KEV67

In science fiction it annoys me if the SF aspect is only there to set up either a) some sort of alternative historical Earth with castles and what-not, or b) some sort of fantasy world with people resembling elves, dwarfs, etc. In both cases civiliation is recovering from nuclear war which set the date back to year zero. In the case of b) mutations caused by radioactive fall out led to the pointy ears and the short stature. Postmodern books that do not have beginnings, middles and ends in the correct order, and which have parallel stories that do not go anywhere annoy me. Surprisingly to me, since I am a bit of a reactionary and not a feminist, I don't like reading very macho characters in books. I really did not like How Green Was My Valley, and I disliked a SF book I read recently whihc had a rather domineering security officer.

That's a bit different. Those people weren't named characters on the whole. There was the curate and one or two scientific types at the start. Otherwise the victims were just part of an anonymous mass.

I wonder if it's Mrs Gaskell. I don't think she is the most miserable of the Victorian authors, but her mortality rate is similar to a World War I novel.

Some excellent suggestions so far. How Green Was My Valley - Richard Llewellyn Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf The Island of the Day Before - Umberto Eco

I have just read E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops. It's a bit like The Matrix and a bit like Brave New World. It seems to predict something like the internet.

I think a decent stab at the science is important; otherwise it is just fantasy. SF books are often books of ideas, but if they break known scientific limits, such as travelling faster than lightspeed with no plausible explanation of how they do it, then to me they are fantasy or adventure books. Technology shapes society. A lot of SF books imagine what that society will be like, which pointless if the technology is unrealistic. Many SF books are projections of the fears of the time of writing, particularly dystopias. I am trying to think of some of my favourite SF books: The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell - A first contact book. Basically it was a book about over-population. Ringworld, by Larry Niven - not sure if it fits my thesis about SF being a projection of modern fears, but it is an interesting idea, which sounded plausible when I read it. Larry Niven often wrote about criminal who killed people for their organs, but I can't remember if he was in the book. Dune by Fank Herbert - eugenics, a planet of inscrutable machine makers reminiscent of Japan, the control of spice needed throughout the galaxy reminiscent of oil. The Left Hand of Darkness , by Ursula Le Guin - quite a bit about gender, quite political. An envoy tries to persuade an isolated civilisation to join the community of planets. The science was pretty good. The Martian, by Andy Weir - not really a projection of modern society or fears at all, but the science was strong. Makes Mars colonisation seem plausible (although difficult). The Gods Themselves - the Earth has found a cheap and abundant source of energy, unfortunately it is damaging the environment in a big way.

My favourite book was The Hobbit followed by Watership Down, which had similar plots. I read all Enid Blyton's Famous Five books. I never bothered with her Secret Seven. I liked the Willard Price Adventure series. They were about two lads who helped their father catch wild animals for a zoo. I liked the Dragonfall 5 books too when I was younger. They were about a family who flew an obsolete cargo spaceship.

I read three of Iain Banks' books, two of which were science fiction. I can't remember what they were called. In one, the hero flits around the galaxy, offing people and trying not to get offed. The other takes place on Planet Medievalland. There's a king who has counsellor, or possibly a doctor, who is obviously from off-world. The neighbouring kingdom was usurped by a Oliver Cromwell type. He has a bodyguard who is in love with one of his harem. I thought it was a pretty good book, but there was not much science fiction in it. I have read one Arthur C Clarke book, The City and the Stars. I did not think it was that good. I hear Rendevous with Rama is better, but not to bother with the sequels. I read one Issac Asimov book: The Gods Themselves. I did like that, and it had some pretty hard science. Aliens from a parallel universe were tinkering with the strong atomic force.

I recently finished Tau Zero by Poul Anderson. It had a great premise for a sci-fi book: spaceship gets closer and closer to light speed, while time slows down on board accordingly. It was described as a hard science sci-fi book. I was really disappointed with it. I can't say how good the science was for the time; it was written (approx 1970), but it is definitely out of date now. I think it was a bit cobblers then. What I really didn't like was the inter-personal stuff. The characters were either flat, or I did not like them. The attitudes were a bit out of date. The science in science fiction is nearly always wrong. Some sci-fi books are just plain fantasy. Some use a bit of science, e.g. nuclear war, space travel to another planet, just to get to another world, which either resembles a fantasy world or an historic world. Some use a bit of science to set up a plot and make it sound plausible, but don't really pretend that the science is perfect. Occasionally, you get a sci-fi book that tries to be as scientific as possible. The Martian is a decent example of that, but Andy Weir a) had to use a scientifically impossible device to strand his hero on Mars, and b) made the odd mistake, despite all his online readers pointing out his errors. Sci-fi books are books of ideas. I think H.G. Well's sci-fi books are interesting because they say something about the fears of the time. For instance, The Time Machine commented on the social divides in late Victorian Britain, Darwinian ideas, and there must have been something in the air about space-time, although Einstein had not got there yet. I remember The Day of the Triffids had a real Cold War feel about it. Unless a sci-fi book alludes to the concerns of society at the time it was written, it's probably a bit pointless.

Skulduggery Pleasant perhaps, the dead detective. I haven't actually read any of the series but someone I follow on YouTube raves about them. The autistic boy in The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time has to do a bit of detective work. That's a good book and not particularly difficult to read. Father Brown is like a religious Sherlock Holmes. It's about as far away from real crime as it is possible to get.

Thinking about Orwell, although more a café than a pub, they serve alcohol in the Chestnut Tree.

It looks like the international critics agree with you about Virginia Woolf. She has three books in the top 25, including 2nd and 3rd. http://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/story/20151204-the-25-greatest-british-novels Still wouldn't have her in my top 5.

I liked Wuthering Heights a lot more than Jane Eyre, although my opinion of Jane Eyre is coloured by having to study it for O level at school. WH is very different and original. It's very poetic writing. I did not have too much trouble with Joseph because I've read the James Herriot books. Sadly, I don't think too many people speak like that any more.

Anyway, regarding HG Wells' early science fiction: they must have been startling at the time. The late C19th seems to have been a period of change literature wise. All the great old Victorian authors were dead. The old triple decker novels were falling out of fashion. Arthur Conan Doyle was writing his detective books. Rudyard Kipling was writing his Empire and animal books. Science was advancing, yet technology was still in a half and half state. When Wells was writing in the Victorian era, we did not have radio, but we did have the telegraph. We did not have cars, so we still relied on horse power, but we did have trains. We did not really have much electricity, but we did have gas. Wells' books must have seemed explosive back then - short but totally original.

I don't remember that at all. Was that from a film?

Frankenstein does not actually have an awful lot of science in it. Frankenstein won't say how he made the monster, although it seemed to entail digging up body parts from the graveyard and torturing animals. Frankenstein said he made the monster very large because it was an easier scale to work with, not so fiddly. So, does that he made all the body parts from scratch? Where would you find bones and parts for a man that big.

Interesting, I knew Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Lost World, but not the others. Does he discuss any science in them? H.G. Wells like to include a bit. For example, in The Invisible Man, the abrasive anti-hero says he made himself invisible by changing the refractive index of his body tissue.

Yes, I've given him a go, but there is a reason why he is not read much any more. I read The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which I seem to remember had some odd religiosity too, but not as much as The Man Who Was Thursday. Although NoNH was set in 1984, it could not really be called science fiction. I read his Father Brown stories, which are rather like Sherlock Holmes, but not quite as engaging. It struck me that these days he would be in great demand writing TV plots for series like Dr Who, only he didn't write women at all; he almost entirely ignored them. I think one or two of his poems are quite good. I may well ask for the Rolling English Road to be read at my funeral.

I agree with you there. It did get rather weird.

I am currently reading Our Mutual Friend (Charles Dickens), which has a pub called The Six Jolly Fellowships, which made me think about this. I always thought Keith Talent's favourite pub, The Black Cross, in London Fields (Martin Amis) had an appropriate name. George Elliot often had pubs in her books. There were four in Middlemarch, including The Tankard and The Green Dragon, I think. My favourite pub name of hers was The Hand and Banner in Daniel Deronda. Sadly there is no Hand and Banner pub in Britain at the moment. I've noticed that The Wetherspoons chain sometimes uses literary pub names, for example, there is now a Moon Under Water in Milton Keynes, which was George Orwell's ideal pub.

E. M. Forster wrote a book called The Machine Stops in 1909. According the the Goodreads blurb, it predicted instant messaging and the internet. I would not have thought E. M. Forster wrote science fiction.

I am working through H.G. Wells' science fiction books. I wondered who Well's sci-fi contemporaries were. The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton is not exactly science fiction, but it has its steampunk chapters. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a little bit science fiction.

Another interesting theory is that The Wizard of Oz was a commentary on the American monetary system. I watched an hour long video about it. Dorothy wore silver shoes in the book. The yellow brick road looks rather like gold. There you have the bi-metallic US currency system. The Emerald City represent Greenbacks, which I believe was a type of money not tied to gold or silver and not created by debt either, just issued by the treasury. The straw man represented the farmers. The tin man represented industry. The lion represented a particular politician who was trying to do something with the US currency system around the time L. Frank Baum wrote the book.

What are your favourite book theories? I am looking for things hidden in the text, that the author may or may not have intended. My favourite theory is about Daniel Derona by George Elliot. There is a theory that one of the two principle character, Gwendolen Harleth, was sexually abused by her stepfather, Captain Davilow, and that she was frigid as a result. Given that the book was written in the C19th, that would be quite a bold thing to write about. None of the reviewers from the time seemed to have picked up on it. Captain Davilow was dead before the book started. Nevertheless, the theory would explain a lot.