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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FraserRonald" data-source="post: 1487049" data-attributes="member: 7892">Hey, I'm actually at home this time. No one to call me away from my desk. Well, my wife, but she wouldn't do anything that evil.I believe Journey to the Center of the Earth was Jules Verne. Having only read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, I have to say that I'm rather unimpressed with Verne. It could, of course, be the translation, but the story just wasn't that inspiring. Much like Last of the Mohicans, I find the movie actually better than the book! I know, I know, blasphemy. I shall perform 20 Hail Kurosawa's to make amends.As for Wells, one of the things that is important to remember is that he was a socialist, a part of the Fabian Society (along with George Bernard Shaw) and that informed everything he wrote. He wasn't socialist in the modern, mistaken sense of being a communist, but rather he expected that man was inherantly good, that the state had certain duties towards its citizens and that the future--with the rise of technology--could be wonderful. He wasn't one that looked back to the past for the Golden Age, he looked to the future. However, he never forgot about man's weaknesses. Consider the Shape of Things to Come, vivid with both hope and despair. Really fascinating to look back on. It's all the more surprising that he doesn't pontificate on imperialism in War of the Worlds or the class structure that dominated Britain at the time in the Time Machine. Of course, do I mean to say that's what these books are about? Well, no, that's just my interpretation. Yeah, I mean, there was a great lesson and great characters in Frankenstein, I just hate it when an author really belabours a point, beats the reader over the head with it as if to say "In case you are too stupid to see it, this is the point." Graham Greene did the same thing in the Power and the Glory. It's like, "okay, okay, I get it, he's a Christ figure, now get on with the damn story!" He's a pretty whacked out writer. Back when I was in university, but after I had finished his courses, he was being acclaimed as one of the originators of a new genre termed "Gothic Sexual." I didn't even want to go near it. He keeps a dream journal and a lot of his stuff comes right from that, which is obvious in his stories. I think his most accessible stuff is in the short story collection Inspecting the Vaults. The eponymous story is really, really atmospheric in a Kafka-esque way. There's also the highly entertaining (in a weird way) but quite odd "Knox Abroad" which has John Knox in Colonial America. Really bizarre. Check out his <a href="http://www.sju.ca/mccormack/biography.htm" target="_blank">bio page</a> from the St. Jerome's University website. SJU is a church college affiliated to the Univeristy of Waterloo and its where I was registered. Check out the pic. He was quite popular among the young ladies, though he never acted with impropriety. Please do post the results of this experiment. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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