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Erle Cox

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Erle Cox
BornErle Cox
(1873-08-15)15 August 1873
Emerald Hill, Victoria, Australia
Died20 November 1950(1950-11-20) (aged 77)
Elsternwick, Victoria, Australia
LanguageEnglish
NationalityAustralian
Genrescience fiction
Notable worksOut of the Silence

Erle Cox (15 August 1873 – 20 November 1950) was an Australian journalist and science fiction writer.

Life

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Cox was born at Emerald Hill, Victoria, on 15 August 1873, the second son of Ross Cox, who had emigrated from his native Dublin as a youth during the early gold rush days of the 1850s. He was educated at Castlemaine Grammar School and Melbourne Grammar School. Following school, Cox worked as a wine-grower near Rutherglen, Victoria, before moving to Tasmania. On 24 December 1901 he married Mary Ellen Kilborn and some time later the couple settled in Melbourne.[1]

In 1921, Cox joined the editorial staff of The Argus newspaper as a writer of special articles and book reviewer under the pen name 'The Chiel'; later he was the principal movie critic. In 1946 he joined the staff of The Age after being given notice from The Argus.[1]

Cox died in 1950 after a long illness.

Works

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Three early works were published in the Lone Hand Magazine: Reprieve, Diplomacy and The Social Code.

  • Out of the Silence, his best known novel, is set in Australia, and involves the discovery of a gigantic, buried sphere, containing the accumulated knowledge of a past civilization. It was published by The Argus in weekly instalments over a six-month period in 1919. The first Australian edition in book form was published by Vidler, in 1925. The same year a British edition appeared (Hamilton), and in 1928 an American edition (Rae D. Henkle). In 1934, the book was adapted to a comic-strip format by an artist identified only as Hix, likely Reginald Ernest Hicks.[2] This pictorial version was published daily in The Argus in 120 episodes from August to December. In the same year, the novel was dramatised for radio presentation as a 25-part serial. The SF Encyclopedia notes that: "The novel exhibits some racist overtones"[3] in reference to the eugenically inspired character Odi, who brought about the supremacy of a white race by devising a ray that killed only black people. The device of a buried sphere from a lost, advanced civilization clearly influenced René Barjavel's best-settling 1966 French science fiction novel La Nuit des temps, translated into English as The Ice People (1971).
  • Fools Harvest was published as a fourteen-part serial in The Argus, in 1938, and was published in book form the following year by Robertson Mullen with two extra chapters.
  • The Missing Angel, the third and final book by Cox, was published by Robertson Mullen in 1947.

References

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Further reading

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  • Tuck, Donald H. (1974). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Chicago: Advent. p. 119. ISBN 0-911682-20-1.
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