"Another John Middleton, ye gods!" said DH Lawrence, when he heard of the birth of the writer John Middleton Murry, who has died suddenly aged 75.
Murry grew up in the shadow of his famous critic and editor father, but he was an excellent novelist in his own right and, as Richard Cowper, became an admired and popular science-fiction writer. He also wrote under the name of Colin Murry, after his grandmother's childhood nickname for him.
John's mother was Violet Le Maistre, JMM Sr's second wife, who modelled herself to excess on her predecessor, Katherine Mansfield. Not only did Violet physically resemble Mansfield, she also wrote stories in that mould. When John was eight months old, she contracted pulmonary tuberculosis - JMM Snr recorded that she broke the news with the words, "I'm so glad. How could you love me without this?" She died just before John's fifth birthday.
The turbulent years that followed are recorded in the first volume of Murry's autobiography, One Hand Clapping (1975). There were two stepmothers: the first was Betty, a woman of immense verbal and physical violence who, for many years, terrorised both John and his father. To avoid some of the domestic upheavals, John was sent to board at Rendcomb College, the independent progressive school in Gloucestershire.
In 1944, he joined the Royal Navy, a move his father treated unexpectedly benignly, perhaps an early hint of his own switch away from pacifism that was to come in the 1950s. John originally applied to join the Fleet Air Arm as a pilot, but after being rejected on the grounds of deficient eyesight, he spent his war service as a rating, narrowly spared a posting to the far east by the capitulation of the Japanese in 1945.
After the war, he went to Brasenose College, Oxford, reading the Anglo-Saxon that he hated and the English that he loved. The poetry of Sidney Keyes had an early impact; later came John Donne and William Wordsworth. Donne, he said, "provided me with a touchstone of excellence, living proof that intensity of feeling was the very life-blood of great literature".
With some cautious encouragement from his father, John had begun writing in his teens: short stories, critical essays, a few poems. Little of this work survives in print, and his first novel was not published until 1958. Other matters had to be settled first. He met his wife, Ruth Jezierski, in 1948, and they married a year later. Less than an hour before the ceremony, he was still at Brasenose, well lubricated with brandy, gabbling his way through his vivas.
The first novel was The Golden Valley. Soon after finishing it in 1954, John showed it to his father, seeking what he saw as the ultimate stamp of approval. JMM Sr was harsh: he complained that its style, seemingly autobiographical, would identify him as the protagonist and, because "Betty" was depicted sympathetically, he would be seen in an unfavourable light. John was crushed by this self-serving response; the wound had hardly healed by the time his father died in 1957.
Three more novels followed, under the pseudonym Colin Murry, the last appearing in 1972. They are all long out of print, and, while their depiction of honest emotion might not be fashionable in these more cynical times, the clarity of the prose and purity of language have hardly dated.
Streaks of fantasy ran through at least two of these novels, so it was no surprise that John turned to science fiction, this time under the byline Richard Cowper. For several years, the Middleton Murry heritage was put to one side, and Cowper made his way into the hidebound SF arena as a new writer.
Responses were mixed: readers were beguiled by the subtle, lyrical and moving stories, but some science-fiction critics could not cope with a writer who worked with feelings rather than gadgets. The young Martin Amis, for instance, wrote a series of increasingly vicious reviews of the Cowper books. In private, John laughed Amis off: "He grew up with a famous father too."
His best SF is found in The Twilight Of Briareus (1974) and three books in the White Bird Of Kinship series (1978-82), but most of his short stories were also remarkable. His work always stood out in the SF genre: he was anachronistic, but he dazzled with elegant, precise and bountiful prose.
Ruth died at the end of March. At her funeral, John read the paragraph from his autobiography in which he described falling in love with her at first sight. It was beautiful and stunning, a poignant moment at the end of more than 50 years of marriage.
John leaves two adult daughters, Jacky and Helen.
· John Middleton Murry, writer, born May 9 1926; died April 29 2002