A World of Difference

by Robert Conquest

Sphere 1st edition1970 editionpaperback, fine In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

George Robert Ackworth Conquest was a British historian who became a well known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication, in 1968, of his account of Stalin's purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror.

Reviews

[itchy]

Some futuristic science fiction work just weren't pushed far enough ahead, like Back to the Future.

[Samwise Chamberlain]

Main characters are ethnically diverse but essentially copies of each other. The female characters are sexist stereotypes, with the author really wanting to make it clear how young, beautiful, and (though not as smart as the men) intelligent these women are... And of course they fall for the protagonist men who are more than half their age. Condescending is the word I would use. The plots seem half developed and thrown in in a haphazard way, and are not concluded in a satisfactory way in my opinion. Seems like a vehicle for the author's political philosophy and little else.

One interesting point raised in the book, and one that we're having to come to terms with now, is technologically created art displacing human made art. What is art? Is it the search for truth? Does it matter if progress is made via artificial means? At what point are the means artificial? All these would have been better avenues to steer this book and would have actually maybe made a world of difference.