Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Novelists are becoming steadily less audacious. Unlike their 19th century forebears, they rarely offer themselves as omniscient puppetmasters, privy to the thoughts and motives of an entire cast. Attuned to the jet hops of the screen-so the conventional reasoning goes-audiences will shun the long ocean cruises that fiction once traversed. Thus the fragments of 20th century life are all too often rendered in views, not visions...
There are several other weapons Emmerich has in his arsenal. He cites Dawkins' use of an analogy he borrows from a science fiction story, without explaining why and how Dawkins used it in the slightest. After doing so he uses this analogy to poke fun at Dawkins. This is a nifty technique for making someone look bad but it isn't very helpful to those who want to know what the book is about...
While reading your article about what President Carter's new energy package [April 4] holds in store for us, I was shocked. It has actually reached the point where the people of the U.S. have to be ordered to conserve energy. It is like a science-fiction story: a government has to begin to run the way people live just to get them to do something that was for their own good in the first place...
Buying "high spots," as the most desirable books are called, is no guarantee of profits. Authors' reputations can rise and fall like cyclical securities. In first-edition fiction, it is usually the collective judgment of critics that establishes basic market value. But tastes change. John Galsworthy seemed a safe bet in 1930 when a first edition of his The Man of Property (1906) sold for about $250. Today that property, in good condition, would be worth a little more than half that amount. During the '50s, literary quarterlies were fragrant with allusions to Henry James' "sensibility...
...this exposition constitutes one of the novel's main failings. Dialogue and action often take a back seat to first-person narration in contemporary fiction; still, when the narrator's chief preoccupation is his own lack of selfhood, the novelist faces an imposing task. In this case, he succeeds only in order to fail. Evoking Jed's self-confessed insubstantiality by equipping him with poetic phrases and intellectual rationalizations in place of emotions, Warren purposely forfeits the possibility of making his protagonist a fully rounded, artistically engaging human being. Jed is a small triumph of characterization, but a pyrrhic...