Writers and Critics Who Prophesize with Your Pen Quiz

Answer: Bible

The first three writers are all Biblical prophets. Isaiah, the author of the eponymous book in the Old Testament, is considered to be one of the Major Prophets. The term major refers to length, not to theological significance - the Minor Prophets which follow are significantly shorter. While different groups of Christians include different texts in their canon (and the Jewish Tanakh which is the original source differs again), all include the five Major Prophets in some form. These prophets are considered to have been delivering messages from God to the chosen people of Israel.

The Book of Isaiah is traditionally attributed to the 8th-century BCE prophet Isaiah ben Amoz, but internal evidence shows that much of it was written at least two centuries later, during the Babylonian Captivity. Scholars are divided as to exactly how many different writers contributed to the final work - certainly at least two, perhaps more. The first part of the book is probably mostly the work of the original writer, and focuses on telling the people that their failure to adhere to God's commandments is going to lead to the nation's downfall (a common theme in Old Testament prophets), but that this will be followed be a saviour (messiah) who will lead the virtuous survivors. The latter part of the book is clearly written when the people are in exile, telling how they will return to Jerusalem, and then after they have returned from exile.

Christians tend to focus on the writing of Isaiah as being a prediction of the coming of Jesus Christ as the Messiah, although most Jewish scholars consider the prophecy to be about a fully human leader, who is yet to come. Early Christian writers (including the writers of the New Testament) made regular references to passages from Isaiah, attempting to establish that Jesus was indeed the promised Messiah. As a result, there are many passages from Isaiah that are familiar, although not always accurately rendered. The popular image of the lion lying down with the lamb to describe a future time of harmony and bliss, for example, is adapted from Isaiah 11:6 - 'The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.' (NIV)

Answer: Bible

The Book of Lamentations was traditionally attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, and the Christian Old Testament includes it immediately after the Book of Jeremiah in the Minor Prophets section. The Jewish Tanakh places it in the Ketuvim (Writings) rather than with the prophets. It is a collection of five separate poems, all bewailing the fate of Jerusalem. This sets the date of writing as being between 586 BCE (when the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians at the start of the Babylonian Captivity) and 520 BCE (the end of the Captivity).

The five chapters of Lamentations appear to have been written by (as many as) five different people, then compiled into a single text because of their common theme. The focus is on the disaster that has befallen Israel, and the possibility that God may have abandoned them due to their sins - but Chapter 3 offers hope that this is merely a chastisement for error, and that God's benevolence will once again be shown.

The most interesting aspect of Lamentations is not apparent when it is read in translation: the first four chapters are acrostics, with each verse starting with the letters of the alphabet in sequence. Chapter 3 has 66 lines, so each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet is used three times. Additionally, these four chapters use a traditional metre called qinah, in which each pair of lines has 3 stressed syllables in the first line, and 2 in the second. Unlike these first chapters, which lament the sorry state of affairs, Chapter 5 is a prayer for God to relent.

Answer: Bible

The Book of Revelation, also called the Book of the Apocalypse, is the only book of prophecy in the New Testament. The word Greek word apocalypse means revelation, and apocalyptic writing is said to reveal the future, as seen by a divinely inspired writer. This genre developed in Jewish culture, when the prophecies in the Tanakh of a future messiah and triumphant life for God's faithful had failed to develop within the expected time following the return from the Babylonian Captivity. While John's writing seems to be in many ways at variance with the other New Testament books, it was part of a well-developed literary tradition in which the author has a vision (from a heavenly messenger of some sort) that offers a detailed vision of the end times. The phrase end times does not mean the end of the world, it refers to the end of the age in which the writer lives, however that may be interpreted. Isaiah 24-27 is an example of apocalyptic writing.

For John (whoever he was - see below), the end of the age meant the return of Jesus and the establishment of a new heaven and new earth, replacing the old heaven and old earth, in which there will be no more suffering or death (Rev 21:1-8). The book describes the message he has received, which is so full of symbolism and imagery referring to Old Testament prophecies that details of its meaning are wide open to interpretation (whether it is read literally or metaphorically).

The identity of John has been a matter of much debate. He identifies himself as John, and states that he wrote from the island of Patmos, so it is safe to call him John of Patmos. In the second century he was often identified with John the Apostle, but most contemporary theologians do not agree with this (for reasons that are too arcane to go into here). Revelation is considered to have been written by a Jewish Christian prophet who was not connected to the Johannine community (adherents of John the Apostle) that produced the final version of the Gospel of John and the three Epistles of John. Uncertainty about the authorship of Revelation is one of the reasons why it took several centuries for it to be accepted as canon. It was probably written near the end of the 1st century, and not universally accepted as part of the New Testament until the end of the 5th century.

Answer: Novel

H G Wells wrote 'The Time Machine' in 1895, framing his dystopian vision of the future as a story narrated to a Victorian audience by a character known only as the Time Traveller, who had invented a machine that took him forward in time to the year 802,701. Here he found that the world was quite changed, and at first seemed to be inhabited by small and childlike humanoids, the Eloi. He later discovers that a more savage and ape-like group, the Morlocks, dwelled underground, and ran the machines that controlled the surface world of the Eloi. While the Eloi seemed to live in an idyllic world, it was only due to their dependence on the labor of the Morlocks. This was clearly a rather heavy-handed metaphor for the separation between the aristocracy and the working classes of Wells's own time.

The Time Traveller's machine actually allowed him to travel much further into the future, seeing the death of the Sun and the end of life on our planet, before he returned home to attend his dinner party - a bit late and dishevelled, considering he had only been gone for three hours!

Answer: Novel

Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation' trilogy (later expanded to have two more sequels and two prequels) was originally written as a series of eight short stories published in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction during the 1940s. In 1951 four of them were collected to form this first volume, with the addition of an extra chapter ('The Psychohistorians') which established the premise for the world of the novel.

Sometime well in the future (12,067 of the Galactic Era, whenever that may be), the Galactic Empire is on the wane, and Hari Seldon uses his theory of psychohistory (a statistical analysis of the behavior of large populations) to predict that the fall of the empire is going to lead to a dark age that will last for 30,000 years, before a second empire can establish itself. He determines to shorten this period, and offers an alternative plan. A Foundation is set up on the remote planet Terminus, where they construct the Encyclopedia Galactica, a comprehensive collection of all human knowledge. This group are to help steer the galaxy through the inter-empire period.

Of course, human politics is more complicated than that, as Seldon knew, so he simultaneously sets up a Second Foundation at a secret location. This group will prevent the First Foundation from simply taking over the galaxy, which would lead to stagnation. Its existence is only hinted at here, but it will become significant in the later novels. By the time of his death in 1992 Asimov had linked the various instalments of the 'Foundation' series (the last of which was published posthumously in 1983) with his other series, including especially the 'Robot' novels.

Answer: Novel

Many will first connect this title with Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film for which he and Arthur C. Clarke wrote the screenplay. The novel was developed at the same time, and published after the film had been released, with Clarke being listed as the sole author despite the earlier collaboration. Both film and book start 3 million years ago, with an alien artefact interacting with a group of hominids on the African plain, before moving to the (then-) near future, when another artefact has been discovered by workers on a Moon base. A mission is sent to investigate.

The book explores a number of aspects of a possible future, including realistic details of space travel (remember, this was written before the first moon landing in 1968, the establishment of the first space station in 1971, or the first flight of a space shuttle in 1981), the development of artificial intelligence and the perils of overreliance on technology, and speculation about the possible future course of evolution for humans.

Answer: Novel

Often stylized as 'WOOL', Hugh Howey's 2011 novel is set in 2345, in a world where our current civilisation was destroyed around 2050 by a nuclear war. It is set in one of the fifty underground 'cities', called silos, which had been set up to allow selected people to continue to live and carry on society for the hundreds of years that were expected to be needed before the surface would once again be habitable. With over 100 levels connected by a staircase around the inside of the outer surface of the cylinder, it houses several hundred people, in a carefully controlled population that can be sustained by the silo's resources and trained to provide all essential services.

Most of this background is only hinted at in this book, the first in the 'Silo' trilogy, which is set in Silo 18. When some of the residents discover that the IT people have been controlling their knowledge of the outside world, including the existence of other silos, and the reason why they are there, the social order is overthrown (which we later find has happened before, both in this silo and in others). The novel is composed of five sections, each originally self-published as an independent work before they were brought together to form a coherent narrative.

The title of the book seems to refer to the use of wool pads to clean the silo's sensors, a task assigned effectively as a death penalty. Four of the five sections have titles that refer to knitting, again providing a wool-related thread. It is not until the second volume of the trilogy, 'Shift' (2013) that it is revealed that WOOL is also an acronym for World Order Operation Fifty (L being the Roman numeral for 50), the project that set up the fifty silos.

Answer: Poem

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) is probably best known now for his poetry (he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857), but he also wrote extensively in prose, including essays of literary criticism and social criticism. This poem reflects the latter concern, as do many of his poems. It uses a river as a metaphor for time, and describes humanity's journey through time as akin to a voyage along a meandering river. The peace of the past is contrasted with the turmoil of the present, and the final verses speculate on the possibility of restoring the lost sense of connection to the world around us in the future.

"Haply, the river of Time-
As it grows, as the towns on its marge
Fling their wavering lights
On a wider, statelier stream-
May acquire, if not the calm
Of its early mountainous shore,
Yet a solemn peace of its own.

And the width of the waters, the hush
Of the grey expanse where he floats,
Freshening its current and spotted with foam
As it draws to the Ocean, may strike
Peace to the soul of the man on its breast-
As the pale waste widens around him,
As the banks fade dimmer away,
As the stars come out, and the night-wind
Brings up the stream
Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea."

Answer: Poem

Wallace Stevens first published this poem in 1923, and it has been included in multiple collections since that time. The narrator of the poem seems to be contemplating a ruined mansion and reflecting that the lives of those who lived there will not be understood by those who come across the building's ruins in the future. I have absolutely no authoritative basis for it, but because of the title I always imagine him reflecting on the experience of viewing Pompeii as he considers how much, and how little, information the site reveals about those who lived there. Then again, some critics suggest that the mansion is intended as a metaphor for the lives of a generation of people.

From the first verse ("Children picking up our bones / Will never know that these were once / As quick as foxes on the hill;") through the last ("A dirty house in a gutted world, / A tatter of shadows peaked to white, / Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.") there is little sense of a positive connection between past and present. The poet rather seems to reflect the sense (prevalent at the time he wrote) that his current generation was isolated from those that preceded it, and those that were to follow it, by the enormity of the war they had been through.

Answer: Poem

This poem from Robert Frost is short enough to reproduce in its entirety, for those who have not previously encountered it.

"Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice."

The origin of this speculation is obscure, and there are several credible suggestions. The astronomer Harlow Shapley says he had a conversation with the poet about a year before the poem first appeared in print in the December 1920 edition of 'Harper's Magazine', in which he explained that the Earth could perish either because the sun exploded and incinerated it or because the sun slowly cooled so much that life became unsustainable. On the other hand, Jeffery Myers suggested, in his biography of Robert Frost, that it had been inspired by Dante's 'Inferno', where the lowest level of Hell is a frozen lake; this possibility has been supported by several literary critics. The truth is probably a bit of both.