Aldiss, like Wells, is pitiless: "Man had rolled up his affairs and retired to the trees from whence he came".
In 1964, Gardner began his novelist career with The Liquidator, in which he created the character Boysie Oakes who inadvertently is mistaken to be a tough, pitiless man of action and is thereupon recruited into a British spy agency.
Shortly after Model's departure to Rzhev area, Hitler also stated that: "Generals must be tough, pitiless men, as crabbed as mastiffs – gross-grained men, such as I have in the Party".
Equally, though the sadistic violence in Wuthering Heights is more extravagant (with Heathcliff – "a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man" – the abused child turned abuser), Jane Eyre is also full of cruelty, with Jane mistreated by her aunt and at school and then tormented by Rochester, who takes pleasure in rousing her jealousy – a trait somewhat underplayed in the new film.
Damaged, twitchy, unfocused, he is a lost soul in a pitiless world, and his evolving relationship with Eric provides an intriguing counterpoint to that man's ferocious quest.
Some of the illustrations showed grown men, guards and warriors and courtiers, whose faces scared me — their stylized cruelty, in a pitiless world of all-powerful chiefs and quaking commoners.
We're the bystanders witnessing a pitiless world where the game is rigged.
In this pitiless world utility trumps artistry.
Who's up for an hour-long pitiless examination of man's apparently inexhaustible capacity for inhumanity to man?
She goes on to say, "Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.
And in its pitiless depiction of men reduced to the most basic and extreme of situations – thirst, cold, heat, exhaustion, isolation, not to mention the undesirability of each other's company – this book very nicely fits into the contemporary vogue for survival-manual entertainment as exemplified by films such as Gravity and All Is Lost.
