Books in Brief

Voices Prophesying War, 1763-1984 by I. F. Clarke (Oxford, $10.00). Although it reads suspiciously like a revamped thesis (there are thirty-six pages of bibliography and the ghosts of purged footnotes haunt the text), Voices Prophesying War is still an interesting book. As the titles suggest, it is anaccount of fictional wars-to-come from The Reign of George VI (1763) to the present and beyond. The best part of the book deals exhaustively with the pre-1914 rash of chauvinistic battle tales, stories which made up in verve what they lacked in prognosis. However, when Mr. Clarke explores atomic age extrapolation, the scholarship becomes threadbare. At this point in time, science fiction dominates literary prophesy, and although Mr. Clarke conveys the generally kakotopian trend of contemporary sf—the change from narratives of glory to catalogues of destruction — —the particulars are spotty and ill-chosen. Heinlein is never mentioned and the sole reference to Asimov suggests that Mr. Clarke had only read a dust-jacket. Nevertheless, when Mr. Clarke is on the beam (most of the time), it is an absorbing book for the general reader, as well as a near-must for the sf aficionado and the military buff. J. D. KIRWAN

The Twenty-Fifth Hour, by C. Virgil Gheorghiu. Translated from the Romanian by Rita Eldon (Regnery, $6.50). The theme of contemporary civilization as a wasteland, because it concerns the fundamental problems of changing technology and shifting values, represents the most vital issue faced in twentieth-century literature. This admirable novel is a long cry of anguish over the plight of Western man, who is shown as being or becoming the slave of soulless ideologies. The book is set in Eastern Europe in the Thirties and Forties; Gheorghiu portrays these countries as battered between Soviet brutishness and Western bureaucracy and _ indifference, while still staggering from the horrors of Nazi oppression. He sees the danger of the three systems in their common tendency to view man collectively rather than individually and is particularly concerned that the West, with its traditions of respect for individualism, should accept collectivism: “It kills the living man, sacrificing him to plans, theories, and abstractions. Here we have the modern variant of human sacrifice. The stake and the auto-da-fé have passed away, but in their place stand bureaueracy and statistics, the two present-day social myths whose flames consume the sacrifice of human flesh.” Gheorghiu is pessimistic about our ability to revalue the individual in society, but his own sensitive art points at least to the beginnings of a_ solution. T. K. MEIER

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Voices Prophesying War, 1763-1984 by I. F. Clarke (Oxford, $10.00). Although it reads suspiciously like a revamped thesis (there are thirty-six pages of bibliography and the ghosts of purged footnotes haunt the text), Voices Prophesying War is still an interesting book. As the titles suggest, it is anaccount of fictional wars-to-come from The Reign of George VI (1763) to the present and beyond. The best part of the book deals exhaustively with the pre-1914 rash of chauvinistic battle tales, stories which made up in verve what they lacked in prognosis. However, when Mr. Clarke explores atomic age extrapolation, the scholarship becomes threadbare. At this point in time, science fiction dominates literary prophesy, and although Mr. Clarke conveys the generally kakotopian trend of contemporary sf—the change from narratives of glory to catalogues of destruction — —the particulars are spotty and ill-chosen. Heinlein is never mentioned and the sole reference to Asimov suggests that Mr. Clarke had only read a dust-jacket. Nevertheless, when Mr. Clarke is on the beam (most of the time), it is an absorbing book for the general reader, as well as a near-must for the sf aficionado and the military buff. J. D. KIRWAN

The Twenty-Fifth Hour, by C. Virgil Gheorghiu. Translated from the Romanian by Rita Eldon (Regnery, $6.50). The theme of contemporary civilization as a wasteland, because it concerns the fundamental problems of changing technology and shifting values, represents the most vital issue faced in twentieth-century literature. This admirable novel is a long cry of anguish over the plight of Western man, who is shown as being or becoming the slave of soulless ideologies. The book is set in Eastern Europe in the Thirties and Forties; Gheorghiu portrays these countries as battered between Soviet brutishness and Western bureaucracy and _ indifference, while still staggering from the horrors of Nazi oppression. He sees the danger of the three systems in their common tendency to view man collectively rather than individually and is particularly concerned that the West, with its traditions of respect for individualism, should accept collectivism: “It kills the living man, sacrificing him to plans, theories, and abstractions. Here we have the modern variant of human sacrifice. The stake and the auto-da-fé have passed away, but in their place stand bureaueracy and statistics, the two present-day social myths whose flames consume the sacrifice of human flesh.” Gheorghiu is pessimistic about our ability to revalue the individual in society, but his own sensitive art points at least to the beginnings of a_ solution. T. K. MEIER