Andrew Porter reports: “British SF author Douglas R. Mason, who wrote under the pseudonym John Rankine, has died. The author was just short of his 95th birthday. The information was supplied by his son, John R. Mason. No date of death was given.”

Mason was born 26 September 1918 in Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales, UK. In the 1930s, he enrolled at Manchester University to study English Literature and Experimental Psychology. While there, he first wrote and published poetry. He joined the the Royal Signals Corp during World War II, and then returned to school after the war, graduating in 1948. After school, he taught, and after a heart attack in 1962, resumed writing.

His first sf stories appeared in the mid-1960s. His first novel, Interstellar Two-Five, was published by Dennis Dobson in 1966. He went on to publish more than 30 novels in the next two decades, both originals and tie-ins (including five in the Space: 1999 series).

He retired from teaching in 1978, and from writing in the early 1980s. He returned to writing around the turn of the century, producing two more novels and two collections of shorter works.

For more information, see this site.