Word: novelized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...work arose and later broke from a utopian tradition in Soviet science fiction whose ancestry dates back to the industrial revolution's impact on nineteenth-century thought. Chernyshevsky's 1862 novel What is to Be Done?, an idealistic apothesis of reason, and its immediate rebuke by Dostoevsky in Notes From Underground, a defense of irrationality, are perhaps the progenitors of the utopian/anti-utopian debate. Since then, utopian literature has focused primarily on the issues of technology and political ideology...
...ENDOWS HIS narrator with an urbane wit which frequently turns upon Western decadence and indicts the depersonalized world of modern technology. John's sarcastic wit carries the novel through its occasional slow stretches such as his lengthy drive from Naples to Rome...
...VEHICLE IN The Chain of Chance is a variation upon the conventional detective novel--one might call it a murder without a murderer--which he infuses with an inventive twist of probability theory. Civilization has grown so complex, he maintains, that it is governed only by laws of random chance. As a result, the protagonist--and the reader--is alienated from the reality he thinks he can understand and control. In the depersonalized modern world, common sense has become nearly meaningless. The effect is eerie and sobering...
...philosophical concerns, the novel remains a suspensful and realistic detective story. The author's acuity of observation and penchant for statistical minutiae makes each character convincing and interesting. A significant portion of this short novel consists of meticulous descriptions of the victims and the circumstances of their deaths, making The Chain of Chance both a forensic pathologist's delight and a challenge to armchair sleuths, because, hidden among the barrage of details are the clues to this mystery. To understand them one might have to be pre-med, but the novel's tendency toward the arcane does not greatly detract...
...earlier works, this novel parodies those institutions claiming to have achieved static perfection or ultimate knowledge. Like Lem's earlier protagonists, usually human scientists studying alien civilizations, John is struggling to discover truths inherently too complex or mysterious to be understood. The utter failure of man's scientific explorations in past novels manifests the author's conviction that man cannot apprehend the universe in a meaningful, objective...