I suppose:
A sullen darkness now surrounded us - but from out the milky depths of the galaxy a luminous glare arose, and stole along the sleek metal loins of our space craft. We were nearly overwhelmed by the brilliant shower that settled upon us and the ship, but melted into the vacuum as it fell. The source of the cataract was utterly lost in the darkness and the distance. Yet we were evidently approaching it with a hideous velocity. At intervals there were visible in it wide, yawning, but momentary rents, and from out these rents, within which was a chaos of flitting and indistinct images, there came the rushing, mighty, soundless winds of space, tearing through stars and planets in their course.Don't look it up or google for it. Who is the author?
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The Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes? (And you've changed a lot of words?)
Is it Poe?
It is Poe, I'm sure. "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym"? A ship instead of a space-ship, Antarctic waters instead of space?
Anyone think it might be Stapledon or Arthur C. Clarke?
No? In fact, the people who said Poe - and more specifically The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket - are exactly right.
I've been thinking a fair bit, of late, about the great sea-voyage narratives of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. Specifically abou the way extraordinary experiences are conveyed by these authors, and how their techniques compare to those of modern writers dealing with, say, space voyages or journeys to fantasy worlds.
Anyone else want to comment before I go on?
I had been going to say Olaf Stapledon.
I was going to say HG Wells.
My reading of old SF is limited so my options were: Wells, Stapledon, Verne, EE Smith.
The pasasage is from the end of the book, by which stage things are getting science fictionish.
But when we restore the references to the boat, the ocean, etc., the style can be seen as not greatly different from what we've experienced throughout, with a great deal of realistic detail - Poe actually knew a lot about sailing, the ocean, water in general, and geography.
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