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Jon Sparks's avatar

I wonder how you categorise Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, who wrote no fewer than five science fiction novels (under the overall title Canopus in Argos).

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Toby Litt's avatar

Hello. I'm going novel by novel here. I would call those science fiction novels by a literary writer. Though I think they may be a bit science fantasy. I remember picking them up in the school library and putting them down again, because they didn't have Chris Foss paintings on the cover, as EE "Doc" Smith's novels did. Do you recomend them?

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Jon Sparks's avatar

TBH it’s a long time since I read them, but I was impressed at the time. But a caveat: not everything I liked then has stood up particularly well to a re-read.

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Liz S's avatar

Hm, I knew I should have read The Hunters by James Salter, a literary novel about a fighter pilot in the Korean War. Lots of high velocity there. Except that Wikipedia says, "... until the next-to-last chapter, scenes involving flying are few and brief ... journey is more through [the MC's] soul than the combat missions."

Does he have a turbo-charged soul, flinging itself through doubt and questions at max speed? I suspect not.

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Toby Litt's avatar

Very good suggestion. I am starting to think that average overall speed might be a useful marker, too. And a novel where the main character, despite being a fighter pilot, is mostly sitting around would still have a lowish average mph. But a technothriller where they were chasing all around the place would be high speed. Thanks for the pointer.

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John-Paul Stonard's avatar

Transatlantic flights in Amis?

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Toby Litt's avatar

Very true. And there are many, aren't there? The poet of the tray table.

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Johnathan Reid's avatar

A pedantic STEM correction: 'Velocity' is a vector and requires a direction, whereas 'speed' is a scalar and doesn't.

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Carsten ten Brink's avatar

And there I was about to make a similar point. But it also made me think whether the direction might not also matter... someone travelling upwards at 70kmh is probably in a spacecraft or attached to an ICBM etc

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Word Tweak's avatar

Recently scored a copy of Mick Herron's Slow Horses. Keen to read it.

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