Importance
"Aristotle and the Gun" is one of de Camp's most notable works. Like his first significant work of alternate history, the novel Lest Darkness Fall (1939), the story posits a world changed as the result of time travel, and like his other major work in the field, "The Wheels of If" (1940) it reveals the long-term consequences of the historical change. The story's popularity has been demonstrated by frequent reprinting and anthologization. For de Camp himself, however, its publication marked the beginning of a lengthy departure from the science fiction field, and pointed the way to the historical novels of the ancient world he would write during the next ten years, beginning with An Elephant for Aristotle (1958), which serves as an interesting counterpoint to the present story. This development is indeed to some degree foreshadowed in the present story itself, with its meticulously researched depiction of the Classical Greek and Hellenistic milieu – for which de Camp clearly had strong interest and empathy, also when seen through the eyes of its own native-born denizens and without a time traveler in attendance. De Camp would write no more science fiction until 1977.
Read more about this topic: Aristotle And The Gun
Famous quotes containing the word importance:
“Never before has a generation of parents faced such awesome competition with the mass media for their children’s attention. While parents tout the virtues of premarital virginity, drug-free living, nonviolent resolution of social conflict, or character over physical appearance, their values are daily challenged by television soaps, rock music lyrics, tabloid headlines, and movie scenes extolling the importance of physical appearance and conformity.”
—Marianne E. Neifert (20th century)
“The importance of a lost romantic vision should not be underestimated. In such a vision is power as well as joy. In it is meaning. Life is flat, barren, zestless, if one can find one’s lost vision nowhere.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)
“Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. ‘Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)