London Calling: The Iron Heel and the Literature of Ideas
Last week I discussed Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker as an example of a true literature of ideas: a work structured not as a traditional narrative, with plot and character development as we know them, but instead built around the ideas that the work’s presenting, so that the book’s material is defined not by narrative but by the ideas at the core of its theme. As it happens, I recently stumbled across another example of this sort of thing.
Published in 1907, Jack London’s The Iron Heel is an imaginative account of North America sliding into a totalitarian society. London, a socialist, wrote the book as a cautionary tale about the oligarchs of his era. It’s an odd thing, mixing journalism and (what we now call) dystopic science fiction with economic hectoring. It’s slow going, particularly in the first half, but the climax is exciting adventure writing. You can see why it didn’t catch on, but it’s still worth looking at.
(You can read the book here, here, or over here, or listen to an audio version over here. I note there was recently a piece about the book on Daily Kos; you can find that here.)
It won’t be long now…
Astronomer James Elliot gets a featured obit because he discovered the rings of Uranus (okay, wipe that smirk off your face). What’s also noteworthy is that he apparently did so in a kind of jury-rigged fashion. According to the Times obituary:
Also in the news is the tsunami and the largest earthquake in a century or more that hit Japan. Whatever our global technological progress (even while world politics continues to destabilize), we tend to forget just how fragile we are as a species even without our efforts to do ourselves in. During the Cold War, the end of the world was nuclear. Then it was terrorism and religious fanatacism. But, maybe it will end up just being good old Mother Nature. Time to go reread J.G. Ballard.
