Word: fictions
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...hard on foreign despots? Inside of what appears to be a heartless tyrant like MUAMMAR GADDAFI is there really a sensitive thinker and environmentalist struggling to get out? Pierre Salinger thinks so. J.F.K.'s former press secretary has written the introduction to Gaddafi's first published work of fiction, just arrived in translation in the U.S. Cheerily titled Escape to Hell and Other Stories, Gaddafi's book mostly covers things that chafe him, including football, rock music and especially cities: "Flee from the lethargy and waste, the poison and boredom and yawning. Flee from the nightmare city," he writes. People...
...meantime, what was not yet known as the media had enthusiastically taken up the science-fiction approach to the future. In 1910 an illustrator named Jean Marc Cote began a series of advertising cards depicting life in the year 2000: underwater croquet tournaments, men being shaved by robots, battery-powered roller skates. Later, Hugo Gernsback, who started out as a manufacturer of automotive batteries, launched the magazine Amazing Stories ("Extravagant Fiction Today--Cold Fact Tomorrow"). It was endlessly imitated. A typical series in Famous Fantastic Mysteries was titled Crimes of the Year 2000. The crimes were not especially novel...
...make up for that, a group of writers a few years later published the book Woman in the Year 2000. The contributions were cast in the form of fantasy and fiction but largely reflected the familiar feminist gospel. One story involved a girl born at midnight in the year 2000, appropriately named Millenny. When she goes to school, she finds that girls are no longer discouraged from fighting with one another and that boys are no longer looked down on when they weep. On television, violence and machismo have been banned. Safe pharmaceutical contraceptives are available free at banks...
More importantly, they are one of the few times when the College exhibits signs of a truly collective social life. This spring season, we set out to evaluate four formals, separating fact from fiction, faux pas from fabulous and clipons from hand-ties...
...Irving's ninth novel, A Widow for One Year (Random House; 537 pages; $27.95), is unlikely to generate a similar hullabaloo. That is not because Irving's storytelling skills have waned; his new novel is in many respects his best since Garp. But over the past two decades, serious fiction has been elbowed ever further toward the fringes of popular culture. The adulation that once greeted Garp now goes to sitcoms and celebrities, a development that the hero-author in the novel foresaw and deplored...