Miles de Selby

Miles de Selby was the author of Letters from Earth, a book published in 1993. In one letter, de Selby discussed the popularity of magic, gurus and spirit-healers in India. He noted that groups of men calling themselves "rationalists" had begun to travel from town to town in large buses, debunking medicine-men and witchcraft. De Selby remarked that their chanted battle-cries and hymns about the wonders of rationalism ironically seemed quite superstitious. (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet)

Behind the scenes

 * Miles de Selby does not appear in the events of Lawrence Miles's Christmas on a Rational Planet (1996), and is mentioned only once, when he is quoted alongside "Sarah-Jane Morley" in the epigraph for the third part of the novel. His name appears to be a reference to Flann O'Brien's novel The Third Policeman (1966), whose narrator is obsessed with the writings of a deranged scientist-philosopher known only as de Selby, and frequently quotes and discusses his writings in footnotes; while Lawrence Miles giving de Selby his own surname as a forename may have been another of Christmas's many metafictional jokes, it may also have been intended as an allusion to O'Brien, who also wrote under the name Myles na gCopaleen. In 2013, The God-Machine Chronicle, a sourcebook for the World of Darkness RPG setting, also introduced an eccentric scientist character named Myles de Selby in a seemingly coincidental instance of a near-identical reference.