The coolest books of all time: amazing novels to read

Fiction: Recent Books: Jun. 20, 1938

Non-Fiction

THE VOICES OF THE CATHEDRAL—Sartell Prentice—Morrow ($3.50). With the animated scholarship that distinguished his rich interpretation of church architecture (The Heritage of the Cathedral), the late Dr. Prentice here analyzes church art in terms of its living background, clearly deciphers many an obscure iconographic symbol. His thesis: that church art. Most inspired in medieval Gothic, thereafter declined to ornamental gibberish because "there was no longer a body of tradition everywhere respected upon whose wings an artist might rise to heights far beyond his own capabilities."

SOME STILL LIVE—Frank G. Tinker Jr. —Funk & Wagnalls ($2.50).

Aviator Tinker, U. S. Navy-trained, flew a fighting-plane for the Spanish Leftists for seven months, earned his $1,500 a month by bringing down eight ships, quit when there was nobody left in his Russian squadron to whom he could talk. He had only one mishap: once when tight he was shot off a bicycle by a Civil Guard whom he almost ran down. His verdict on his foes: "The German pilots were very evidently the best-trained pilots in Spain. . . . If the German pilots had had the equipment that the Italian pilots had, there would have been an entirely different story-after each dogfight."

Science Fiction Was Around In Medieval Times – Here's What It Looked Like

Carl Kears, King's College London and James Paz, University of Manchester

Science fiction may seem resolutely modern, but the genre could actually be considered hundreds of years old. There are the alien green "children of Woolpit", who appeared in 12th-century Suffolk and were reported to have spoken a language no one could understand. There's also the story of Eilmer the 11th-century monk, who constructed a pair of wings and flew from the top of Malmesbury Abbey. And there's the Voynich Manuscript, a 15th-century book written in an unknowable script, full of illustrations of otherworldly plants and surreal landscapes.

These are just some of the science fictions to be discovered within the literatures and cultures of the Middle Ages. There are also tales to be found of robots entertaining royal courts, communities speculating about utopian or dystopian futures, and literary maps measuring and exploring the outer reaches of time and space.

The influence of the genre we call "fantasy", which often looks back to the medieval past in order to escape a techno-scientific future, means that the Middle Ages have rarely been associated with science fiction. But, as we have found, peering into the complex history of the genre, while also examining the scientific achievements of the medieval period, reveals that things are not quite what they seem.

Origins Amazing Stories, April 1926, Volume 1 Number 1. Wikimedia Commons

Science fiction is particularly troublesome when it comes to matters of classification and origin. Indeed, there remains no agreed-upon definition of the genre. A variety of commentators have located the beginnings of SF in the early-20th-century explosion of pulp magazines, and in the work of Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967), who proposed the term "scientifiction" when editing and publishing the first issue of Amazing Stories, in 1926.

"By 'scientifiction'," Gernsback wrote, "I mean the Jules Verne, H G Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story – a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision … Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading – they are always instructive."

But here Gernsback was already looking backwards in time to earlier writers to define SF. His "definition", too, was one that could also be applied to literary creations from much further into the past.

Science and fiction

Another longstanding idea is that the "science" in science fiction is key: SF can only begin, many historians of the genre proclaim, following the birth of modern science.

Alongside histories of SF, histories of science have long avoided the medieval period (over a thousand years in which, presumably, nothing happened). Yet the Middle Ages was no dark, static, ignorant time of magic and superstition, nor was it an aberration in the neat progression from enlightened ancients to our modern age. It was actually a time of enormous advances in science and technology.

The compass and gunpowder were developed and improved upon, and spectacles, the mechanical clock and blast furnace were invented. The period also laid the foundations for modern science through founding universities, advanced the scientific learning of the classical world, and helped focus natural philosophy on the physics of creation. The medieval science of "computus", for instance, was a complex measuring of time and space.

Use of medieval abacus and counting board. Wellcome Collection, CC BY-SA

Scholars have started to reveal the convergence of science, technology and the imagination in medieval literary culture, demonstrating that this era could be characterised by inventiveness and a preoccupation with novelty and discovery. Take the medieval romances that feature Alexander the Great soaring heavenwards in a flying machine and exploring the depths of the ocean in his proto-submarine. Or that of the famous medieval traveller, Sir John Mandeville, who tells of marvellous, automated golden birds that beat their wings at the table of the Great Chan.

Like those of more modern science fictions, medieval writers tempered this sense of wonder with scepticism and rational inquiry. Geoffrey Chaucer describes the procedures and instruments of alchemy (an early form of chemistry) in such precise terms that it is tempting to think that the author must have had some experience of the practice. Yet his Canon's Yeoman's Tale also displays a lively distrust of fraudulent alchemists, sending up their pseudo-science while imagining and dramatising its harmful effects in the world.

Alexander in his 'submarine'. British Library, Royal MS 15 E. Vi f. 20v, Author provided The medieval future

Modern science fiction has dreamt up many worlds based on the Middle Ages, using it as a place to be revisited, as a space beyond earth, or as an alternate or future history. The representation of the medieval past is not always simplistic, nor always confined to "back then".

William M Miller's immensely detailed medieval future in A Canticle of Leibowitz (1959), for instance, dwells on the way the past consistently reemerges in the fragments, materials and conflicts of a distant future. Connie Willis's Doomsday Book (1992), meanwhile, follows a time-travelling researcher of the near-future back to a medieval Oxford in the grip of the Black Death.

Although "medieval science fiction" may sound like an impossible fantasy, it's a concept that can encourage us to ask new questions about an often-overlooked period of literary and scientific history. Who knows? The many wonders, cosmologies and technologies of the Middle Ages may have an important part to play in a future yet to come.

Carl Kears, Lecturer in Old and Middle English before 1400, King's College London and James Paz, Lecturer in Early Medieval Literature, University of Manchester

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Head Of Zeus Scoops Dan Jones' Standalone Biography Of Henry V

Head of Zeus has snapped up a standalone biography of Henry V by medieval writer, historian and broadcaster Dan Jones.

Non-fiction publisher Richard Milbank acquired UK, Commonwealth and translation rights for Henry V from Georgina Capel Associates, for Head of Zeus' Apollo imprint, and the book will be published in hardback, e-book and audio — which will be read by the author — in September 2024.

"For Dan Jones, Henry V is one of the most intriguing characters in all medieval history, but also one of the hardest to pin down: a hardened warrior, who was also creative, bookish and artistic; a leader who made many mistakes, yet always triumphed when it mattered," the synopsis says. "Both standalone biography and a completion of Dan's sequence of English medieval histories that began with The Plantagenets (William Collins) and The Hollow Crown (Faber), Henry V is a thrilling and unmissable life of England's greatest king from our bestselling medieval historian."

Jones commented: "This is a biography I have been waiting many years to write. Henry V was considered the pinnacle and paragon of medieval kingship in his own time — and for centuries thereafter. Henry was a man of many parts — not all of which he wished the world to see. I am fascinated by his long apprenticeship, his many brushes with death and his rare ability, as king, to force his will onto his world. As a study of leadership in a time of crisis, his story seems especially meaningful right now."

Milbank added: "Dan is a writer in the form of his life, and I am delighted and honoured to be publishing his first foray into biography. The verve and excitement of his writing, allied to impeccable scholarship, promises a life of Henry V that transports the reader to the racing heart of the medieval battlefield."

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