review by Brian Charles Clark
The Green and the Gold: A Novel of Andrew Marvell: Spy, Politician, Poet
Christopher Peachment
Thomas Dunne, 2004
Andrew Marvell was a contemporary of John Milton and John Donne. As a poet he is a far lesser light than Donne or Milton, although as far as poems read in their entirety, Marvell may be the better known, as he was the author of “To His Coy Mistress,” the classic “let’s make hay while the sun shines” seduction poem. It was Donne who wrote such memorable lines as “for whom the bell tolls” (in a sermon that is rarely read anymore) and Milton who wrote Paradise Lost (and other huge poems that few people read today), it was Marvell who made the marvelous line, “my vegetable love grows ever grows / vaster than empires and more slow.” Donne and Marvell are typically remembered as members of a group of “metaphysical poets,” which Donne certainly was, though Marvell wears the title reluctantly. “One final piece of advice if you seek to become a poet,” Christopher Peachment’s fictional Marvell says: “Resist the temptation.” Read the rest of this entry »
Science fiction comes in a number of flavors. There’s “hard” SF, which speculates from a basis in the physical sciences. There’s “soft” SF, which works from a basis in the so-called human sciences (especially anthropology). The market-driven art is further subdivided into horror, fantasy, and sword-and-sorcery. Firing shots across the bow of these main genres, though, are those writers who create what might be called, to borrow a term from today’s music scene, “mash-ups.” Joanna Russ, for instance, is perhaps best known for her feminist SF novel The Female Man, which throws gender into a mix of hard and soft science. Then there’s Samuel R. Delany, whose New Wave classic Dhalgren pointed the way toward a science fiction that was truly literary and not merely boilerplate genre fiction. Into this mix we can add what may be the oldest form of speculative fiction: the retelling of myths and legends. 
