Sunday 27 December 2015

Past, Present And Future

I have begun to read Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham. How does this connect with Poul Anderson? It may be less evident to American readers, but for someone in the UK, Anderson and Grisham are two fictional windows onto the US. Here, I discussed John Buchan, John le Carre and John Grisham as carrying their readers through modern history from the eve of World War I to the high tech War on Terror. A Grisham novel featuring early twenty first technology reads like sf. Anderson, of course, takes us further into the future(s) but sets some of his sf in the present and also wrote a contemporary detective trilogy.

Both Anderson and Grisham write well and prolifically. Grisham perfects the contemporary American legal thriller whereas Anderson roams through time and the universe. We need fiction about contemporary society and also about our place in the cosmos.

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