What made this slug-a-seabed rise as killer?

November 5, 2018 8:26 PM

Good Gods, why did ye thus make ill Godzilla? Book One of the Godziliad, by Adam Roberts (previously).
posted by Cash4Lead (6 comments total)

I'm not convinced that Pope-style couplets are the way to go in this day and age. A more modern translation of the opening lines might go:

Wrath, goddess, sing of Gojira, Poseidon’s son,
Calamitous wrath, that hit the people of Edo with countless ills –
Many the poor salarymen he saw off down to Hades,
Scorched by his fiery breath, or left for carrion
In city blocks crushed as a child on the beach might knock down
A sandcastle he has built as part of a game –
From the first moment he was roused from his timeless slumber
Beneath the wine-dark sea.

What was it that woke him up?
The atomic bomb: for the Americans, enraged by emperor,
And by those who would seize control of the means of production,
Were testing these devices, and men and fish were dying,
All because Poseidon’s realm had been dishonoured…
posted by Mocata at 3:55 AM on November 6, 2018 [8 favorites]

For Ghidorah was an angry king...
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:09 AM on November 6, 2018

This sort of thing serves as a salutary reminder that the Adam Roberts whose speculative fiction criticism is some of the best out there is the same Adam Roberts who wrote The Soddit, The Sellamillion, The McAtrix Derided and The Va Dinci Cod. Possibly it becomes clearer with his article about the best science fiction having the same structure as a joke.

Regardless,

Man strives in vain to slay what God enlarges
Aye pooping out explosion-primed depth-charges.
Such ordnance monsters laugh to very scorn;
They cannot harm a beast of H-bombs born.

is going to be rattling around my head for a while.
posted by ocular shenanigans at 6:50 AM on November 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

This is so good.
(I spend much of grad school and being a lit prof rattling around in the 18th century. I admire how well Roberts understands the ways Dryden, Pope et al developed the couplet)
posted by doctornemo at 8:43 AM on November 6, 2018

I feel that this thread would be incomplete without a link to Beowulf Meets Godsylla.

Beowulf belly up to meaddehæle bar,
Sæd, “Ne foe beaten mie færsom cung-fu.”
posted by praemunire at 8:43 PM on November 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

Likewise Bambi.
posted by flabdablet at 8:30 AM on November 7, 2018