George Reginald Turner (8 October 1916 – 8 June 1997) was an Australian writer and critic, best known for the science fiction novels written in the later part of his career.
Subsequently, he worked in a variety of fields, including as an employment officer, as a technician in the textile industry, and was a reviewer of science fiction for the Melbourne Newspaper The Age.
In 1977 he edited The View from the Edge, an anthology of tales produced by participants in a Melbourne writers' workshop, which he ran with science fiction authors Vonda McIntyre and Christopher Priest.
Turner's first science fiction novel, Beloved Son (1978), was followed by two related works, Vaneglory (1981) and Yesterday's Men (1983), comprising the Ethical Culture series.
While they did not form a coherent trilogy, they were set in the same future, plagued by the problems of both a nuclear holocaust and the ravages of ill-advised experimentation with genetic food crops and epidemics caused by mutated viruses.
[4] Vaneglory introduced perhaps his most memorable creation, the Children of Time, a secret society of mutant human beings who are virtually immortal and have certain advanced mental skills.
Subsequent to the events of that novel, the crew of a starship sent to explore for habitable planets, return to find themselves at odds with the inhabitants of the Earth, who have evolved in a more ecologically harmonious direction in their absence, and ostracise them for their incompatibility with a society determined by rigid genetic specialisation.