cold, air-conditioned comfort
Jul. 29th, 2010 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
holliOh, Internet. I missed you. You too, air conditioning. We just got the electricity back on, at about 6 this morning, so I'm catching up on everything I missed while basking in sweet, sweet artificially-cooled air.
I spend a lot of my electricity-free time reading, and one of the books I finished was Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm. I've seen the movie, and it's very charming, but the book was really interesting too. The plot wasn't really changed at all for the movie, which I appreciate, but there is one big difference: Cold Comfort Farm, the novel, is science fiction.
No, seriously! There's a note at the beginning that says it takes place "in the near future," and it's full of random little details that Stella Gibbons thought would be part of life in the late 40s/early 50s, though the book was published in 1932. For instance, Flora makes calls on a videophone-- and the person she's calling is "a veteran on the Anglo-Nicaraguan war of '46," and people are constantly catching airplanes from place to place and owning private planes, and at one point a character thinks about how the train system isn't as good anymore now that so many people drive or fly. And yet most of the details of daily life are what you'd expect of a novel from the 30's-- the farm doesn't have an indoor bathroom, for instance. It's very odd, and sort of charming.
I spend a lot of my electricity-free time reading, and one of the books I finished was Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm. I've seen the movie, and it's very charming, but the book was really interesting too. The plot wasn't really changed at all for the movie, which I appreciate, but there is one big difference: Cold Comfort Farm, the novel, is science fiction.
No, seriously! There's a note at the beginning that says it takes place "in the near future," and it's full of random little details that Stella Gibbons thought would be part of life in the late 40s/early 50s, though the book was published in 1932. For instance, Flora makes calls on a videophone-- and the person she's calling is "a veteran on the Anglo-Nicaraguan war of '46," and people are constantly catching airplanes from place to place and owning private planes, and at one point a character thinks about how the train system isn't as good anymore now that so many people drive or fly. And yet most of the details of daily life are what you'd expect of a novel from the 30's-- the farm doesn't have an indoor bathroom, for instance. It's very odd, and sort of charming.
