DICK, Kay

(1915-)

   UK writer and editor whose novel, They: A Sequence of Unease (1977), resembles thematically and in its experimental structure much of her previous fiction, but is set in a NEAR FUTURE England where freedom of travel is restricted and cultural activities are actively persecuted. Constructed as a set of linked stories that mirror one another, They relates ENTROPY and the youth-culture as enemies of creative values (and middle-class individualism); in relating these levels of meaning, KD sets up a very moving, though abstract, model of humanistic response to a straitened future.

   JC

   Other works as editor: The Mandrake Root (anth 1946) as Jeremy Scott, At Close of Eve (anth 1947) as Scott and The Uncertain Element (anth 1950), all fantasy anthologies.