Bibliography
Jun. 23rd, 2013 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyThe Time Machine and The War Of The Worlds - H. G. Wells
These two come together because I picked up an edition which printed the two together. The rationale was that they were two examples of Wells' early visions of the future, before he settled down into the sedate chap of the 1940s and beyond. I'd not read either of them before, despite (for instance) the fact that Eloi and Morlocks have become a certain sort of cultural touchstones. Unlike my reading of Great Expectations, these chaps did live up to expectations on the actual encounter. It's easy to see why The Time Machine had such a great influence on later work, and indeed why The War Of The Worlds held the imagination of popular culture similarly.
I'm not sure which of the two I preferred, but there were certain similarities between them in thematic terms. Both explore the future possibilities of human evolution, and see them in pessimistic terms, including the potential of cannibalism. There's also a concern with technology and what to do about it - either the way that it could split the human race into the privileged and the unprivileged (with the possible consequences), or the way that Martians become totally reliant upon their machinery rather than their ingenuity.
Actually, writing about it, I do think The War Of The Worlds has the marginal edge. It's something about the playing with science and the neat solution to the Martians' fall, and the general representation of the way that the human population (and human nature in general) copes with such a shocking event. I won't spoil it, but I for one found it rather pleasing in its ingenuity.
Territorial Rights - Muriel Spark
I picked this up from a library shelf on a whim, and I'm not honestly quite sure how I feel about it. It was pretty good, being brief, but it's a strange book. It charts a brief episode in Venice, when a few people have nasty history come back to haunt them, and a young man realizes a) that he despises his father b) that he despises his lover and c) that he's actually a born criminal, not a student at all. There's a dose of adultery and various other naughty doings, and the question of what actually happened to a Bulgarian exile killed during the second world war. The writing is dry, the pulling together of threads satisfying, the humour occasionally black. But I think the issue is that the characterization sometimes doesn't quite come off - it occasionally fails to convince. Nevertheless, there are some Spark-esque tendencies here which make it a good read, and one much needed for a tired and exhausted wee brain.
These two come together because I picked up an edition which printed the two together. The rationale was that they were two examples of Wells' early visions of the future, before he settled down into the sedate chap of the 1940s and beyond. I'd not read either of them before, despite (for instance) the fact that Eloi and Morlocks have become a certain sort of cultural touchstones. Unlike my reading of Great Expectations, these chaps did live up to expectations on the actual encounter. It's easy to see why The Time Machine had such a great influence on later work, and indeed why The War Of The Worlds held the imagination of popular culture similarly.
I'm not sure which of the two I preferred, but there were certain similarities between them in thematic terms. Both explore the future possibilities of human evolution, and see them in pessimistic terms, including the potential of cannibalism. There's also a concern with technology and what to do about it - either the way that it could split the human race into the privileged and the unprivileged (with the possible consequences), or the way that Martians become totally reliant upon their machinery rather than their ingenuity.
Actually, writing about it, I do think The War Of The Worlds has the marginal edge. It's something about the playing with science and the neat solution to the Martians' fall, and the general representation of the way that the human population (and human nature in general) copes with such a shocking event. I won't spoil it, but I for one found it rather pleasing in its ingenuity.
Territorial Rights - Muriel Spark
I picked this up from a library shelf on a whim, and I'm not honestly quite sure how I feel about it. It was pretty good, being brief, but it's a strange book. It charts a brief episode in Venice, when a few people have nasty history come back to haunt them, and a young man realizes a) that he despises his father b) that he despises his lover and c) that he's actually a born criminal, not a student at all. There's a dose of adultery and various other naughty doings, and the question of what actually happened to a Bulgarian exile killed during the second world war. The writing is dry, the pulling together of threads satisfying, the humour occasionally black. But I think the issue is that the characterization sometimes doesn't quite come off - it occasionally fails to convince. Nevertheless, there are some Spark-esque tendencies here which make it a good read, and one much needed for a tired and exhausted wee brain.
