The British novelist and historian Peter Berresford Ellis, who, with Jack Adrian, is preparing a biography and bibliography of E. Charles Vivian, has so far identified ninety-six books published by Vivian under that name and several pseudonyms during his career of four decades as a novelist, journalist, and magazine editor. Fantasy works constitute only about one-fifth of his book-length fiction, including two novels, Star Dust (1925) and The Kleinert Case (1938), that may be classified as marginal science fiction. And even in these relatively few titles the fantasy element is often slight, appearing in his adventure novels Woman Dominant (1929), Coulson Goes South (1933), and The Dead Man's Chest (1934) as secondary lost-race motifs. Yet, psychic phenomena and Atlantean and Lemurian motifs are prevalent, so that even the marginal works seem colored by an imaginative, poetic vision.

The son of a gentleman farmer, Vivian was born Charles Henry Cannell in Lodden, Norfolk, on...