John Kippax


John Kippax was the pen name of English science fiction writer John Charles Hynam, author of many short stories and the Venturer Twelve series of space opera novels.
Hynam was killed on the afternoon of 17 July 1974 when a lorry hit his car at Werrington, a few miles outside Peterborough. He left a wife, Phyl, and a daughter, Jennifer - who a week later gave birth to his first grandchild, a son, an event which he was awaiting with eager anticipation.
In the postscript to "Where No Stars Guide", published posthumously in 1975, Hynam's literary collaborator and close personal friend Dan Morgan wrote: "John had a larger-than-life physical and psychic presence. Likeable, eccentric, egocentric, kind, brusque, take your pick from the thesaurus to describe him, he was all of these and more. A man of enormous enthusiasms, he died as lived, at full speed".

Venturer Twelve series

Hynam's death put a premature end to the Venturer Twelve series, of which he and Morgan collaborated on the first three volumes while Hynam wrote the fourth by himself. Morgan did declare his intention to write a fifth volume, but he never did. The series was thus left at a permanent cliffhanger - ending with an ever-increasing threat posed to space-faring humanity by mysterious, malevolent aliens whose precise character is never clarified, and with the struggle gathering momentum just when the series was cut off. Many further adventures were clearly intended for the Venturer's Captain, the tough macho Tom Bruce; his courageous, dedicated and sensitive Second in Command and former lover Helen Lindstrom; and their multi-racial crew. These seem doomed to remain unwritten. As noted by Morgan, the character of Admiral Junius Farragut Carter, Captain Bruce's boss, was "Hynam's own wryly conceived self-caricature".