Tuesday, October 23, 2007

NASA's loss. Literature's gainDafydd ab Hugh (born October 22, 1960 as David Friedman) is a U.S. science fiction author.In the 1980s he served in the U.S. Navy training to be a Radar Intercept Officer, hoping to be selected to become an astronaut.

The major reason people tend to hate self-styled intellectuals is that so often, their thinking is divorced from ordinary human thought. They say or write things so truculent, while simultaneously so risible, that you wonder whether they need a sedative -- or a keeper.

The Golden Notebook is the kind of novel every publisher waits for impatiently - a major work by a major talent. It is surely on of the most important English novels of our time.

Here in this labyrinth of overwhelmingly real stories is the full, complex story of a modern woman, Anna - a woman who will be talked about as were Ibsen's and Shaw's "new women" when the first appeared.

Anna tries to live with the freedom of a man. She is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one with a black cover she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with Communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which her heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer, threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

With these various thread of her story - her life - Anna weaves a shatteringly vivid tapestry of contemporary concerns. Never for a moment can you doubt the validity of her testament. Documentary precision combines with deep narrative art to reveal the truth of being an intelligent woman. Her conclusions are likely to be debated for generations.

They were creatures seemingly spawned straight from the pits of Hell -- demons, zombies, fire-breathing imps -- all too horrifically close to the stuff of nightmare to be real. But they were. And on the inhospitable moons of Mars, Corporal Flynn "Fly" Taggart, Earth's last line of defence against a seemingly inexhaustible supply of alien warriors, beat them back almost single-handedly.

But Taggart discovers that the war had barely begun...for while he was fighting them on Mars, the hellish creatures had established a beachhead on Earth itself. Now, with the aid of a fourteen-year-old female computer genius, an unrepentantly Mormon sniper, and the best soldier in this woman's army, Fly Taggart must defeat the invaders -- and their treacherous human allies -- yet again...