Light of A Thousand Suns (1974*, SNT), a cold war techno-thriller set in 1995
• The Doppelganger Machine (1974, AT)
• Speculator Sport (1974, AT)
• The U-Boat That Lost Its Nerve (1975, SNT), a WWII historical drama regarding an informal trial of a German U-boat officer in a POW camp.
• The War in Secret (1975, 3 episodes of 45 mins)
• The Last Riot (1975, AT)
• Jumbo (1976, SNT)
• No Time on Our Side (1976, 60 mins)
• The Rabid Summer (1976, SNT)
• The Twisted Image (1977*, AT)
• The Spanish Package (1977, SNT)
• The War Behind the Wire (1977, 4 episodes of 45 mins)
• A Touch of Slander (1977, AT)
• The Destruction Factor – The Seeds of Creation (1978*, SNT; a serial in 6 30-minute parts), ecological science fiction
• Vendetta for a Judge (1979, SNT)
• The Bionic Blob (1979, JBM)
• The Devil to Play (1979, JBM)
• The Bionic Blob and The Case of the Stolen Wavelengths (1979, JBM)
• Softly Steal the Hours to Dawn (1979, JBM)
• The Man Who Invented Yesterday (1980, JBM)
• The Long Lonely Voyage of U-396 (1980, SNT)
• Oboe at the Embassy (1980, AT)
• Earthsearch (1981*, 10 episodes of 30 mins)
• Earthsearch II (1982*, 10 episodes of 30 mins)
• A Darkening of the Moon (1986, SNT)
• Ice (1986*, SNT), based on the novel.
• Men, Martians and Machines (2003), a 3-hour career retrospective for BBC 7; named after a science-fiction novel by Eric Frank Russell that had fired Follett's imagination.

An asterisk * after the year means the play has been repeated on BBC7.

Television

• Two episodes for the cult science-fiction TV series Blake's 7 – "Dawn of the Gods" and "Stardrive"; 18 episode of 'Hyperspace Hotel' for BBC1's 'Knowhow' series; two episodes of 'The Squad' for Thames TV; six episodes of 'Crown Court' for Granada TV.

Other works

• Starglider, a science-fiction novella that accompanied the 1986 computer game of the same name.
• Tracker, a science-fiction novella that accompanied the 1988 computer game of the same name.

Injury repaired after 49 years

Follett wrote on Usenet in 2002:^[5]

Fifty years ago, in 1952, at the age of 12, I was in the capable hands of a Mr Harold Ridley, an extremely kindly ophthalmic surgeon who saved my right eye following an accident that cost me my left eye. The lens had to [be] removed (needled) to prevent infection spreading. His parting words to me all those years ago were: "Come back in 20-years and we might be able to put an artificial lens in your left eye." I went back in the 1960s and got much the same answer from Mr Ridley's successor: "Sorry – not enough tissue to anchor a lens in place. Come back in 20 years."

Last year my vision started clouding in my good eye so I hot-footed to London and got to see the one man who's been working near miracles at Moorfields. To my astonishment, he was prepared to tackle my defunct left eye on the grounds that it had been pretty useless for half a century therefore nothing would be lost if a lens implant operation went pear-shaped.

He went on to say that they had had to place the lens in front of the pupil, but it worked, and the cataract in his right eye had also been repaired.

See also

• List of novelists

External links

• Official website
• Articles and reviews: James Follett's radio work

References