Download Ebook A Crystal Age, by William Hudson
Why should be A Crystal Age, By William Hudson in this website? Obtain much more profits as what we have informed you. You could discover the other reduces besides the previous one. Reduce of obtaining guide A Crystal Age, By William Hudson as exactly what you desire is also supplied. Why? Our company offer you many type of guides that will not make you feel bored. You could download them in the web link that we give. By downloading and install A Crystal Age, By William Hudson, you have actually taken the proper way to pick the ease one, as compared to the inconvenience one.
A Crystal Age, by William Hudson
Download Ebook A Crystal Age, by William Hudson
Picture that you obtain such specific amazing experience and also expertise by simply checking out a book A Crystal Age, By William Hudson. How can? It appears to be higher when a book can be the most effective thing to find. E-books now will show up in published and also soft documents collection. Among them is this publication A Crystal Age, By William Hudson It is so normal with the published books. However, many folks often have no room to bring the book for them; this is why they cannot review guide any place they really want.
Keep your method to be below and also read this page finished. You can enjoy browsing guide A Crystal Age, By William Hudson that you truly refer to obtain. Right here, obtaining the soft file of the book A Crystal Age, By William Hudson can be done conveniently by downloading in the web link resource that we give right here. Obviously, the A Crystal Age, By William Hudson will certainly be your own quicker. It's no should wait for the book A Crystal Age, By William Hudson to get some days later after buying. It's no should go outside under the warms at mid day to head to guide store.
This is some of the benefits to take when being the member as well as get the book A Crystal Age, By William Hudson here. Still ask just what's different of the various other site? We supply the hundreds titles that are created by advised writers and also authors, around the world. The connect to acquire and also download and install A Crystal Age, By William Hudson is also very simple. You may not discover the difficult site that order to do more. So, the means for you to obtain this A Crystal Age, By William Hudson will be so easy, will not you?
Based upon the A Crystal Age, By William Hudson information that our company offer, you may not be so confused to be here and to be participant. Obtain currently the soft file of this book A Crystal Age, By William Hudson and also save it to be yours. You conserving can lead you to evoke the simplicity of you in reading this book A Crystal Age, By William Hudson Even this is forms of soft data. You could really make better chance to get this A Crystal Age, By William Hudson as the advised book to read.
The book presents an almost utopian society where man lives in peace and harmony. The young protagonist is transported into the future where he has difficulty in coming to grips with reality. A narrative that captures the imagination and strikes a crucial balance between the author's desires of a dystopian future society and reality.
- Published on: 2012-06-14
- Released on: 2006-10-01
- Format: Large Print
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 10.00" h x .55" w x 7.75" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 364 pages
About the Author
William Henry Hudson (1841 - 1922), author, naturalist, and ornithologist, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina to American parents. He spent his early years studying the local flora and fauna on the Argentine pampas and then settled in England in the early1870s. Hudson's most famous novel isGreen Mansions(1904), an exotic romance about a traveler who encounters a woman named Rima in the Guyana jungle of southeastern Venezuela. His other works includeThe Purple Land(1885) andFar Away and Long Ago (1918).
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
An irritating Rip Van Winkle romance
By Karl Janssen
A Crystal Age, published in 1887, is a utopian science fiction novel by English author W. H. Hudson. I hesitate to use those adjectives in describing the book, however, because it barely qualifies as either. The book reads like a tepid, watered-down ripoff of William Morris’s novel News from Nowhere, and Hudson even acknowledges the similarities in his preface to the 1906 edition. It turns out, however, that Hudson’s book preceded Morris’s by three years, so the former deserves credit for that. Wikipedia states that A Crystal Age “has been called a ‘significant S-F milestone.’” I don’t know who would call it that, however, because it is vastly inferior to News from Nowhere and just about any other utopian or dystopian novel I’ve ever read. Regardless of what influence it may have had on the genre, A Crystal Age is merely a baby step towards futurism and suffers from being too deeply rooted in the histrionic romantic literature of the past.
The story is narrated by a man named Smith. While out hiking the English countryside, he stumbles off a cliff and is knocked unconscious. When he comes to, he is covered in earth and entwined in tree roots. After digging himself out he discovers that the world he has awoken to is very different from the one he fell down in. At first, Smith doesn’t comprehend what has happened, but the reader recognizes that, much like the fairy tale of Rip Van Winkle, Smith has been asleep for a long time indeed. The sylvan landscape in which he now finds himself is largely uninhabited, but he soon encounters a party strolling in the woods, engaged in an apparent funeral procession. These beautifully dressed strangers gaze in horror at Smith’s antiquated and dirt-covered garments, and they are equally disturbed by his attempts at conversation. Although they speak the English language, they have no comprehension of words like “England,” “city,” or “money,” and do not recognize the names of any of a long list of historical personages. Though they suspect Smith may be insane, they recognize a traveler in need and invite him to accompany them back to their home. This fish-out-of-water scenario is humorous at first, but it becomes annoying as it goes on for half the book. The others’ take so much offense at everything Smith says, they come across as a bunch of annoying, puritanical pricks.
Smith is taken to a mansion which seems to function as an independent city state. One patriarchal couple governs over this domain, and the mother is worshipped as a goddess. Unlike Morris’s novel, which contemplates in great detail the social conditions of a future world, this is about the extent of Hudson’s utopian thought. The world depicted has a vaguely Pre-Raphaelite vibe, and only serves as background to a plot about Smith chasing after a 15-year-old girl. To be fair, the narrator is only 21, but his pursuit of the fair Yoletta borders on stalking. Despite all his waxing poetic about the nature of love, it’s clear his attraction towards her is purely physical. Much to his chagrin, her world does not comprehend romantic love, only a sort of universal brotherhood and affection, which makes his task more difficult. He soon realizes that to win the girl he must win over the mother, so he sets about kissing up to the matriarch.
Smith doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s been transported to the future. Only in the final two chapters is there any degree of philosophical reflection on mankind’s present or future existence. I enjoy 19th-century literature and utopian novels of all stripes. Even by the standards of its day, however, A Crystal Age is merely a dull, pedestrian love story, and 21st-century readers will learn little from it. News from Nowhere is no masterpiece either, but it’s a lot better than this.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By jp
great
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
This is worth a second read - probably more.....
By A. G. Plumb
The pastoral nature of this novel is such a disguise for it ends with the toughest, grittiest and most challenging ending I have ever read (stronger than Kafka's 'The Trial', or Christopher Priest's 'The Separation'). As a human being facing what we all face this ending is truly awful.
But what is Hudson telling us in this novel? Is it a Victorian approach to telling things that are otherwise inexpressible - that affection is not enough? That real love with all its manifestations must be honoured, because without it there is only death?
Here I find a challenge to psychoanalysis and all the techniques of psychology: 'I only discovered, what others have discovered before me, that the practice of introspection has a corrosive effect on the mind, which only serves to aggravate the malady it is intended to cure.' (If only I could stop introspection ......!) ) [page 279 Dutton edition of 1917]
But here the common man, Smith, plunged into this affectionate pastoral society, bemoans what he has just learned - that the young woman he loves can never love him as he wishes - 'I wish that I had never made that fatal discovery, that I might have continued still hoping and dreaming, and wearing out my heart with striving after the impossible, since any fate would have been preferable to the blank desolation which now confronted me.' [page 303-304 of the same edition]
I wonder what woman of Hudson's acquaintance he had to put aside with such enormous regret that he expressed these words!
Search this book out. Absorb its gentle fantasy and hold tight for a rough ending.
Other recommendations:
The Separation - Christopher Priest
The Trial - Franz Kafka
The Shepherd's Life - W H Hudson
Green Mansions - W H Hudson
A Crystal Age, by William Hudson PDF
A Crystal Age, by William Hudson EPub
A Crystal Age, by William Hudson Doc
A Crystal Age, by William Hudson iBooks
A Crystal Age, by William Hudson rtf
A Crystal Age, by William Hudson Mobipocket
A Crystal Age, by William Hudson Kindle
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar