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Don Carpenter (March 16, 1931 – July 28, 1995) was an American writer, best known as the author of Hard Rain Falling. He wrote numerous novels, novellas, short stories and screenplays over the course of a 22-year career that took him from a childhood in Berkeley, California and the Pacific Northwest to the corridors of power and ego in Hollywood. A close observer of human frailty, his writing depicted marginal characters like pool sharks, prisoners and drug dealers, as well as movie moguls and struggling actors. Although lauded by critics and fellow writers alike, Carpenter’s novels and stories never reached a mass audience and he supported himself with extensive work for Hollywood. Facing a mounting series of debilitating illnesses, Don Carpenter committed suicide in 1995.

Padura’s novel El hombre que amaba a los perros (The Man Who Loved Dogs) deals with the murder of Leon Trotsky and the man who assassinated him, Ramon Mercader. At almost 600 pages, it is his most accomplished work and the result of more than five years of meticulous historical research. The novel, published in September 2009, attracted a lot of publicity mainly because of its political theme. The novel centres ‘on Stalin’s murderous obsession with Leon Trotsky, an intellectual architect of the Russian Revolution and the founder of the Red Army’, and considers ‘how revolutionary utopias devolve into totalitarian dystopias.’

First published in 1976, it follows the travels of protagonists Edward Turnbull and Amelia Fitzgibbon. The pair is dropped on the surface of Mars (due to interference by Turnbull) prior to the Martian invasion of Earth that forms the storyline of The War of the Worlds. Edward and Amelia, who works for the inventor Sir William Reynolds, have used Reynolds’s space and time machine to jump into the future at the onset of the Mars invasion. They find that, on Mars, humans have been turned into Martian slaves.

This novel effectively binds the storylines of the H.G. Wells novels The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine into the same reality. Action takes place both in Victorian England and on Mars, as the time machine displaces the duo through space (in addition to time).

Technology is shown to be roughly Victorian of nature, so as not to destroy the setting for War of the Worlds, but also shows some unpublished advancements of Sir William Reynolds (such as a form of bicycle that requires no input from the rider).

The names of the characters also suggest historical Britain. Both Edward’s name and Fitzgibbon’s refer to Edward Gibbon, the famous British historian and author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, while Turnbull is suggestive of, among others, the famous early British actor John Turnbull and, more generally, the Bulldog, which is popularly used to represent England and its defiance in war.

Recursive science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction, which itself takes the form of an exploration of science fiction within the narrative of the story.

Mike Resnick and Robert J. Sawyer cite Typewriter in the Sky by L. Ron Hubbard as an example of recursive science fiction. Gary Westfahl writes, “Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) offered a non-genre model.” Westfahl noted that Hubbard’s book was “an early genre example, perhaps inspired by Pirandello”.

Films under the subgenre include Time After Time (1979) and The Time Machine (2002). In Time After Time, H. G. Wells, who wrote The Time Machine, is fictionally portrayed as an inventor of an actual time machine. In the 2002 film The Time Machine, the story by the real-life Wells serves as inspiration for the film’s protagonist to invent a time machine. | WIKIPEDIA |

The setting is the Kingdom of Edeyrnion in North Wales, where the indigenous Forest people have ruled by the Brythonic Celts on behalf of Rome. Prince Einion, ruler of Edeyrnion, owes allegiance to the Emperor Arthur, who rules Britain for Rome. While historians tells us that Rome withdrew its army from Britain around 410 AD, Roman influence is still strong in Powys’s late 5th century. But in the autumn of 499 AD the Saxons, under their leader Colgrim, are advancing on Edeyrnion and the Forest people have joined with them against their Brythonic rulers.

The main plot follows the various experiences of Porius, the heir to the throne of Edeyrnion, the novel’s eponymous protagonist, and his struggle to gain freedom from the influence of his parents. This in particular involves resolving his divided loyalties between Rome and the indigenous peoples of Wales. Porius himself not only has Roman, Brythonic, ancestors but an ancestor who was an aboriginal giant as well as relatives amongst the Forest people. Porius gains maturity, and with it personal freedom, through a number of significant experiences, including especially this encounter with the aboriginal giants of Wales, as well as the profound influence of the magician, prophet, and possibly the god Chronos/Saturn, Myrddin, who reinforces the values, and develops on, the teachings of Porius’s earlier teacher, the Christian heretic Pelagius. A major climax in the novel comes when Porius mates with the young giantess, he names Creiddylad, one of two surviving Cewri, or giants, the true aboriginals of Britain. This is immediately followed by the violent deaths of Creiddyladd and her father.

However, this novel goes beyond Porius’s experience, at times focusing on other characters. This includes the highly significant scene involving Myrddin’s magical transformation of the owl Blodeuwedd into a young girl. Another important episode occurs when Morfydd, and Euronwy, Porius’s mother, unite “to aid the endangered House of Cunedda”. This involves Morfydd “sacrificing her love for Rhun” by agreeing to a political marriage with Porius, “in order to create harmony between the Roman and aboriginal peoples”. Then there is the scene which involves Brochvael, Morfydd’s scholarly father, who represents classical Roman culture, confronting the aboriginal worlds of Sibylla and the Druids, which dramatizes the novel’s central political conflict in yet another way.

The novel’s final climax comes with Porius’s “rescue” of Myrddin from his entombment by the enchantress Nineue on the summit of Snowdon, Wales’ highest mountain. A scene where, according to Powys scholar C. A. Coates, Porius saves “the good magician” by resisting “the temptation of the bad fairy”. However, the ending is ambiguous, and “Merlin’s stature at the end of the novel is such to preclude any sense that his is not in fact the ultimate power”. Powys provides invaluable commentary on Nineue in his “The Characters of the Book”. However, by freeing Myrddin Porius makes possible Myrddin’s return in two thousand years to re-establish the Saturnian Age of Gold.

At the end of the novel Ederynion remains free from Saxon domination, a freedom that it will retain and which will shape the subsequent history of the Welsh: “The new nation, the Cymry, is to be born as a result of the Saxon invasion”. And Porius himself has also gained the necessary personal freedom and maturity he that will need as the future ruler of Edeyrnion. | WIKIPEDIA |