Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford D. Simak, Robert Sheckley)

The Golden Age of science fiction

The failure of philosophy

The search for identity

Themes

Style

The beauty of the novel lies in the dissection of Herzog's mind. In typical Bellow style, the descriptions of characters' emotions and physical features are rich in wit and energy. Herzog's relationships are the central theme of the novel, not just with women and friends, but also society and himself. Herzog's own thoughts and thought processes are laid bare in the letters he writes.

Herzog spends most of his time fretting about what he isn't - a good husband, a good father, an academic success - that he defines himself in those terms, rather than accepting himself and defining himself in terms of positives. At the novel's end, he is beginning to show signs of making that transformation: "Myself is thus and so, and will continue thus and so. And why fight it? My balance comes from instability."

It is also worth noting that the name of the title character, Moses E. Herzog, comes from a minor character in James Joyce's Ulysses.

Herzog finds modern life degrading with its acceptance of materialism and victimhood. He left a stable marriage with his first wife (Daisy) because he found it dull and alienating, but ended up in a marriage that left him isolated and the victim of a con. Herzog's letters and thoughts reveal his readings of the major philosophers, but finds them all lacking, including Freud and Nietzsche, explaining in letters where their ideas have failed him. Herzog's own worldview is more optimistic: "The light of truth is never far away, and no human being is too negligible or corrupt to come into it."

The Golden Age of Science Fiction, often recognized as a period from the late 1930s or early 1940s through the 1950s, was an era during which the science fiction genre gained wide public attention and many classic science fiction stories were published. In the history of science fiction, the Golden Age follows the "pulp era" of the 1920s and 30s, and preceeds New Wave science fiction of the1960s and 70s. According to historian Adam Roberts, "the phrase [Golden Age] valorises a particular sort of writing: 'Hard SF', linear narratives, heroes solving problems or countering threats in a space-opera or technological-adventure idiom."

The saying "The golden age of science fiction is twelve", from the science fiction fan Peter Graham, means that many readers use "golden age" to mean the time when they first developed a passion for science fiction, often in adolescence.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11