Saturday 25 February 2017

Echoes Of Kipling

The beginning and end of Poul Anderson's The Game Of Empire echo Kipling as does the title of SM Stirling's Dies The Fire.

Science Fiction Weekly commented that Stirling described details "...with the skill of a Poul Anderson..." This is correct and we know what he means although, years ago, a well-read house visitor, finding a copy of an sf review magazine lying around, asked me if it was a joke! It was full of authors and titles that he had never heard of.

Library Journal described Dies The Fire as set in a near future. However, it was published in 2005 whereas its opening chapter is dated 1998 so I would call it a recently divergent alternative history.

More on this later.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And just before the beginning of DIES THE FIRE, Stirling gives us an all too apppropriate quote from Kipling's poem "Recessional." The agony and horror of the Change is ominously prefigured in the line "Far called our navies melt away/On dune and headland sinks the fire;..."

I checked, but I saw nothing from or reminiscent of Kipling at the end of DIES THE FIRE.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
No, just the title.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Understood! You meant simply the lines quoted by Stirling from Kipling's poem "Recessional." We do get Kipling allusions/reminiscences at the beginning and end of Anderson's THE GAME OF EMPIRE.

Sean