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Meta
Category Archives: prose
pseudohistorical linguistics
I can’t remember how much I knew of Elvish languages before The Silmarillion, with a glossary, appeared in 1978. Can you tell from the text of The Lord of the Rings (not counting the Appendices) that Quenya and Sindarin are … Continue reading
Posted in fandom, language, prose
3 Comments
adrift in a sea of time
In Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992), the narrator says or implies that the events happened many years ago; so I’ve been watching for details that date it. Oprah Winfrey, whose show premiered in 1986, is mentioned; I think that’s … Continue reading
Posted in prose
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about that sex thing
I recently read the uncut Stranger in a Strange Land (having read the shorter version long long ago, probably before puberty). It contains the phrase “she’s as female as a cat in heat,” which also appears in the same author’s … Continue reading
Posted in prose
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late antiquity
An argument is offered that New Zealand is the wrong place to film Tolkien’s works: One of Tolkien’s great accomplishments was making Middle-earth seem vividly old. Wherever the reader looks, ruins and crumbling statues poke through the lichen. […] To … Continue reading
Posted in cinema, prose
2 Comments
To your rearranged bodies go
I’m re-reading To Your Scattered Bodies Go and, of course, pondering the arrangements. The premise is that all humans who ever died (for some convenient definitions of ‘human’ and ‘ever’) are simultaneously resurrected (for purposes unknown to them) on an … Continue reading
Posted in prose
7 Comments
Nero Wolfe and the Drones Club
P. G. Wodehouse and Rex Stout were contemporaries and friends, I recently learned. The opening pages of Stout’s Champagne For One read like a Bertie Wooster story: an acquaintance known as Dinky, feigning laryngitis, rings to beg that the narrator … Continue reading
Incandescence
Greg Egan complains about sloppy reviews of his latest novel: About half the reviews of Incandescence made at least one of the following false assertions: The Splinter orbits a neutron star. Rakesh visits the Splinter. The relationship between the novel’s … Continue reading
Posted in prose
5 Comments