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Karel Capek’s Apocryphal Stories
In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads the charming short stories of Karel Čapek
The modern meaning of the word ‘robot’ has its origins in a 1920 play by Czech writer Karel Čapek. The play, titled R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), begins in a factory which manufactures artificial people, the ‘universal robots’ of the play’s title. The robots are designed to serve humans and work for them, but the robots eventually turn on their masters, wiping out the human race (shades, or rather a foreshadowing, of The Terminator here). This sense of ‘robot’ is taken from the earlier one defined above – namely, the Czech for ‘slave worker’ or ‘drudge’.
Karel Čapek himself didn’t coin the word. The word ‘robot’ was in existence before he wrote his play. But nor did Čapek come up with the idea of taking the word ‘robot’ and using it to describe the man-made droids that feature in his play. He originally called them labori, from the Latin for ‘work’, but it was his brother, Josef Čapek, who suggested roboti. Josef, himself a gifted artist, would later write a volume of poems from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in which he was interned. In April 1945, just weeks before the end of the war, he became one of the 6 million Jews who were murdered in Hitler’s Final Solution.
Most readers who know the name Karel Čapek associate it with robots and little else. Yet Čapek was also the author of some charming short stories and skits, which were collected together as Apocryphal Stories (Modern Classics)
The Best David Gemmell Novels Everyone Should Read
The 10 best novels by David Gemmell, master of heroic fantasy
In the 1980s, with his debut novel Legend (1984), the British author David Gemmell revolutionised heroic fantasy. Drawing on the stories of Robert E. Howard and the novels of Michael Moorcock and J. R. R. Tolkien, Gemmell also took inspiration from his favourite novelist, the prolific writer of Westerns, Louis L’Amour. L’Amour’s stripped-back style of writing, and his emphasis on the darker aspects of the Wild West, combined with the epic qualities of The Lord of the Rings, and Gemmell’s own strong belief in the power of redemption, to create a new model for heroic fantasy, with no-nonsense writing, fast-paced action, and superlative characterisation. There are no longueurs in Gemmell’s fiction, no padding which sees characters talking at length without doing anything. The result was a string of bestselling fantasy novels which were true page-turners. He has often been described as one of those writers who can keep readers up into the small hours because they simply have to read another chapter (or, indeed, several chapters). Below we’ve chosen ten of the greatest David Gemmell novels – going roughly from the 10th best to the number one book (a controversial view) – any of which could be read as a standalone tale of courage, action, love, power, and redemption.
Troy: Lord of the Silver Bow. Gemmell’s final project, which he was still at work on when he died in 2006, was a trilogy about the Trojan War, harking back to the original work of fantasy literature in the western world, Homer’s Iliad. This book, the first in the trilogy, follows Heliakon (better known as Aeneas) but also boasts a cast including Odysseus, Andromache, Agamemnon, and many others. Read the rest of this entry
A Short Introduction to Free Indirect Style
Sep 19
Posted by interestingliterature
Free indirect style, alternatively known as free indirect speech or free indirect discourse, is a narrative style which requires some explanation and unpicking, since it is subtle and sometimes difficult to spot in a work of fiction. However, it is one of the most powerful tools a writer possesses, and has been used to great effect by writers as diverse as Jane Austen, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence.
What is free indirect style (free indirect speech/free indirect discourse)? Put simply, free indirect style is when the voice of a third-person narrator takes on the style and ‘voice’ of one of the characters within the story or novel. It is, if you will, as if a detached third-person narrator has begun to turn into a first-person narrator, i.e. one of the characters within the story (or novel). The objectivity and detachment we associate with third-person narrators dissolves into the subjective and personal style of a character. Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Read the rest of this entry →
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Tags: Analysis, Commentary, Explanation, Fiction, Free Indirect Discourse, Free Indirect Speech, Free Indirect Style, Introduction, Literature, Narration, Summary