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I want to get this finished today: the remaining 50,000 words. I've scribbled over aboput 45,000 of them, but there's a late section that needs to be printed out and scribbled on again. And then there's the innocent reference to Space Opera (1974) connecting the sub-genre to the baroque.
I've ignored this for months, since it seemed reasonable, and my chair is within three feet of a copy so I could always check. At last, I did.
Mistake.
Whilst it contains the word "wide-screen" (although I cannot just find it now) I can spot no "baroque" - and I'm assuming that the phrase is "wide-screen baroque". A little googling and I'm led to Billion and Trillion Year Spree. Space opera isn't in the index, and a flick through the chapter on E.E. Doc Smith yields nothing.
A further Google and I catch another lead: Charles Harness is an exemplar of widescreen baroque: yes, Aldiss mentions this on p. 302 of BillionTrillion. An endnote guides me to a 1964 reprint of The Paradox Men with an Aldiss intro.
Back to google, and a review, by Rob Latham as it turns out: "Harness’ fiction is both richly literate and extravagantly imagined, and has led Brian W. Aldiss to coin the resonant term 'Wide-Screen Baroque' to describe it (in his introduction to the 1967 Four Square edition of Harness’ 1953 novel The Paradox Men [a.k.a. Flight into Yesterday])" The date there is a bit off.
The next item down looks familiar - it's a PDF of Angus Taylor's Philip K Dick and the Umbrella of Light:
"Dick’s works are not unrelated in tone to that group of novels produced by van Vogt, Alfred Bester, and others andcharacterized by Brian Aldiss as 'Widescreen Baroque': 'Their plots are elaborate and generally preposterous, their inhabitants have short names and short lives. They traffic as readily in the impossible as the possible. They obey a dictionary definition of baroque; which is to say that they have a bold and exuberant rather than a fine style, they are eccentric, and sometimes degenerate into extravagance. They like a wide screen, with space and possibly time travel as props, and at least the whole solar system as their setting.'"
And a footnote - but will it cite a page?
"Brian W. Aldiss, introduction to Charles L. Harness, The Paradox Men (London: Faber and Faber, 1964),pp. v-vi"
Result. But it's taken two hours to get here.
I've ignored this for months, since it seemed reasonable, and my chair is within three feet of a copy so I could always check. At last, I did.
Mistake.
Whilst it contains the word "wide-screen" (although I cannot just find it now) I can spot no "baroque" - and I'm assuming that the phrase is "wide-screen baroque". A little googling and I'm led to Billion and Trillion Year Spree. Space opera isn't in the index, and a flick through the chapter on E.E. Doc Smith yields nothing.
A further Google and I catch another lead: Charles Harness is an exemplar of widescreen baroque: yes, Aldiss mentions this on p. 302 of BillionTrillion. An endnote guides me to a 1964 reprint of The Paradox Men with an Aldiss intro.
Back to google, and a review, by Rob Latham as it turns out: "Harness’ fiction is both richly literate and extravagantly imagined, and has led Brian W. Aldiss to coin the resonant term 'Wide-Screen Baroque' to describe it (in his introduction to the 1967 Four Square edition of Harness’ 1953 novel The Paradox Men [a.k.a. Flight into Yesterday])" The date there is a bit off.
The next item down looks familiar - it's a PDF of Angus Taylor's Philip K Dick and the Umbrella of Light:
"Dick’s works are not unrelated in tone to that group of novels produced by van Vogt, Alfred Bester, and others andcharacterized by Brian Aldiss as 'Widescreen Baroque': 'Their plots are elaborate and generally preposterous, their inhabitants have short names and short lives. They traffic as readily in the impossible as the possible. They obey a dictionary definition of baroque; which is to say that they have a bold and exuberant rather than a fine style, they are eccentric, and sometimes degenerate into extravagance. They like a wide screen, with space and possibly time travel as props, and at least the whole solar system as their setting.'"
And a footnote - but will it cite a page?
"Brian W. Aldiss, introduction to Charles L. Harness, The Paradox Men (London: Faber and Faber, 1964),pp. v-vi"
Result. But it's taken two hours to get here.
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