<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Charles Eric Maine was the pseudonym of David McIlwain (January 21, 1921 – November 30, 1981), a British writer whose novels often veered toward mainstream suspense and what would today be called technothrillers, and in fact he did write straightforward adventure fiction under other pennames. Although he sold several short stories during the 1940s, after the sale of his first SF novel, Spaceways (1953), almost none of his SF was not in the form of novels. Spaceways was based on a radio script which Maine had written and which was later turned into a lackluster movie about a murder during a space launch. Almost all of Maine's subsequent novels would be set in the present or the very near future. Timeliner (1955) was the most notable exception to this rule, the story of a man whose consciousness becomes unstuck in time so that he drifts into the future, occupying the bodies of other people.

Some of Maine's novels revolved around speculation about technology, although his grounding in science was not solid. In The Man Who Couldn't Sleep (1956, aka Escapement) it becomes possible to record and play back emotions. The Isotope Man (1958, aka The Atomic Man) involves matter duplication. Two mediocre sequels followed the last, neither of which has ever had a US edition. Maine also tried his hand at disaster novels. The Tide Went Out (1958, later revised as Thirst!) subjects civilization to a global drought. A new plague rises in Darkest of Nights (1962, aka Survival Margin). World Without Men (1958) and the very similar Alph (1972) speculate about the nature of a society where women reproduce artificially and men are no longer essential to the process. Maine's most interesting novel was The Mind of Mr. Soames (1961), basis of a boring movie despite its interesting premise. A thirty year old man wakens from a lifelong coma and his custodians must devise a way to educate him.

Other novels were at least modeled after hard SF. High Vacuum (1957) attempts to accurately describe a major crisis within a moon colony. Fire Past the Future (1959, aka Countdown) reprised the plot of Spaceways but was much more realistic in its portrayal of a near future space program. His last significant novel was B.E.A.S.T. (1966), in which he deals with the possibility of computers so complex that they become self aware and potentially inimical to humanity. Maine never wrote a breakthrough novel to establish himself as anything other than an imitator and his scientific lapses may have alienated some readers. He was, however, a competent and often very entertaining writer of thrillers whose best work deserves to be remembered.