"Oh, my lungs and liver, what do you want? Oh, goroo, goroo!"

May 6, 2019 2:30 PM

'An amphibious boy in a canvas suit': Charles Dickens's monsters: "The only thing that would prevent this whole passage from appearing in a Warhammer 40,000 novel is that GW's writers could never sustain this level of prose." Joseph Manola of the Against the Wicked City fantasy adventure gaming blog writes about Charles Dicken's powers of description.

"You know that city, right? You've read about it in a hundred dystopian novels and OSR campaign settings. Some of you will have read about it on this very blog. (I called it the Wicked City.) But all that any of us have done is taken Dickens's metaphors a bit more literally than he does here."

posted by Caduceus (8 comments total)

Dicken's prose will echo down the centuries like Milton, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible — is echoing, in fact; I can't be more specific because I don't have access to either book right now, but there are passages in Gravity's Rainbow which parallel paragraphs in Bleak House too closely for me to believe it could be coincidental.

And I think one of the reasons Pynchon has not equaled the greatness of GR is that he moved on from that great Model (which reminds me that there seem to be a lot of similarities between The Crying of Lot 49 and Lolita, though not particularly in the prose).
posted by jamjam at 2:56 PM on May 6, 2019 [6 favorites]

For a side project I happened to discover this bit of Dickensian SF: My Wonderful Adventures in Skitzland in which the protagonist decides to dig a hole in his garden and just keeps digging until he falls into the hollow center of the earth, a land in which, as one local explains to the hole digger:

... the inhabitants, until they come of age, retain that illustrious appearance which you have been so fortunate as never to have lost. During the night of his twenty-first birthday, each Skitzlander loses the limbs which up to that period have received from him no care, no education. Of those neglected parts the skeletons alone remain, but all those organs which he has employed sufficiently continue unimpaired. I, for example, devoted to the study of the law, forgot all occupation but to think, to use my senses, and to write. I rarely used my legs, and therefore Nature has deprived me of them.

You’ll never guess how he gets home.
posted by notyou at 3:34 PM on May 6, 2019 [3 favorites]

> And I think one of the reasons Pynchon has not equaled the greatness of GR is that he moved on from that great Model.

that’s just like your opinion man
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 3:59 PM on May 6, 2019 [19 favorites]

Uber and Finn cartage?
posted by clavdivs at 4:00 PM on May 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

Law and Howitzer
posted by notyou at 4:47 PM on May 6, 2019 [1 favorite]

He fixes the cable?
posted by axiom at 9:50 PM on May 6, 2019

OK - total Mark Twain newbie. Can you please recommend a few books by him that would be a good first read? He's been on my list for quite some time.
posted by rebent at 6:19 AM on May 7, 2019

Don't the band's lyrics in Lot 49 specifically reference Humbert Humbert?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 8:02 AM on May 7, 2019