Re: Clarke Award Finalists 2005

Melissa Hollingsworth wrote:

Lynn McGuire wrote:

James Nicoll wrote:

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
>
I've read all of them except for the Mitchell and the Niffenegger.

>
The Time Traveler's Wife isn't boundary-pushing SF, but it's a very good
love story. I don't usually read love stories, and I enjoyed it.

Intellectual romance, along the lines of WAR AND PEACE's placid
passages, ranks as one of my favorites. Taken by itself, the romance
element in THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, is indeed enjoyable.
    From my perspective THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE is a jigsawed romance.
Readers must mentally assemble nonlinear story snippets to see the
overarching plot unfold in their mind's eye.
    Niffenegger uses an in-story quote from MAN AND TIME by Preistley.
It leaves me with the impression she's read the Preistley. If so,
Niffenegger's well versed in the temporal underpinnings of time travel.
    Yet, the tale's tick-tock tempo may metaphorically misdirect. My
copy contains a READING GROUP GUIDE. One of its questions is: "How does
the author use time travel as a metaphor: for love, for loss and
absence, for fate, for aging, for death?"

# # #

CLOUD ATLAS jigsaws its narrative in a different manner. It explores
entangled emotions and events transposed through time. Its small swarms
of symbiotic souls sort of segue through a many worlds universe.

# # #

Neither nonlinear novel is recommended by me. They both spew more
profanity and blasphemy than a obnoxious loud-mouth drunk who fouls
himself sitting in a cheap seat at a Major League Baseball game.

Poe's prose poem EUREKA scratches my puzzle fiction itch better.

    Eureka (1848) is the climax of Poe's thinking, in astronomy
    and cosmology, and is his most ambitious literary work
    employing a considerable amount of scientific information.
    His almost lifelong interest in astronomy and other sciences
    might result in an attempt to explain the origin and
    functioning of the universe. His metaphysical bent would urge
    him to fill in by intuition the gaps left by science. His
    conscious knowledge of his powers as an author would demand
    that he perform better what several less skilful writers had
    attempted before him. Instead of being the anomaly in his
    writings that some critics have considered it, Eureka is in
    some respects the climactic art-product of this literary artist
    who took science as a source of material.

    (excerpt)

    <https://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1921/cdl51c12.htm>

Danke,

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