Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Pseudolus' young master Hero (John Hansen) is piteously in love with the beauteous virgin Philia (Pamela Hall). If Pseudolus can secure her for Hero, he will receive his freedom. The plot tangles, twists, thickens, quickens, down alleys and up roofs, through brothels of spicy beauties and manses of spiky matrons, leaving behind a car nage of laugh-splintered ribs. Salve, Forum, et in arena hilaritatis! lo triumphe...
...late effort called The Pencil. Also included are two famous novellas, Trouble Is My Business and Blackmailers Don't Shoot, and two full novels, The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye. The difference between the two novels reveals an uncomfortable truth. The Little Sister is vintage Chandler. The plot is ingenious and preposterously complicated. Detective Philip Marlowe is full of tough backchat ("Cracking wise," he would call it). In The Long Goodbye, the paranoia and self-pity that engulfed Chandler in his last long work, Playback, are already in evidence, and the prose and characterization are flaccid. Still, this...
...Vonnegut, liberal quantities of whimsy are poured through the plot like so many doses of barium. The viewer is supposed to have a sense of the spiritual crisis brought on by Billy's experience in the Dresden bombing. Having found solace with Montana, he announces, "If we're going to survive, it's necessary to concentrate on the good moments and forget the bad." Shortly afterward, his baby is born, the universe rejoices, the firmament lights up with fireworks. As a resolution of plot and a reconciliation of historical horror, this amounts to a cosmic lollipop...
...wears "two wisps of bra which did little to contain the overflow of her provocative breasts." Scenes of perfervid theological discussion alternate plonkingly with episodes like one in which the p.r. man performs some ungodly acts with an ex-nun. Then Wallace stops pandering and starts attending to the plot. From there on the book takes...
...clientele of Popular Mechanics. A typical introduction to one of the stories might read: "Now here's a story by an old friend of F& SF readers, one of the best young writers in the field. We think it's a story you're really going to like. The plot is involving in the best sort of way, and the end is as stunning as anything we've seen." Just as typically, the story that follows seems as if it had been typed out in the basement on weekends, for fun and extra cash...