It's not only a grasp of history that's required for good government; a good imagination is also crucial.

Or maybe that's why he lost. Hmm.

And he was interesting. Not competent, mind you, but interesting. (For the record, I voted for the Democrat. Not that it helped -- he came in third.)

It's pretty easy to squelch this urge when the candidate most likely to be interesting is also morally reprehensible, but when I'm (say) weighing which Democratic Senate candidates is most likely to defeat Norm Coleman, it can be hard to determine the extent to which my urge to go for the interesting option fuels my fondness for Al Franken.

It's incomplete as a description of real life simply because "novelist" and "politician" aren't exclusive. They're both things people do, and some people do one thing very much and others not so much, and others do several things a lot, and so on through the various balances. Sometimes one role enriches another in the doer's thoughts and feelings, sometimes it distracts. I also suspect that political activists of a lot of flavors would say that in times and conditions of injustice, making a bigger mess is actually a crucial part of getting to jutice, dragging the veils off what's rotten and seeing just who's responsible.

None of which detracts from it being a very funny comment. :)

bracket cynic endbracket
No. Worms are useful. Try slugs.
bracket slash cynic endbracket

Although come to think of it, does this say anything about politicians* in particular? Seems to me this might be more a feature of writers. Since (unlike most folks) writers are paid for their ability to create interesting problems. What is a Plot, after all, but a collection of problems arranged to show a Protagonist to best advantage?

* disclaimer: Maybe he says more in the link. I can't follow it from work.

Jane

That I can no longer read my own comment is a problem I shall studiously ignore. Hey, how 'bout that chariot team?

That doesn't scan. Try:

Open cynic tag
No. Worms are useful. Try slugs.
Then close cynic tag.

(Well, it looked like a haiku!)

There was a fairly detailed discussion of Barnes' work in one of the recent open threads, which you might also find useful if you can track it down.

I think the general consensus was: don't read Earth Made of Glass unless you're in the mood to be really depressed.

That speaks to my experience. I've never been more than a casual gamer, but I do know submissions. The sense that a novel is playing an existing game, rather than creating its own game, is often what gets an otherwise passable manuscript rejected.

Jane (12): Coningsby? Henrietta Temple? Have there been other novelist politicians? Novelist generals, novelist spooks, sure; but I'm not coming up with other decent novelists who held high office in parliamentary governments.

Abi (14), nicely done.

Ew.

Well, there was Disraeli. I'm not sure if you would classify him as a decent novelist, but he managed to make some money at it.

A few too many over here, I fear. Douglas Hurd, Jeffrey Archer, Edwina Currie ... I quite like some of A.P. Herbert's novels, but they're less fun than the immortal Misleading Cases. Oh, and how about that seminal skiffyman Thomas More?

But wait! A quick search for "politician" in the Encyclopedia of SF reminds me of those household names Vernon Bartlett, Ignatius Donnelly, Stephen King-Hall, Andre Laurie, Rudolf Chambers Lehmann, Kenneth MacKay, John Francis Maguire, Chris Mullin, Joseph Compton-Rickett, Frank A. Ridley, and Julius Vogel....

Worm farms are very lucrative, as long as you keep the soil moist and don't let them get out. The Durham farm does a thriving business keeping all the bait shops around us supplied, as well as gardeners looking to augment their own worm population.

I just go buy the bait worms and turn them loose in my garden. Cheaper and they do the same thing as the mail order ones do.

Politicians don't want to open cans of worms; can't put the top back on the can and the worms never do what they think they'll do.

In any case, I will not admit to anyone whose respect I hope to keep to having actually read "1945", nor would I consider inflicting such a cruel and unusual punishment on anyone, even to promote the cause of Literacy.

Trollope? But he was really a bureaucrat (Post office) rather than a politician. My favorite novelist, though.

Oh, I love you! That's wonderful, redeeming art from goop. :)

Come to think of it, that maybe describes the voting population, too.

My vote on #1 Barnes novel to start out with is Mother of Storms. I loved that book. Although ... what's the one with "Penna Pike, Penna Pike, Penna Penna Penna Pike?" That one was really entertaining. One for the ... something?

abi #32: We've had a few more such cases post-1989, although Havel is of course by far the best-known. It seems that playwrights are more likely to succeed than novelists - might this be because they have to deal with people and realities of solving problems in life's endeavours (i. e., getting the thing staged) more directly? Certainly the #2 after Havel (in fact quite literally in the new-divorced Czech Republic's constitutional system) was Milan Uhde. Another one, though of rather smaller stature artistically, was Pavel Dostál. Does diplomacy count as politics? Then Jiří Gruša (and of course, the well known case of Chingiz Aitmatov - I hope his politics was better than his writing, BTW; I hated his pseudo-SF - socialist realism trying to pass itself off as magical). In the 1960es, there was Jan Procházka - though I admit that doesn't count as a "parliamentary system" :-) And how come none of the Americans has mentioned Mario Vargas Llosa? (OK, I'm willing to accept the argument that a lost election doesn't make him a politician any more than Upton Sinclair, or RAH while we're at it...)

Politician novelists: Hilaire Belloc comes to mind; best known for his history and poetry, he also wrote several novels, and was a member of Parliament from 1906 to 1910. Of his novels I've read, I enjoyed The Emerald of Catherine the Great a little better than The Haunted House, but both are good.

At least, by \good/ publishers; some seem to think that More of Same is the only thing that sells. But that's a beautiful phrasing of a common problem.

Every fricken time.

And has anyone, anywhere ever deliberately canned worms?

Yes. I've seen them for sale in vending machines to fishermen.

I have never yet opened it. But I have threatened it many times, and once stuck a post-it note with someone's name on it -- "I've got a can of whoopass with your name on it!"

Front
Towards
Enemy

We now resume our regularly scheduled program.

Would Walpole count ?

(I have a probably wrong hunch you'd find more politicial figures writing poetry if you classed them by type of writing productions, though I can't fathom why...)

There does, I note, seem to be a relationship between being a poet and being a diplomat (certainly a French diplomat, as in the cases of Paul Claudel and Saint-John Perse).

OMG !
You mean I managed to make a short paper on Robert Walpole including a paragraph passing by about his writing The Castle of Otranto and his love of Laurence Sterne, and none of the two and a half teachers who read it managed to correct me ?

Good to stand corrected after all these years... Thank you.

So obvious I didn't think of it: André Malraux.

The novelist was Horace Walpole, son of Robert Walpole.

Of course there's Aimé Césaire. I've managed to avoid reading Malraux, even though Man's Fate was once within my grasp.

#53: I always felt that for maximum idiot-proofness that should read: THIS SIDE TOWARDS ENEMY. Or perhaps THIS SIDE GOES BANG.

61: Semtex is the name of the company; it's moved from manufacturing PE to manufacturing energy drinks.

Fear
Is
The Enemy

Keep your Friends
Close
And your enemies
Closer

Murphy rules

@Fragano Ledgister (#59):

I could have bet you'd answer Césaire to Senghor.

Malraux was one of those writers who are of a given time, and as such his writings have aged, for better or worse - and I'd say worse myself as far as reading pleasure is concerned. His language felt bland and contrieved to me, and I do think it often came from his trying to be cinematic using referents of his time.

And I'm with you on Malraux. Or am I thinking of Gide? I can never keep them straight. They're both boring, anyway. (Oh, except for the part in La Voie Royale where Malraux is looting Angkor Wat. I kept hoping he'd get squashed flat.)

Thank you. Guess I can produce something worth the time once in a while.

The problem Gide and Malraux both share is that their books read more like men of letters' than like writers'. If I make sense.
Gide is in another league though. The man can be terrifyingly precise when he wants to.

@Dave Langford (#60): Hey ,thanks. Will have to go dig for a copy of that book.

Two more humorous efforts by the same authors: Horse Nonsense and Garden Rubbish are, unsurprisingly, about horses and gardening. Terry Pratchett often quotes, with relish, the latter's concept of the Unpleasaunce which lurks in the far corner of every garden.

My fear is that I would somehow look up, just at the instant of its being triggered, and the last thing I would think is "Say, now why does it say that side's supposed to be toward the *enemy*?"

You know that aphorism about how we are our own worst enemies? That's why.

I know of it through Dorothy Parker's review of it, a fine and scathing piece.

But wait! A quick search for "politician" in the Encyclopedia of SF reminds me of those household names ...Ignatius Donnelly..."

Urk. I've read excerpts from his "scientific" writings--he wrote novels as well? This may top "The Little Belgian Orphan" in my list of Literature To Be Avoided.

That reminds me: since one of your many hats is as a book reviewer I'd like to ask what may be a dumb question. I keep hearing how funny the "Nigel Molesworth" books are (one friend who spent her teen years in Ireland went into a twenty-minute dialog with quotes when I asked about them) but it seems the only editions available are all from the U.K. Before I e-mail my favorite used bookstore in England to see if they have any of the books, is the humor in them universal enough to make sense to someone from the U.S.A.?

[Looks nervously over shoulder for menacing gaze of SFWA DCMA cops] You can find some samples of Molesworthiana at this possibly illicit site, named for our lad's school, St Custard's.

This could be made more clear with the use of parentheses.

It didn't get printed in 1997 for a number of reasons (that Barnes explains). He's selling it directly in unlocked PDF format.

> John Barnes has an e-book available, never before published.

Thanks - just bought it. At $US4 it's in impulse purchase territory.

Final thought on Barnes: If I had to describe his writing in one word I'd have to say "variable" - I think his books range randomly from "brilliant" to "fair" - but he gets a huge amount of credit from me for having written the *only* good depiction of ethnic hatred I've seen in SF in 'The Earth made of Glass'.

On the unlikely assumption that anyone's still reading this moribund thread, can you think of anyone else who's done a good job? Maybe Jack Vance to an extent...