# ACoC Dialectic! *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 09 Jun 1999* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Michael Andre-Driussi *09 Jun 1999, 17:01* Nigel Price, > Re: Blish's ACOC, you wrote: > Other than > that, I can't make up my mind whether it's a peculiar twist in Blish's own > thinking, or the effect of the novel's technique, which is to set the main > characters against each other in a sort of chiaroscuro dialectic, > reminiscent in both its brilliance and its staginess of George Bernard Shaw > at his most argumentative. (There are parts of the first book of ACoC > which are actually set out as dramatic dialogue, as if written for a play.) Thanks--I wanted to say something like that! (Rather than Shaw, I was going to draw attention back to the [in my mind] similar roughness of Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain," full of declamations! And stark revelations! People speak frank! [As contrast to Smith's "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard"] But that would only have led to tangents on Cordwainer Smith.) Hurry up and finish reading it, so you can say whatever it was I was going to say! =mantis= ---