Category Archives: Fiction
Truth is Stranger than Science Fiction
Fiction may seem outlandish to us when it imagines exotic realms or daring adventures, yet few things in the universe are as mysterious as the human soul. We all enjoy works of pure escapism. That said, the most enduring stories … Continue reading
The Time Traveller’s Prophecy
H. G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine, published in 1895, is more than a piece of highly entertaining fiction. It is also an interesting and important contribution to the canon of dystopian literature. Even before Wells, there was a tendency … Continue reading
Of Martians and Men
Over the years I have a commented on many of H. G. Wells’ tales. In this post I want to profile his greatest work, The War of the Worlds (1898). I first encountered the novel around the age of twelve … Continue reading
The Fantastic Voyages of Jules Verne
Jules Verne’s Around the Moon (1870) is the sequel to his famous tale From the Earth to the Moon (1865), though of the two I think the later book must be the more interesting because the first story deals only … Continue reading
Orwellian Paradoxes
Stephen Jay Greenblatt’s Three Modern Satirists (1965) is an obscure but insightful volume that I found while browsing the increasingly depleted shelves of the public library. It examines the careers of English authors Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. … Continue reading
Dr. Jekyll’s Temptation
During this Halloween season I took up Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The book is full of the “atmospherics” that I enjoy in older British fiction. Take for example this scene between the taciturn lawyer Mr. Utterson (friend … Continue reading
The Infinite Worlds of Lester del Rey
One of the Golden Age science fiction novels that I fondly remember reading as a child was Step to the Stars (1954) by Lester del Rey (1915-1993). I have recently rediscovered this and other classic novels at the Richmond city … Continue reading
Frankenstein as Literature
Good fiction should, above all, be read as a story, before tackling the deeper implication of the author’s ideas. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is no exception. I was paging through the book, appropriately enough, in the week before Halloween. There … Continue reading
Wakefield’s Delinquency and Hawthorne’s Moral
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Wakefield” is not particularly dramatic or bizarre. There are no great crimes, supernatural occurrences or unusual spiritual dilemmas, though there is a more subtle moral element at work. Originally written in the 1830s – as part … Continue reading
Paul Bourget and the Intellectual as Villain
While at the city library I was surprised to find an interesting older volume of literary criticism that had not yet been purged from the shelves—The Intellectual Hero: Studies in the French Novel, 1880-1955 by Victor Brombert (Lippincott, 1961). Perusing … Continue reading
