Comments on: Geographiction?

By: Roderick

Roderick — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:55:30 +0000

Verne also wrote a long essay or short book about Poe, titled "Edgard [sic] Poe and His Works," and his novel The Sphinx of the Ice is a direct sequel to Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym -- as, in its way, is At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft (whose essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" also deals with Poe).

By: Joel Schlosberg

Joel Schlosberg — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:31:12 +0000

Authors who were against some form of racism/prejudice but in favor of others are actually pretty common, for instance Mark Twain had some pretty nasty views on native Americans, or these two sets of WWII-era cartoons from Dr. Seuss (let’s put it this way: one is consistent with The Sneetches and the other isn’t, and let’s not even get into his pro-FDR, anti-isolationist views):
http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dspolitic/Racism.html
http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dspolitic/Japan.html

By: Joel Schlosberg

Joel Schlosberg — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:22:34 +0000

The gaining-a-day plot point was taken from Edgar Allan Poe’s story “Three Sundays in a Week”; Poe’s role in the development in science fiction is even more neglected than Verne. Coincidentally the page of definitions you link to includes Hugo Gernsback’s one as “the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story”, as that quote indicates he considered Poe to be the equal of Verne and Wells, all three of which were frequently reprinted in Gernsback’s magazines.

By: Roderick

Roderick — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:03:05 +0000

Don’t you mean ΨΦ?

By: Roderick

Roderick — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:02:05 +0000

I don’t know. He was sound on many things and unsound on many things. (For example: he sympathised with blacks and native americans but was rabidly anti-semitic. Which just goes to show, it’s always something.)

By: Roderick

Roderick — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:04:37 +0000

Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica can't be sf either, since they both take place in the past.

By: Black Bloke

Black Bloke — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:54:45 +0000

Don’t you mean SyFy?

By: David Gordon

David Gordon — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:28:19 +0000

Verne is good, but was he sound on Plotinus?

By: Brandon

Brandon — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:24:45 +0000

This reminds me of a thought I had about what the first serious sci-fi movie was. I thought it was Forbidden Planet in 1956, but then The Day The Earth Stood Still from 1951 came to mind (Metropolis might also count). But is the latter sci-fi? It has a space ship and two aliens, but takes place in then-contemporary times. That’s certainly not the case for Forbidden Planet.

By: John Markley

John Markley — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 21:06:27 +0000

I loved maps as a child, so I was very young when I found out what the international date line was. I was a pretty literal minded-child, so when I learned that you “gained” or “lost” a day when you crossed the line I thought you literally moved in time , and that if you repeatedly circled the globe traveling east and completed each circumnavigation in less than 24 hours you would travel into the past. I was terribly disappointed when I found out it didn’t actually work that way.