Voltaire Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories (1775)
My quest for Voltaire's Micromégas finally brought me here, Micromégas being your boy's concession to proto-science-fiction wherein an enormous bloke from Saturn meets an even more enormouser bloke from Sirius and they have a conversation about stuff. This also meant re-reading Candide, which was actually a pleasure as this seems to be a significantly better translation than the first one I tried; or at least I got more of the jokes.
While Micromégas and Memnon - which also features a person from Sirius - are of obvious interest as proto-science-fiction, the fantastic aspects serve primarily to support points made in the other stories by different, more prosaic means, so there's probably not much fun to be had in examining Voltaire as a sort of eighteenth century Peter F. Hamilton; so I won't.
Voltaire's philosophical focus seems mostly concerned with the disparity between that to which humanity aspires, and that which it is seen to do; so his stories tend to be populated by optimists forever finding themselves bitten in the ass by an unexpectedly harsh reality. Reduced to its most basic form, I'd say he's exploring the gulf between objective and subjective experience, and in doing so, pointing out which emperors happen to be wandering around in the nip, albeit without quite the same degree of bile as Jonathan Swift.
This collection comprises four longer stories and a bunch of much shorter efforts, some of just a couple of pages length. It almost certainly helps if you understand elements of eighteenth century politics and the history of France, which I don't, so those tales with a more obviously eastern influence - notably Zadig - came across as a little dry for my tastes, meaning there's not much point reading them unless one's powers of concentration are fully engaged; but Voltaire's wit and insight tend to be a constant, allowing one to power through even when lacking the faintest fucking clue as to what he's talking about; and while I can see why Candide seems to be regarded as his hit single, both Ingenuous and Count Chesterfield's Ears and Chaplain Goodman are just as lively, just as philosophically rich, and just as worthy of our attention.
My quest for Voltaire's Micromégas finally brought me here, Micromégas being your boy's concession to proto-science-fiction wherein an enormous bloke from Saturn meets an even more enormouser bloke from Sirius and they have a conversation about stuff. This also meant re-reading Candide, which was actually a pleasure as this seems to be a significantly better translation than the first one I tried; or at least I got more of the jokes.
While Micromégas and Memnon - which also features a person from Sirius - are of obvious interest as proto-science-fiction, the fantastic aspects serve primarily to support points made in the other stories by different, more prosaic means, so there's probably not much fun to be had in examining Voltaire as a sort of eighteenth century Peter F. Hamilton; so I won't.
Voltaire's philosophical focus seems mostly concerned with the disparity between that to which humanity aspires, and that which it is seen to do; so his stories tend to be populated by optimists forever finding themselves bitten in the ass by an unexpectedly harsh reality. Reduced to its most basic form, I'd say he's exploring the gulf between objective and subjective experience, and in doing so, pointing out which emperors happen to be wandering around in the nip, albeit without quite the same degree of bile as Jonathan Swift.
This collection comprises four longer stories and a bunch of much shorter efforts, some of just a couple of pages length. It almost certainly helps if you understand elements of eighteenth century politics and the history of France, which I don't, so those tales with a more obviously eastern influence - notably Zadig - came across as a little dry for my tastes, meaning there's not much point reading them unless one's powers of concentration are fully engaged; but Voltaire's wit and insight tend to be a constant, allowing one to power through even when lacking the faintest fucking clue as to what he's talking about; and while I can see why Candide seems to be regarded as his hit single, both Ingenuous and Count Chesterfield's Ears and Chaplain Goodman are just as lively, just as philosophically rich, and just as worthy of our attention.
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