Talk:George Griffith/GA1

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Reviewer: Chiswick Chap (talk · contribs) 13:02, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

Comments

I'll do this one. The article is a remarkable turnaround from deletion candidate earlier this year. Chiswick Chap (talk) 13:02, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• "Griffith was born George ...": it's conventional to start with the full name, i.e. "George ... was born in Plymouth ..."
  • Done. TompaDompa (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• "His parents were colonel-turned-clergyman...": British English has "the colonel-turned-clergyman"; another instance is "editor Peter Keary" (=> "the editor Peter..."). I promise I'm not going to pick you up on every sentence.
  • Done. TompaDompa (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• " He would later claim both to have been offered to marry a Polynesian princess..." => perhaps something like "He later claimed both to have been offered the hand of a Polynesian princess in marriage...".
  • Tweaked. TompaDompa (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• "a sail ship" => "a sailing ship"
  • Done. TompaDompa (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• pen name Lara. Do we have any idea why he chose a woman's name here? Many female authors of the time chose men's names to be published more easily... (this isn't a GA criterion question).
  • I don't know. The PhD thesis Male Use of a Female Pseudonym in Nineteenth-century British and American Literature (listed in the "Further reading" section) covers the general phenomenon and mentions Griffith's use of the Lara pseudonym, but doesn't seem to make any specific commentary on his decision to use a female pseudonym (though I have admittedly not read the entire thesis). TompaDompa (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• "Comparisons to H. G. Wells": not sure about this heading. Perhaps "Comparisons with..." would be more British (given the British English tag on the article); but perhaps we could say "In the shadow of H. G. Wells" or "Eclipsed by H. G. Wells" as suitably scifi and literary terms, and more than justified given the reliably cited statement that Wells is the superior writer. The section already uses the word "shadow" so maybe that's the best choice.
  • I changed it to "In relation to H. G. Wells"—see what you think. I don't want to put too much focus on the competitive angle in the heading as the section to a large extent deals with comparative analysis of themes and worldviews and so on. TompaDompa (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• "Griffith was irreligious": not sure this term conveys quite the right impression of a "freethinker" who "advocated fiercely for secularism". One might sum those up as "atheistic", "anti-religious", or indeed we could call him "an active secularist". "Irreligious" does carry echoes of "irresponsible", not caring about religion, or possibly just practising it sloppily, none of which quite seem right here.
  • I don't know that there is a better way to summarize the source's "Griffith, who embraced no religion, [...]". I would describe him as an atheist if I had sourcing to back that up, but the source's phrasing is perfectly consistent with deism, for instance. Being a secularist also does not necessarily say much about what his religious views were on the metaphysical level, as it is possible to have strong religious convictions yet be ardent about viewing religion as a strictly private matter. As such, "irreligious" doesn't go beyond what we have sourcing for and doesn't omit what we do have sourcing for on this matter either. TompaDompa (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• I wonder whether we shouldn't have separate sections for religious, political, and social views.
  • I turned "Personal views" into a separate section and added subheadings. TompaDompa (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• It would be nice to have a short boxed quotation from Griffith's writing to illustrate how his views are expressed in his science fiction. No danger of a copyright issue...
  • Added an example used by Melchiori. TompaDompa (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• The word "also" is used rather too much; it adds little.
  • I removed a few instances. TompaDompa (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• Constructions using "-ing" are used quite heavily (e.g. "Wood focuses on Wells depicting ... while Mollmann focuses on Wells portraying ..." ). These may be found difficult by people whose first language isn't English; it might be worth doing a little copy-editing to simplify the grammar here and there.

Images

• All are PD on Commons. Glad to see Chiswick resident Harold H. Piffard in service!

• The three upright (portrait format) images should have the "|upright" parameter.
  • Why? It makes the images thinner, and I don't see how that's an improvement. TompaDompa (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

References

• The sources used all appear suitable, and those I checked verify the claims made using them.

• The joint handling of two similar Darko Suvin sources in separate St. James Press books is a bit surprising; it results in Harv warnings but I guess that's not important. If the two are so similar that we (ten times) use them as one source, is there actually any good reason to cite both of them? Put another way, does the 1986 text say anything that the 1996 text does not? The two texts look as like as two peas to me. I rather like Suvin's (1996) comment that even his best work, The Angel of the Revolution, "is marred by slipshod haste, racist chauvinism, and melodramatic sensationalism." I'd have thought that well worth quoting.
  • They're not identical, though they are pretty close. I noticed some differences in the bibliographies when writing the article, though I don't recall the exact details. I agree that it's a good quote—I added it to the article for The Angel of the Revolution a while back. I refrained from including it in this article to make broader points about Griffith's body of work while avoiding unnecessary repetition. Suvin and Bleiler are also very harsh on Griffith compared to the other sources (Moskowitz, on the other hand, is much more charitable than most), and I tried to avoid overemphasizing their viewpoints to make sure the overall consensus is reflected as accurately as possible. TompaDompa (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

• Given the rather short page ranges of the citations involved, it's hard to see much justification for using the RP notation to specify page subranges, often down to individual (?!) pages. I'd have thought we could simply suppress all the RP tags here without any noticeable loss of clarity or verifiability.
  • Maybe. I did this to a large extent to make it easier for me to keep track of everything while writing the article (and to make it easier to change things later). I also got not-insignificant pushback at the WP:FAC for Mars in fiction with regard to the, at times, rather extensive page ranges—and here the principal source, Moskowitz (1976), spans 36 pages. I prefer keeping them. TompaDompa (talk) 22:57, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

Summary

Well, this is a very readable and well-researched article on an author who seems to have been all but forgotten as the caterpillar tracks of literary history roll on ... glad to see it in such a good state, along with the resurrected The Angel of the Revolution. Once notable ... I've found very little to comment on here, and expect to see this as a GA very shortly. Chiswick Chap (talk) 14:12, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.