From:
robertaw@drizzle.com
In article <10anb4r$1dhm0$
1@dont-email.me>,
William Hyde <
wthyde1953@gmail.com> wrote:
Cryptoengineer wrote:
On 9/16/2025 6:18 PM, James Nicoll wrote:
(Snip!!)
Dover Beach is an example of another subgenre: WWIII novels where
it turns everyone in NATO (except the US) and in Warsaw Pact
(except the SU) thought WWIII was a stupid idea and had secretly
agreed to sit it out while the big boys hammered each other into
ruins.
To me, 'Dover Beach' is a 1867 poem by Matthew Arnold.
The link is probably the closing lines:
"And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."
The title is a reference to the poem, which I first ran across in Silverberg's "Downward to the Earth".
Something tells me there's another SF work that references it, but I
cannot recall any. Could it be Blish?
I found several:
_As on a Darkling Plain_ by Ben Bova
"When Ignorant Armies Clash" by Ray Bradbury
"Clash by Night" by Lawrence O'Donnell (Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore)
--
"We have advanced to new and surprising levels of bafflement."
Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan describes progress in _Komarr_. —-----------------------------------------------------
Robert Woodward
robertaw@drizzle.com
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