Word: fictional
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Whatever final judgment is passed on Men of Good Will or its author, its plan, the way it was written, the view of life and fiction it embodies, are likely to stand as one of the incredible efforts of the human imagination. It is a one-man attempt to bring order into the fortress of confusion and agony that is modern Europe, to make its disasters intelligible and its political and philosophical incoherence understandable...
Individuals still suffer, fight, endure loneliness and the bitter failure of all this work in Remains' new novel form as they do in life, and as they always have in good fiction. But in Remains' book their triumphs and their tragedies are alike unmoving. Seen as mere units of the world in which they live, his people seem strangely alike, and strangely unlikable...
Hugo Gernsback is widely and affectionately known among U.S. inventors as a bottomless well of incredible notions. For more than 30 years fantasies have come in such profusion from his brain that there is hardly a modern invention he cannot claim to have anticipated. The father of pseudo-scientific fiction, he has started a number of pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories, etc. As a radio magazine publisher, he has given laboratory workers some suggestive ideas. Gernsback himself has patented some 80 inventions, none of which, his admirers are proud to say, has ever proved of the slightest...
Without the faintest notion how they might be built, he predicted radio loud speakers, chain broadcasting (in 1909), visible radio waves (now accomplished by the cathode-ray oscilloscope), television (his friends credit him with coining the word). In one of Gernsback's first science fiction stories (1911), a character futuristically named Ralph 1240 41+ drained a dog's blood, filled its veins with a mythical preservative called "Radium-K bromide" and three years later restored the dog to life by pumping blood back-a fantasy which Gernsback claims has been fully validated by recent Soviet dog-reviving experiments...
High-ranking among 1943's novels, less by its own accomplishment than because of the mixed quality of the year's fiction, was Arthur Koestler's Arrival and Departure ($2). By no means equal to his Darkness At Noon, Koestler's latest novel was a graphic account of the sufferings of an ex-Communist for whom a sardonic psychoanalyst tries to provide an easy way out of the struggle against Fascism...