Parade's End

[fabrisse]

I saw the mini-series Parade's End this weekend and consider it the best $20 I've spent on entertainment in a long while. I enjoyed it so much that I'm reading the tetralogy on which it's based. Toward the beginning of book two, written in the mid-1920s, the leading character, who's currently on invalid leave from World War I, talks about the next war, predicting it will start sometime around 1934. Much of it reads presciently, but the one thing that struck me over the head like a shovel, was that he, and presumably the author, assumed it would be the British and Germans against their "natural enemy," France.

Comments

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

Have you ever seen Things to Come? I did when the AFI and the Building museum did a joint film series/exhibition on futurism in urban planning, and the assumptions it makes about how WWII would happen (with tanks and gas bombs) and how long it would last (decades), is just as interesting at what they didn't see coming (jet engines)...

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

I love the flying wing in that movie. I'd love to see it again, and, yes, there are some interesting and eerily prescient works that just get the details wrong.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

The middle section makes me wonder if it was the first SF post-apocalypse story?

The end section really influences Krypton in Superman, because 'Crystal Spires and Togas' are everywhere. Apparently, Wells thought cloaks were the most dramatic clothing possible, and heroes need something to swish dramatically.