Five Extremely Grumpy Speculative Novels

[james_davis_nicoll]

Stories infused with the spirit of "Get off my lawn!"

Five Extremely Grumpy Speculative Novels

Comments

[glaurung]

Now a real challenge would be to find five Heinlein novels that are not at all grumpy.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Some of the juveniles would qualify. Not sure if five.

[scott_sanford]

Why should the Queen enjoy unrestricted travel on government airplanes?

Fair enough; it's her air force.

(ObSF: Omega by Stewart Farrar. At one point the entire royal family disappears from an RAF base supposedly on total lockdown. It turns out the security breach came from the king walking into a hanger and telling the poor bloke on duty, "Prepare a helicopter; I'm going out." It is the Royal Air Force, so...)

[spiralsheep]

"20th century history was largely the product of the boarding-school rivalry between great-aunt Martha and her arch-frenemy, the Countess"

Blast you for making me want to read this novel!

I was describing In the Wet to a friend recently but failed to capture how utterly Shute it is.

[jsburbidge]

Really, no.

My reaction on reading /Passenger to Frankfurt/ some decades ago was that it was a very, very poor man's /Illuminatus!/ I kept hoping for a character with the three-dimensionality of, say, Howard the Dolphin to appear

[spiralsheep]

Otoh, thank you for attempting to save me from myself.

Otoh, I've never been a Christie fan so I'd in no way be disappointed, and it would be fair vengeance for me being probable cause of James re-reading Rule Britannia.

[scott_sanford]

Instead you got characters with the substance of Joe Malik's dogs?

[(Anonymous)]

"The Big Four" (1927) is another Agatha Christie novel that is away from what she usually does (with her own name), and it stars Hercule Poirot. World order is threatened by a secret organisation, foreign of course... Wikipedia has an article on this book, and reasons for its nature which is more like a James Bond movie, and what Dr Fu Manchu had to do with it, and some bad things that even Agatha Christie said about it.

Robert Carnegie

[james_davis_nicoll]

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