KEV67
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Posts posted by KEV67
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I am still struggling to think of a fifth writer I would have in my top 5. I refuse to include Virginia Woolf. Having watched those Comoron Strike adapations on the BBC, I don't think I place J.K. Rowling on it. I quite enjoyed the TV adaptions but I did not think the plots were great. I am still considering my criteria:
- How long have they been read? (although I also want to pick something written 20th or 21st century)
- How influential have they been on society?
- How much great work did they produce?
- How often are their worked adapted for plays, radio, television, films?
- How many formats did they work in: novels, plays, poems, short stories, journalism, essays, biographies, philisophical or religious works, etc?
- How innovative were they?
- How many people actually read and enjoy their stuff?
It might have to be Chaucer because I cannot think of anyone in the 20th or 21st century that stands out above the others (except Orwell). My own favourite 20th century author was George MacDonald Fraser of the Flashman books, but great as he was, he's not going to make it on the list. Robert Graves perhaps, but he just didn't write enough.
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There was a pub called The Ragged Trousers in Tumbridge Wells. I wondered whether this was a reference to The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
When I was walking from Liverpool St Station to Kings Cross Station one Sunday, I passed a pub called the Betsy Trotwood, who is David Copperfield's aunt.
There is a pub in my home town of Reading called Great Expectations. It used to be a Mechanics Institute in Victorian times. Charles Dickens did a reading there once, but it was from A Christmas Carol.
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On 26/10/2017 at 1:46 PM, Litwitlou said:
Dune, by Frank Herbert is certainly one of the finest examples of the genre. However, before going overboard reading it's many sequels, I suggest reading other works by Herbert: The White Plague is mind-bending book.
I read quite a few of Frank Herbert's book, but I found the The White Plague rather nasty and stopped reading it.
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I've only read these out of the list, and not all as SF Masterworks editions. I don't think they do include all the best science fiction titles. For example The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula Le Guin) is not there. Neither is The Mote in God's Eye by Jerry Pournell and Larry Niven. I am sure The Gods Themselves by Issac Asimov was in a SF Mastwerorks edition, but I do not see it in the OP's list. I thought that was pretty good.
CAT’S CRADLE Kurt Vonnegut
DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP Philip K. Dick
DUNE Frank Herbert
FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON Daniel Keyes
FRANKENSTEIN Mary Shelley
RINGWORLD Larry Niven
TAU ZERO Poul Anderson
THE CITY AND THE STARS Arthur C. Clarke
THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY Douglas Adams
THE INVISIBLE MAN H.G. Wells
THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU H.G. Wells
THE TIME MACHINE H. G. Wells
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS H.G. Wells
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I am reading Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. It's reminds me an awful lot of those Hammer House of Horror films from the early 70s. Vampire stories go back a long way. Which are the best?
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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.
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On 05/08/2017 at 3:30 PM, Raven said:
HG Wells? The War of the Worlds has to have a pretty high body count!
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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6 hours ago, Raven said:
Science fiction is a very broad canvas, and can be very different things depending on the author and the story they are trying to tell. Wells, for example, had a lot of social comment in his stories, and as you say an interest in the scientific thinking of the day, but under the same banner you also have books like Stainless Steel Rat, that are just a bit of a romp.
Poul Anderson falls into what I would term hard science fiction, which is often a high concept idea, with rather cold and flat characterization (Asimov and Clarke are quite often the same).
If you want something with a little more life, but something that is still big on Sci-fi ideas, try some Iain M. Banks (I'd recommend The Player of Games, personally).
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.
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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.
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Skulduggery Pleasantperhaps, 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.
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Thinking about Orwell, although more a café than a pub, they serve alcohol in the Chestnut Tree.
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On 17/04/2017 at 1:02 AM, willoyd said:
For me, the greatest British prose writer of the twentieth century was Virginia Woolf.
I'd agree on Graham Greene and George Orwell being up there, even if I'm personally not a great fan of the latter. I wouldn't put Evelyn Waugh in the same league. Thomas Hardy lived until 1928, wrote much of his poetry in the twentieth century, but none of his novels. Interestingly, none of them are amongst the dozen or so of the country's Nobel Laureates. If you are extending beyond prose, then TS Eliot would have to be in the reckoning.
I doubt if any academic would put JK Rowling in the top ten of twentieth century 'great writers'.
As this speaker was talking about all-time British top 5, one would have to go beyond the twentieth century. For me, the top 5 would probably be Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Woolf and Chaucer. George Eliot would be my personal number six, but that's when more and more start coming into the reckoning!
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.
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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.
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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.
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On 13/06/2017 at 10:16 AM, Madeleine said:
I remember he made the body from the remains of an executed criminal, and someone else's head!
I don't remember that at all. Was that from a film?
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On 05/06/2017 at 6:07 PM, Hayley said:
Just thought maybe you could count Mary Shelley's Frankenstein too. Technically I think it's horror but I know there are people who argue it was the first real science fiction novel.
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.
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11 hours ago, Hayley said:
Arthur Conan Doyle's other 'Professor Challenger' stories too, The Poison Belt, When the World Screamed and The Disintegration Machine are really interesting. The Lost World is my favourite though.
Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote a science fiction book called The Coming Race in the 1870s. He has another one called A Strange Story but I can't remember if it's got any science fiction elements, it's mostly about belief in spiritualism.
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.
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6 minutes ago, vodkafan said:
Apparently Christianity was Chesterton's big thing, he really deplored the fact that the world was becoming more secular and lots of people no longer believed.
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.
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19 hours ago, vodkafan said:
I didn't like the religious over/undertones at the end of The Man Who Was Thursday. I thought it started off really well though
I agree with you there. It did get rather weird.
Do you memorize poems ?
in Poetry, Plays & Short Stories
Posted
I went through a period when I tried to memorize some poems. For most of my life the only verse I could remember was the Lord's Prayer and how to say grace, both from primary and middle school.
Some of the poems I attempted to memorize were:
I suppose I should check if I can still remember them.