Saturday, November 17, 2012

A.E. Housman



Have you read Nancy Kress's story "Mithridates, He Died Old" in the January 2013 issue of Asimov's?  (Excerpt available here.) In the introduction, she mentions that "A.E. Housman is one of my favorite poets. ... His poem ‘Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff,’ which is actually about the mythical king Mithridates, has fascinated me for forty years, and I was so happy to write a story using its famous last line."

("Terence, This is Stupid Stuff" is part of Housman's long work "A Shropshire Lad.")

I started thinking about other science fiction works that have drawn on Housman's words. Here are a few:

For a Breath I Tarry by Roger Zelazny (a line from A Shropshire Lad)
Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke (line from a Housman poem)
When Heaven Fell by William Barton (Housman poem at the beginning of the book)

Do you know of any others?

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