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I picked up a Jack London volume including White Fang and The Call of the Wild for cheap at Borders last week.
The premise is cheesy, the POV bounces to different depths randomly, and the narration is sporadically deeply intrusive. It's also some of the best writing I've ever read, period.
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London wrote in a differnt time. Reader's tastes have changed a bit in a hundred years.
Yet The Sea Wolf remains one of the best books I have ever read. The characters, plot, dialogue, technical details, and wordsmithing can stand up to any other novel.
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It's funny, because Jack London could be considered the Asimov of his day.
London's writing is definitely better. He generally depersonalizes his characters on purpose, since he's using them the same way that Asimov uses gagetry. Long expositions about the settings and the nature of human (and animal) behavior are an essential part of his stories. His goal is usually to get readers to view humans (and thus themselves), not just as people, but as entities subject to natural law.
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Ditto on The Sea Wolf. It has been postulated that the character of Wolf Larsen was actually London's cynical (some would say antagonistic) depiction of Friedrich Nietzsche's 'Übermensch' ('superman' or 'overman,' depending on the translation) concept. Besides that, the sheer monstrosity of the character also generated its bizarre magnetism (for me, at least). Personally, I cared more about what happened to Larsen by the end of the novel than what 'Hump' was up to.
In my book, that's also the greatest epithet ever devised for a viewpoint character. 'Hump.' That's priceless.
Inkwell ----------------- "The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp." -Anonymous
[This message has been edited by Inkwell (edited August 31, 2006).]
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