“This is the sort of book that justifies fatwahs. If WWIII occurred right now, we could die happy knowing Baxter would never write again. If a dinosaur killing asteroid was headed for Earth and I knew Baxter had another book coming up, I would campaign for letting the rock hit, since it is obviously the work of a benevolent deity trying to save us from another Titan.”

—  James Nicoll

[914171029.329464@watserv4.uwaterloo.ca, 1998]
1990s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "This is the sort of book that justifies fatwahs. If WWIII occurred right now, we could die happy knowing Baxter would n…" by James Nicoll?
James Nicoll photo
James Nicoll 69
Canadian fiction reviewer 1961

Related quotes

P. J. O'Rourke photo
Stephen Chbosky photo
Robert Browning photo
Jim Butcher photo
John Banville photo

“Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew. There are good things here, for instance the scene when Perowne visits his senile mother in an old-folks' home, in which the writing is genuinely affecting in its simplicity and empathetic force. Overall, however, Saturday has the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair — who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity — were to appoint a committee to produce a "novel for our time," the result would surely be something like this.
Banville on Saturday http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2005/05/banville_on_sat.html, from The New York Review of Books (source dated 10 May 2005). Original source http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/may/26/a-day-in-the-life/?pagination=false.

Graham Greene photo
Uzma Jalaluddin photo

“Writing a book is so strange. You start off in one spot and end up in another. But I think when I first set out to write the book, there was a certain element of trying to right historical wrongs I saw as a voracious reader and representation of immigrants and children of immigrants…”

On what led her to write Ayesha At Last in “Interviews with authors at EMWF: Uzma Jalaluddin” https://theontarion.com/2018/09/13/interviews-with-authors-at-emwf-uzma-jalaluddin/ in The Ontarion (2018 Sep 13)

Walt Whitman photo

“poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Source: Drum Taps

Related topics