Allusions/references To Actual History, Geography and Current Science
The two frigate actions, HMS Java against the USS Constitution, and HMS Shannon against the USS Chesapeake (details), that form the basis of the narrative are real events although transformed for storytelling effect by O'Brian. The latter battle is discussed in the Memoir of Admiral Sir P. B. V. Broke, Bart., KCB, etc. (London, 1866)
Read more about this topic: The Fortune Of War
Famous quotes containing the words actual, geography, current and/or science:
“That the mere matter of a poem, for instance—its subject, its given incidents or situation; that the mere matter of a picture—the actual circumstances of an event, the actual topography of a landscape—should be nothing without the form, the spirit of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter;Mthis is what all art constantly strives after, and achieves in different degrees.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“But there, where I have garnered up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence,
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)