Literary Significance and Criticism
Ice highlights the Christianity of many Apollo astronauts (one of them wrote the foreword to this work). It touches on several themes at once: the history of Project Apollo, how the nation would have handled what would have been an appallingly demoralizing disaster, the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation of the earth in modern or ancient times, and speculation about the Flood.
Ice attracted little notice beyond the Christian readership to which Johnson directed it, and it is now out-of-print. He had intended a sequel to this novel, titled Fire, based on a similar encounter on the planet Mars. But at last report, the publisher canceled that project.
Read more about this topic: Ice (Johnson Novel)
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or criticism:
“I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.”
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“It is necessary not to be Christian to appreciate the beauty and significance of the life of Christ.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
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