(Or most of them) would give this two thumbs down. Whose dedicated readers, one might think, Hard-rockin hard-right Baen of mil-fic rep, Let’s not forget this is a book from Baen, Your mileage, as they say, may verse-y vary. In its tenth book which left me hmm?-ing, some. I thought this half was better than the first, To something more like classic Arthur Clarke It goes from Michael Crichton thriller vibe Their mission, should they choose etcetera,Īdd: halophytic food crops, and some otherĪt this stage we’re not even halfway through: Like something from a sketch by Peter Cook) We start with chickens coming home to roost:Ī flood in Holland, coastal scares, and worseĬalled Peter Frobisher (Christ, what a name (It is) and caused by man (that’s also true) The premise is that global warming’s real īusy with action, clogged with infodumps. This "totality" has, in Hegel, a crucial, informing function. Prose fiction, with its highly self-conscious adieu to epic-fabulous presumptions by Cervantes, constructs contexts of totality, related to those in the economic systems of mercantile capitalism and to those aimed at by positivist science. It recounts modes of existence in which non-theological, immanent values and ambitions predominate. The novel, after Defoe, is wholly expressive of the mundane, secular categories of middle-class and mercantile being. Out of the erosion of the mythological-polytheistic or theistic components in drama came the novel. It yielded to the conflicts between individuation and society, between the familial and the political represented in drama. The heroic epic enacted conditions of life and perception of an archaic social order. These, in turn, generated and were generated by (the dialectic) historical, ideological and social realities. Hegel attached the origin, maturity and decline of the major genres in Western literature to corresponding epochs of consciousness. Not quite: fish, fowl, or red-mars-herring. Is neither epic, verse, nor science fiction, He writes a novel, and is pleased to mould His strangeness curdles into whimsy, where That undermines his grand ambitions here. He’s clever, and his verse is pretty good. That form, and later efforts to breathe lifeĬan Turner wrestle something new from all They had the musty flavour of poor compromiseĪbout them, neither one thing nor another, Verse-novels were a nineteenth-century vogue We classify this work? Say it’s not epic,Įxcept that, in a way, this makes things worse. But I’m not twitting him.īut really Turner’s talent’s not in epic,Īnd epic doesn’t match the tale he tells. Invokes his muse, half-heartedly, book one,Īnd ends with "it’s incumbent that an epic Twelve books (or twenty-four) a national theme Integral, not to be brushed off or missed: "Great glory," "fame," (not honesty and love). Which is to say: it’s really, really, not.Īll know that Omer smote his bleedin’ lyreīut still it captures something of the mode,Įxteriorised, the ethos shame (not guilt) I’ll spend a moment talking terms and cons. Would publish (well: e-publish) such a thing:-Ĭoncerning man-made climate change and howĪnd there’s Baen’s logo, disc of dragon redĪnd golden thrusting spaceship. It might surprise us that a firm like Baen The consolations on which the epic poem depends have fragmented and lost their meaning, along with the poetic conventions used to express them.
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