The Scott Expedition of 1910-12 – of which the museum holds a very large number of artefacts, including the contents of Scott’s tent (found after his death) – can be called the first modern voyage of exploration. Scott was a showman and used the mass media to promote support for his project. He got manufacturers to sponsor goods used by the team, and was the first explorer to take a professional photographer with him – Herbert Ponting, a gifted photographer and film maker. whaler as a boy, was starting to use the manpower left spare after the Napoleonic wars to mount naval expeditions to the Arctic. Between whaling captains with a bent for natural philosophy, like the remarkable William Scoresby of Whitby,

Pratchett, Terry (1992). "Small Gods (Discworld #13)(38) by Terry Pratchett". Gollancz . Retrieved 24 December 2016. But a triumph in writing is when you win over the reader with whom you have absolutely nothing in common with.I don’t know anything about playing video games, much less designing them.Yet, I absolutely loved Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.The bottom line is that it was about humans. is necessarily impalpable. But by the same token, it does not have to be proved that (for example) Scott was himself aware of particular books, plays, or fashionable enthusiasms, so long as the styles of feeling they gave currency to survived, Once my climbing partner and I climbed Longs Peak in Colorado but were to descend by a different route, on the trail which we had never been up.A guy we met near the top told us that there were little spots of paint that looked like fried eggs that marked the trail. Or not, he said, just follow your nose.Creation', he had filled it with small woodcuts, some accurate pictures of birds, others 'Tale-pieces of gaiety and humour'. It was thus with an audience very different from Sabine's in mind that he put his perception It is easy to remember that some time means a while since both of those phrases contain two words. Summary Brenda Clough's 2001 science fiction novella " May Be Some Time" has Oates transported to the year 2045, where he is healed via advanced medicine. This novella formed the basis for her later novel Revise the World, which also centred on Oates. [40] THE headline scrolled through the corner of my computer screen sometime after 10 on Friday night. Fidel Castro had died. It was news I’d been waiting to hear my entire life, and yet I hesitated. – The New York Times

Grace Scott clearly did not think this was a surprising thing to write. She evidently saw no contradiction between Scott having 'no urge' towards exploration, and his feeling 'keenly' this very specific appetite for the romance of and the radiators are on -- and whatever one's attitude, whatever the scepticism one applies to the boyish, adventurous text in one's hands, into one's mind come potent pictures of a place that is definitively elsewhere, One anecdote I always take comfort in comes from Terry Tempest Williams.She told about the time she had a reading in New York City (if I am remembering this correctly) and not one single person showed up.As she was walking out, down a grand staircase, a man appeared for the reading.Possibly he was homeless. But he had come for the reading.She sat down and read to him. The final chapter is entirely different, a brief fictionalised account of Scott’s ill-fated final expedition. This would jar in the hands of a lesser writer, but Spufford carries it off beautifully. The book then ends on a personal note, as he recounts a trip to McMurdo Base in the Antarctic to see the memorial to Scott put up by surviving members of his expedition. It’s a moving epilogue that is somehow more powerful for all the dense and elaborate edifice of cultural and social significance that prior chapters have built around it. For all the wider meanings and significances that it evokes, Scott’s journey to the North Pole was also a tragic, unnecessary waste of lives. Another scene, not famous, not potent, requiring to be searched for. The beige and cream, rattan and mosquito netting of the Base Hospital, Delhi, in February 1910; despite the best efforts of the staff, a little dust spangling the strong Indian sunlightof the frozen continent, gradually dissolve its margin, which is thus crumbled into innumerable floating isles, that are driven southward to replenish the seas of warmer climates. In Margaret Atwood's 2009 novel The Year of the Flood the character Adam One makes reference to "Saint Laurence 'Titus' Oates of the Scott Expedition" in a speech made to the followers of the God's Gardeners eco-fanatic religious group. One of the characters is also named after Oates. It is a rich exploration of the cultural significance to the late Victorian and Edwardian English of the various efforts at north and south polar explorations, from the lost Franklin Arctic expedition in the early 1800s to the doomed Scott race to the South Pole. Spufford covers a lot of territory: the way the blankness and challenge to human efforts posed by Arctic wastes was translated in the British mind to an awed appreciation for the sublime, perceived as the juxtaposition of the beautiful and the overwhelming strangeness of the northern regions; the way Lady Jane Franklin positioned herself as an immovable force in British society as she continued to press the government, the Navy and public opinion to continue to search for her missing husband, becoming a cultural and political force in the process (though she was against the suffrage movement); the way Eskimos became an exotic tribe, perceived as humans at an earlier stage of development, and so worth both anthropological study and popular trivialization; and the psychology of the Scott polar expedition, as his men displayed all that was deemed right about British masculine endeavor, facing the most formidable obstacles with good-natured camaraderie, even as they swallowed their growing disenchantment with Scott and got on each others' nerves, but never letting their true feelings get in the way of their grand mission, as stupid and pointless as it was. him. 'No one has the least regard for the man: with them all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they have a deep interest in

Red Plenty, 2010 - longlisted for the Orwell Prize, and translated into Dutch, Spanish, Estonian, Polish, German, Russian and Italian, with versions in French and Turkish following. This is a fusion of history and fiction which dramatises the period in the history of the USSR (c.1960) when the possibility of creating greater abundance than capitalism seemed near. It is influenced by science fiction, and uses many of its tools, but is not itself science fiction.

The Lawrence Oates school in Meanwood, Leeds (closed 1992), was named after him. On the 100th anniversary of his death, a blue plaque was unveiled in his honour at Meanwood Park, Leeds. [36] it seems unlikely that they were in a strict sense personal feelings. Grace Scott seems confident that she is naming well-known, indeed conventional stimuli to feeling when she mentions 'the call of the vast empty spaces', 'the We had better begin with the question asked by every reader of the standard accounts of the great expeditions, the urgent question that floats irresistibly to the surface of one's mind as the contrast grows stronger and stronger between the safe, the course of its transmission from 1913 to the present. In the postwar anomie of the 1920s, Apsley Cherry-Garrard published his memoir of the expedition, The Worst Journey in the World, as a lament for 'an age in geological time, All the non-fiction books about polar exploration that I’d read prior to this one were straightforward travelogue-slash-adventure narratives that dwelt on the immediate context of the expedition recounted and the personalities involved. ‘I May Be Some Time’ is a very different sort of book, although it took me a stupidly long time to realise just how much so. Spufford pulls together an idiosyncratic cultural history, not of the expeditions themselves so much as the context in which they took place. Successive chapters discuss in great detail such themes as the nature of the sublime in popular perceptions of the Arctic, the role of expedition wives as patient yet proactive guardians of their husbands’ reputations, and how attitudes towards the Inuit became more overtly racist during the 19th century. The penultimate chapter was my favourite. In it, Spufford embarks upon a magnificent, grandiloquent, and sweeping account of what it meant to be Edwardian. This combines such delightful ephemera as the use of ‘North Pole’ as rhyming slang for ‘arsehole’ with insights like this: