Month: February 2025

Now that the twentieth century is twenty-five years in the rear-view mirror, we have crystallized for us the enduring question of the time’s art (post-WII, at least).

The first three chapters to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening offer an easy-to-see and instructive example into showing without telling. The point of these opening chapters is to get across to the reader the idea of turmoil beneath the apparently idyllic, and Chopin cleverly begins with the veneer.

Below is the first twenty-three lines to the first in a series of poems about Philip Bunyan — better known as Welterweight Phil — the younger brother to Paul and Peter Bunyan. This first piece tells of Phil’s youth; how he, born in 1850s Maine, grew up middle-sized to his oversized and undersized brothers; how he, being a protective, pugnacious youth, fought for their reputations; and how he, even before beginning upon his life of victorious conquests, won for himself the nickname ‘Welterweight Phil.’

Philip K. Dick’s Penultimate Truth strikes one as an example of science fiction that Dickens would have been a reader of, though that Great would, of course, feel himself compelled to edit as he went along. In particular, the opening chapters are a wonderful example of an author who well knows what authorship is supposed to be, one who can perfectly mask a very deep and very important criticism of society behind the veneer of fictional entertainment.

Asimov’s Full Future is a title that can be applied to a wider series of novels that is itself made up of three initially independent book series by Isaac Asimov. Despite this original state of being unconnected, the three series were weaved together into one by the author in his later works, and they form for us now one gigantic series of science fiction that represents one of the highest achievements of literature in the second half of the twentieth century.