Sunday 2 April 2017

Good Goth Night

It is 2:39 AM. I have just returned from a Goth Night at Morecambe Winter Gardens. I want to post about uses of the Bible in fiction but that will have to wait until after a few hours of sleep.

Fantasy can assume the existence of supernatural beings. Any other fiction can feature characters who quote the Bible but in diverse contexts. (Poul Anderson, of course, did both.) Thus, we will find very different things when we look inside Poul Anderson, James Blish, CS Lewis and Stieg Larsson...

Good night.

4 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

In the strange ways these things happen, your comments here reminded me of Poul Anderson's STARFARERS (1998). In the very last chapter of the book, Chapter 51, we see Captain Nansen, apparently the very last Catholic, quoting Job 38.31 to Hanny Dayan, seemingly the last Jew, eleven thousand years from now. I'll quote from the Douai Reims Challoner version of Job: "Shalt thou be able to join together the shining stars the Pleiades, or canst thou stop the turning about of Arcturus?" We see PA again quoting from the Bible in that chapter of STARFARERS, three years before he died.

And of course, the prime theme of STARFARERS is that for mankind to achieve its utmost, the race HAS to leave Earth, to seek outwards into the universe. Indeed that is one of the most important UNDERLYING themes of all of Anderson's works and thought.

Sean

David Birr said...

Paul:
If you're a real Goth, where were you when we sacked Rome?!

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

David,
Different kind of Goths, of course!
Paul.

David Birr said...

Paul:
Yes, of course I know. I was quoting a humorous T-shirt.