> I think this comment mistakes “understanding the plot” as the main goal of reading
Exactly. Understanding the plot is a level-1 read through. Identifying the effects achieved by the author is a subsequent level, and then exploring how they achieve those effects is where a literary-level read starts.
Another definition that almost works is the distinction between Not-Yet-Possible and Never-Possible - although this may fail when things like Faster-Than-Light drives are considered.
> Tolkien was a seasoned linguist and he worked on LoTR for about a decade
This actually understates the effort Tolkien put in. He'd started the world-building that led to LoTR approx 35 years before the publication of the first volume (in 1954), specifically by writing the first tales in the Legendarium we now recognise as The Silmarillion. And he never actually completed the latter even having spent almost 60 years working on it.
Totally agree. "Stand on Zanzibar" has a modern-world feel to it although some parts have been visited by the Suck Fairy. "Shockwave Rider" is also interesting - IIRC characters use their landline phones to access large computer systems. Because Brunner never really goes into too many techy details - it's just phones and computers - it's less jarring to read now than books where technology-heavy authors such as Arthur C Clarke tried to describe in detail what future computing devices might look like.
> The UK had an influence in punk music. But it was also banned by the BBC
Punk music was not in fact banned by the BBC. They sometimes refused to play the more outrageous tracks that had charted but a massive number got through. The songs weren't somehow eliminated from the charts.
> bands were at times left to tour elsewhere
You could have gone to any Uni town/city in the UK and there would have been punk bands playing in pubs and clubs. The table stakes were extremely low.
> If you try to extrapolate current tech 50 years into the future, you'll probably get it wrong and people reading your books during the time it's set in will think it quaint.
I'm now rereading old SF that I first read 40-to-50 years ago. I don't think I've found a single example where an SF author actually got tech right.
Clarke's original prediction, in a 1945 letter to Wireless World, is as follows:
>> An "artificial satellite" at the correct distance from the earth would make one revolution every 24 hours; i.e., it would remain stationary above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the earth's surface.
>> Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet. I'm afraid this isn't going to be of the slightest use to our post-war planners.
His short story The Sentinel, the precursor to 2001 A Space Odyssey, also has, IIRC, a description of the crew of a lunar rover frying sausages on a hob during one of their missions. And The Deep Range posits mass farming of whales to feed one eighth of the world population. I loved his fiction as a kid but the predictions haven't aged well.
It would honestly be nice if airports had 'phone booths' like I've seen in high tech companies. Think 1 person sized meeting rooms in larger spaces. One door on the pod opens, there's a seat and a small desk inside. Enough to make a mostly private phone call.
In a public setting there should also be things like a panic / duress button. A simple lock (that only local security can bypass). Maybe an internal phone line of some sort. Possibly a wired connection to the net DMZ.
I hesitate to add a timer, because _sometimes_ people have real travel troubles while at the airport and need an extended duration to take care of that. Such nuances might not fit within the context of E.G. a 20 min max timer.
"And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." - Hunter S Thompson
Well it is basically a press release announcing a new book, but TFA does contain some things I didn't know. It specifically identifies the suggested author, namely Gerard, William’s final chancellor, later Bishop of Hereford and Archbishop of York.
That was new, though I wish they'd listed any of the reasons to think that.
They hint that it's stylographic, the details of which would not make terribly interesting reading. Still, I wish they could have picked out something, rather than irrelevant stuff about what a massive undertaking it was.
If they've got nothing more than "We ran it through the algorithm and this is what it popped out", then I'm not really all that interested in their conclusion. Stylometry provides hints but if you can't back it up with some sort of historiographic argument then it doesn't really inform history much.
Looking at the actual synopsis of the 1000-page (!) book [0], and the table of contents [1], rather than the press release, suggests that this was a fairly serious undertaking.
Thank you. That is much more compelling than the press release.
Sadly, at £143.00, I'm not that compelled. But I suspect I'll get what I wish to know eventually, perhaps from a podcast. (I'm more interested in the English language than British history, but I do end up listening to several podcasts who will certainly find this in their domain of interest.)
Exactly. Understanding the plot is a level-1 read through. Identifying the effects achieved by the author is a subsequent level, and then exploring how they achieve those effects is where a literary-level read starts.
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