What book are you reading?

[Ser Clegane]

Bill Bryson - At Home: A short history of private life

Quite entertaining - and I enjoy his way of telling little stories/anecdote, even if this approach tends to be somewhat superficial (but it encourages to find out more, IMO)

[JagRoss]

I'm reading (finished everything but the second appendix) "Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell.
This is the second of his books that I've read so far, the first being "Animal Farm".
I've enjoyed both of them, there're both about communism and his tone is both lighthearted and serious at the same time.

[Martok]

Am now halfway through Wraith Squadron, the fifth book in the X-Wing series.

I'm almost enjoying it more than the previous books (the ones written by Michael A. Stackpole), which comes as a pleasant surprise. There's a lot more humor in this book, and the characters are definitely quirkier. Aarron Allston's writing style is noticeably different from Stackpole's, but I'd say no less inferior (at least so far).

[rajpoot]

Finished A Feast for Crows.
Going to get a A Dance with Dragons soon.
Wikipedia says that there are two more books left after this. Considering the number of loose ends and unanswered questions though, I cannot see how GRRM can tie them all up in just two books, satisfactorily.
Pretty intriguing names though.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring. Makes one wonder if there is going to be a happy ending to books. The last book's name seems to suggest otherwise.

[Nowake]

Going through Snow by Orhan Pamuk at a leisurely pace. If you've read My name is Red, you should pick Snow up as well, in spite of the chronological gap.



Oh and rajpoot, I actually went through the whole ASoIaF series while on a two-weeks vacation this summer. On the porch of the small mountain lodge we rented, it made a great read! The first fantasy series to have laid my hands on to date, I thought I should after seeing the HBO release.

Personally, I enjoyed A Dance with Dragons as well, because I actually enjoy the world-building side-details the most.
Yet to be honest, only the first two books maintain a solid narrative. From A Storm of Swords onwards, the plot just stumbles into some gaping non sequitur issues it never recovers from and the presence of fantasy elements is increased too much for my tolerance level.
The series is definitely not tripe however, despite the genre.

I believe I read in an interview Martin wished initially to stay well clear of fantasy, and simply create an alternate world.
A pity he did not follow up on that, I think he would have come very, very close to Maurice Druon's Les Roi Maudits. In fact, the vivid medieval world ASoIaF depicts seems to me to have been very much modelled on Les Roi Maudits and A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings could have very well taken place in Druon's setting, while a host of Martin's characters were almost transposed from the French historical novel - compare Martin's Tywin Lannister to Druon's Phillipe the Fair for an exact mirror. Plus, despite it being a historical novel, Druon takes great care to render the collective mental horizon of the age by illustrating belief in magic as an element almost as present and real as it seemed in Martin's first two books. But I'm totally rambling off-topic by now, apologies!

[Montmorency]

The series is definitely not tripe however, despite the genre.

So, several years back, I asked myself what genre of fiction was most universally despised by literature professors, reasoning that this was where literature was most likely to happen. So I started with fantasy...

What do you say to that?

[Nowake]

I would say that I perceive 90% of fantasy to be tolkienesque.
And to why that is utter tripe, I would reply with:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Why is the Rings being widely read today? At a time when perhaps the world was never more in need of authentic experience, this story seems to provide a pattern of it. A businessman in Oxford told me that when tired or out of sorts he went to theRings for restoration. Lewis and various other critics believe that no book is more relevant to the human situation. W. H. Auden says that it "holds up the mirror to the only nature we know, our own." As for myself I was rereading the Rings at the time of Winston Churchill's funeral and I felt a distinct parallel between the two. For a few short hours the trivia which normally absorbs us was suspended and people experienced in common the meaning of leadership, greatness, valor, time redolent of timelessness, and common traits. Men became temporarily human and felt the life within them and about. Their corporate life lived for a little and made possible the sign of renewal alter a realisation such as occurs only once or twice in a lifetime.
For a century at least the world has been increasingly demythologized. But such a condition is apparently alien to the real nature of men. Now comes a writer such as John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and, as remythologizer, strangely warms our souls.

Clyde S. Kilby: "Meaning in the Lord of the Rings",
Shadows of Imagination, 1969

I have sometimes wondered how much the advent of steam influenced Victorian ballad poetry and romantic prose. Reading Dunsany, for instance, it often occurs to me that his early stories were all written during train journeys:

Up from the platform and onto the train
Got Welleran, Rollory and young Iraine.
Forgetful of sex and income tax
Were Sooranard, Mammolek, Akanax:
And in their dreams Dunsany's lord
Mislaid the communication cord.

The sort of prose most often identified with "high" fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles; it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies. It is soft:

One day when the sun had come back over the forest, bringing with it the scent of May, and all the streams of the Forest were tinkling happily to find themselves their own pretty shape again, and the little pools lay dreaming of the life they had seen and the big things they had done, and in the warmth and quiet of the Forest the cuckoo was trying over his voice carefully and listening to see if he liked it, and wood-pigeons were complaining gently to themselves in their lazy comfortable way that it was the other fellow's fault, but it didn't matter very much; on such a day as this Christopher Robin whistled in a special way he had, and Owl came flying out of the Hundred Acre Wood to see what was wanted.

Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926

It is the predominant tone of The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and it is the main reason why these books, like many similar ones in the past, are successful. It is the tone of many forgotten British and American bestsellers, well-remembered children's books, like The Wind in the Willows, you often hear it in regional fiction addressed to a local audience, or, in a more sophisticated form, James Barrie (Dear Brutus, Mary Rose and, of course, Peter Pan). Unlike the tone of E.Nesbit (Five Children and It etc.), Richmal Crompton (the 'William' books) Terry Pratchett or the redoubtable J.K.Rowling, it is sentimental, slightly distanced, often wistful, a trifle retrospective; it contains little wit and much whimsy. The humour is often unconscious because, as with Tolkien, the authors take words seriously but without pleasure:

One summer's evening an astonishing piece of news reached the Ivy Bush and Green Dragon. Giants and other portents on the borders of the Shire were forgotten for more important matters; Mr. Frodo was selling Bag End, indeed he had already sold it-to the Sackville-Bagginses!
"For a nice bit, too," said some. "At a bargain price," said others, "and that's more likely when Mistress Lobelia's the buyer." (Otho had died some years before, at the ripe but disappointed age of 102.)
Just why Mr. Frodo was selling his beautiful hole was even more debatable than the price...

The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954

I have been told it is not fair to quote from the earlier parts of The Lord of the Rings, that I should look elsewhere to find much better stuff so, opening it entirely at random, I find some improvement in substance and writing, but that tone is still there:

Pippin became drowsy again and paid little attention to Gandalf telling him of the customs of Gondor, and how the Lord of the City had beacons built on the tops of outlying hills along both borders of the great range, and maintained posts at these points where fresh horses were always in readiness to bear his errand-riders to Rohan in the North, or to Belfalas in the South. "It is long since the beacons of the North were lit," he said; "and in the ancient days of Gondor they were not needed, for they had the Seven Stones."
Pippin stirred uneasily.

The Return of the King, 1955

Tolkien does, admittedly, rise above this sort of thing on occasions, in some key scenes, but often such a scene will be ruined by ghastly verse and it is remarkable how frequently he will draw back from the implications of the subject matter. Like Chesterton, and other orthodox Christian writers who substituted faith for artistic rigour he sees the petit bourgeoisie, the honest artisans and peasants, as the bulwark against Chaos. These people are always sentimentalized in such fiction because traditionally, they are always the last to complain about any deficiencies in the social status quo. They are a type familiar to anyone who ever watched an English film of the thirties and forties, particularly a war-film, where they represented solid good sense opposed to a perverted intellectualism. In many ways The Lord of the Rings is, if not exactly anti-romantic, an anti-romance. Tolkien, and his fellow "Inklings" (the dons who met in Lewis's Oxford rooms to read their work in progress to one another), had extraordinarily ambiguous attitudes towards Romance (and just about everything else), which is doubtless why his trilogy has so many confused moments when the tension flags completely. But he could, at his best, produce prose much better than that of his Oxford contemporaries who perhaps lacked his respect for middle-English poetry. He claimed that his work was primarily linguistic in its original conception, that there were no symbols or allegories to be found in it, but his beliefs permeate the book as thoroughly as they do the books of Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, who, consciously or unconsciously, promoted their orthodox Toryism in everything they wrote. While there is an argument for the reactionary nature of the books, they are certainly deeply conservative and strongly anti-urban, which is what leads some to associate them with a kind of Wagnerish hitlerism. I don't think these books are 'fascist', but they certainly don't exactly argue with the 18th century enlightened Toryism with which the English comfort themselves so frequently in these upsetting times. They don't ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what's best for us.

I suppose I respond so antipathetically to Lewis and Tolkien because I find this sort of consolatory orthodoxy as distasteful as any other self-serving misanthropic doctrine. One should perhaps feel some sympathy for the nervousness occasionally revealed beneath their thick layers of stuffy self-satisfaction, typical of the second-rate schoolmaster so cheerfully mocked by Peake and Rowling, but sympathy is hard to sustain in the teeth of their hidden aggression which is so often accompanied by a deep-rooted hypocrisy. Their theories dignify the mood of a disenchanted and thoroughly discredited section of the repressed English middle-class too afraid, even as it falls, to make any sort of direct complaint ("They kicked us out of Rhodesia, you know"), least of all to the Higher Authority, their Tory God who has evidently failed them.
It was best-selling novelists, like Warwick Deeping (Sorrell and Son), who, after the First World War, adapted the sentimental myths (particularly the myth of Sacrifice) which had made war bearable (and helped ensure that we should be able to bear further wars), providing us with the wretched ethic of passive "decency" and self-sacrifice, by means of which we British were able to console ourselves in our moral apathy (even Buchan paused in his anti-Semitic diatribes to provide a few of these). Moderation was the rule and it is moderation which ruins Tolkien's fantasy and causes it to fail as a genuine romance, let alone an epic. The little hills and woods of that Surrey of the mind, the Shire, are "safe", but the wild landscapes everywhere beyond the Shire are "dangerous". Experience of life itself is dangerous. The Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a declining nation with a morally bankrupt class whose cowardly self-protection is primarily responsible for the problems England answered with the ruthless logic of Thatcherism. Humanity was derided and marginalised. Sentimentality became the acceptable subsitute. So few people seem to be able to tell the difference.

The Lord of the Rings is much more deep-rooted in its infantilism than a good many of the more obviously juvenile books it influenced. It is Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic. If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob - mindless football supporters throwing their beer-bottles over the fence the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom "good taste" is synonymous with "restraint" (pastel colours, murmured protest) and "civilized" behaviour means "conventional behaviour in all circumstances". This is not to deny that courageous characters are found in The Lord of the Rings, or a willingness to fight Evil (never really defined), but somehow those courageous characters take on the aspect of retired colonels at last driven to write a letter to The Times and we are not sure - because Tolkien cannot really bring himself to get close to his proles and their satanic leaders - if Sauron and Co. are quite as evil as we're told. After all, anyone who hates hobbits can't be all bad.
The appeal of the Shire has certain similarities with the appeal of the "Greenwood" which is, unquestionably, rooted in most of us:

In summer when the sheves be shene
And leaves be large and long,
It is full merry in fair forest
In hear the fowle's song;
To see the deer draw to the dale,
And leave the Hilles hee,
And shadow them in levès green,
Under the greenwood tree.
A Tale of Robin Hood
(quoted in Ancient Metrical Tales, 1829)

There is no happy ending to the Romance of Robin Hood, however, whereas Tolkien, going against the grain of his subject matter, forces one on us - as a matter of policy:

And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy stories provide many examples and modes of this - which might be called the genuine escapist, or (I would say) fugitive spirit. But so do other stories (notably those of scientific inspiration), and so do other studies... But the "consolation" of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. For more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending.

J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories"

The great epics dignified death, but they did not ignore it, and it is one of the reasons why they are superior to the artificial romances of which Lord of the Rings is merely one of the most recent.

Since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, at least, people have been yearning for an ideal rural world they believe to have vanished - yearning for a mythical state of innocence (as Morris did) as heartily as the Israelites yearned for the Garden of Eden. This refusal to face or derive any pleasure from the realities of urban industrial life, this longing to possess, again, the infant's eye view of the countryside, is a fundamental theme in popular English literature. Novels set in the countryside probably always outsell novels set in the city, perhaps because most people now live in cities.

If I find this nostalgia for a "vanished" landscape a bit strange it is probably because as I write I can look from my window over twenty miles of superb countryside to the sea and a sparsely populated coast. This county, like many others, has seemingly limitless landscapes of great beauty and variety, unspoiled by excessive tourism or the uglier forms of industry. Elsewhere big cities have certainly destroyed the surrounding countryside but rapid transport now makes it possible for a Londoner to spend the time they would have needed to get to Box Hill forty years ago in getting to Northumberland. I think it is simple neophobia which makes people hate the modern world and its changing society; it is xenophobia which makes them unable to imagine what rural beauty might lie beyond the boundaries of their particular Shire. They would rather read Miss Read and The Horse Whisperer and share a miserable complaint or two on the commuter train while planning to take their holidays in Bournemouth, as usual, because they can't afford to go to Spain this year. They don't want rural beauty anyway; they want a sunny day, a pretty view.
Writers like Tolkien take you to the edge of the Abyss and point out the excellent tea-garden at the bottom, showing you the steps carved into the cliff and reminding you to be a bit careful because the hand-rails are a trifle shaky as you go down; they haven't got the approval yet to put a new one in.

I never liked A. A. Milne, even when I was very young. There is an element of conspiratorial persuasion in his tone that a suspicious child can detect early in life. Let's all be cosy, it seems to say (children's books are, after all, often written by conservative adults anxious to maintain an unreal attitude to childhood); let's forget about our troubles and go to sleep. At which I would find myself stirring to a sitting position in my little bed and responding with uncivilized bad taste.
According to C. S. Lewis his fantasies for children - his Narnia series of seven books beginning with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and ending with The Last Battle - were deliberate works of Christian propaganda. The books are a kind of Religious Tract Society version of the Oz books as written by E. Nesbit; but E. Nesbit would rarely have allowed herself Lewis's awful syntax, full of tacked-on clauses, lame qualifications, vague adjectives and unconscious repetitions; neither would she have written down to children as thoroughly as this childless don who remained a devoutly committed bachelor most of his life. Both Baum and Nesbit wrote more vigorously and more carefully:

Old Mombi had thought herself very wise to choose the form of a Griffin, for its legs were exceedingly fleet and its strength more enduring than that of other animals. But she had not reckoned on the untiring energy of the Saw-Horse, whose wooden limbs could run for days without slacking their speed. Therefore, after an hour's hard running, the Griffin's breath began to fail, and it panted and gasped painfully, and moved more slowly than before. Then it reached the edge of the desert and began racing across the deep sands. But its tired feet sank far into the sand, and in a few minutes the Griffin fell forward, completely exhausted, and lay still upon the desert waste.
Glinda came up a moment later, riding the still vigorous Saw-Horse; and having unwound a slender golden thread from her girdle the Sorceress threw it over the head of the panting and helpless Griffin, and so destroyed the magical power of Mombi's transformation.
For the animal, with one fierce shudder, disappeared from view, while in its place was discovered the form of the old Witch, glaring savagely at the serene and beautiful face of the Sorceress.

L. Frank Baum, The Land of Oz, 1904

Elfrida fired away, and the next moment it was plain that Elfrida's poetry was more potent than Edred's; also that a little bad grammar is a trifle to a mighty Mouldiwarp.
For the walls of Edred's room receded further and further till the children found themselves in a great white hall with avenues of tall pillars stretching in every direction as far as you could see. The hall was crowded with people dressed in costumes of all countries and all ages - Chinamen, Indians, Crusaders in armour, powdered ladies, doubleted gentlemen, Cavaliers in curls, Turks in turbans, Arabs, monks, abbesses, jesters, grandees with ruffs round their necks, and savages with kilts of thatch. Every kind of dress you can think of was there. Only all the dresses were white. It was like a redoute, which is a fancy-dress ball where the guests may wear any dress they choose, only the dresses must be of one colour.
The people round the children pushed them gently forward. And then they saw that in the middle of the hall was a throne of silver, spread with a fringed cloth of chequered silver and green, and on it, with the Mouldiwarp standing on one side and the Mouldierwarp on the other, the Mouldiestwarp was seated in state and splendour. He was much larger than either of the other moles, and his fur was as silvery as the feathers of a swan.

E. Nesbit, Harding's Luck, 1909

Here is a typical extract from Lewis's first Narnia book, which was superior to some which followed it and is a better than average example of Lewis's prose fiction for children or for adults:

It was nearly midday when they found themselves looking down a steep hillside at a castle - a little toy castle it looked from where they stood which seemed to be all pointed towers. But the Lion was rushing down at such a speed that it grew larger every moment and before they had time even to ask themselves what it was they were already on a level with it. And now it no longer looked like a toy castle but rose frowning in front of them. No face looked over the battlements and the gates were fast shut. And Aslan, not at all slacking his pace, rushed straight as a bullet towards it.
"The Witch's home!" he cried. "Now, children, hold tight."
Next moment the whole world seemed to turn upside down and the children felt as if they had left their insides behind them; for the Lion had gathered himself together for a greater leap than any he had yet made and jumped - or you may call it flying rather than jumping - right over the castle wall. The two girls, breathless but unhurt, found themselves tumbling off his back in the middle of a wide stone courtyard full of statues.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950

As a child, I found that these books did not show me the respect I was used to from Nesbit or Baum, who also gave me denser, better writing and a wider vocabulary. The Cowardly Lion was a far more attractive character than Aslan and Crompton's William books were notably free from moral lessons. I think I would have enjoyed the work of Alan Garner, Susan Cooper and Ursula Le Guin much more. They display a greater respect for children and considerably more talent as writers. Here is Garner:

But as his head cleared, Cohn heard another sound, so beautiful that he never found rest again; the sound of a horn, like the moon on snow, and another answered it from the limits of the sky; and through the Brollachan ran silver lightnings, and he heard hoofs, and voices calling, "We ride! We ride!" and the whole cloud was silver, so that he could not look.
The hoof-beats drew near, and the earth throbbed. Cohn opened his eyes. Now the cloud raced over the ground, breaking into separate glories that wisped and sharpened the skeins of starlight, and were horsemen, and at their head was majesty, crowned with antlers, like the sun.
But as they crossed the valley, one of the riders dropped behind, and Colin saw that it was Susan. She lost ground though her speed was no less, and the light that formed her died, and in its place was a smaller, solid figure that halted, forlorn, in the white wake of the riding.
The horsemen climbed from the hillside to the air, growing vast in the sky, and to meet them came nine women, their hair like wind. And away they rode together across the night, over the waves, and beyond the isles, and the Old Magic was free forever, and the moon was new.

The Moon of Gomrath, 1963

Evidently, Garner is a better writer than Lewis or Tolkien. In the three fantasy novels The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1961), The Moon of Gomrath (1963) and Elidor (1965) his weakness, in common with similar writers, is his plot structure. In a later, better-structured book,The Owl Service (1970), he improved considerably.

This deficiency of structure is by no means evident in Ursula K. Le Guin, Gillian Bradshaw or Susan Cooper. For my taste Susan Cooper has produced one of the very best sequences of novels of their type (modern children involved in ancient mystical conflicts). They have much of Masefield's Box of Delights magic. Her sequence, The Dark is Rising, has some fine moments. The strongest books are the title volume and the final volume Silver in the Tree (1977), while some of the best writing can he found in The Grey King (1975):

They were no longer where they had been. They stood somewhere in another time, on the roof of the world. All around them was the open night sky, like a huge black inverted bowl, and in it blazed the stars, thousand upon thousand brilliant prickles of fire. Will heard Bran draw in a quick breath. They stood, looking up. The stars blazed round them. There was no sound anywhere, in all the immensity of space. Will felt a wave of giddiness; it was as if they stood on the last edge of the universe, and if they fell, they would fall out of Time... As he gazed about him, gradually he recognised the strange inversion of reality in which they were held. He and Bran were not standing in a timeless dark night observing the stars in the heavens. It was the other way around. They themselves were observed. Every blazing point in that great depthless hemisphere of stars and suns was focussed upon them, contemplating, considering, judging. For by following the quest for the golden harp, he and Bran were challenging the boundless might of the High Magic of the Universe. They must stand unprotected before it, on their way, and they would be allowed to pass only if they had the right by birth. Under that merciless starlight of infinity any unrightful challenger would be brushed into nothingness as effortlessly as a man might brush an ant from his sleeve.

Ursula K. Le Guin in her trilogy A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971) andThe Farthest Shore (1972) is the only one of these three to set her stories entirely in a wholly invented world. She writes her books for children as conscientiously as she writes for adults (she is a leading and much admired sf author whose work has won many awards). Here is a passage from near the beginning, again with its echoes of Frazer's Golden Bough:

On the day the boy was thirteen years old, a day in the early splendour of autumn while still the bright leaves are on the trees, Ogion returned to the village from his rovings over Gont Mountain, and the ceremony of Passage was held. The witch took from the boy his name Duny, the name his mother had given him as a baby. Nameless and naked he walked into the cold springs of the Ar where it rises among the rocks under the high cliffs. As he entered the water clouds crossed the sun's face and great shadows slid and mingled over the water of the pool about him. He crossed to the far bank, shuddering with cold but walking slow and erect as he should through that icy, living water. As he came to the bank Ogion, waiting, reached out his hand and clasping the boy's arm whispered to him his true name: Ged.
Thus was he given his name by one very wise in the use of power.

A Wizard of Earthsea

Lloyd Alexander is another American writer who has had considerable success with his books set in an invented and decidedly Celtic fantasy world, but for my taste he never quite succeeds in matching the three I have mentioned. He uses more clichés and writes a trifle flaccidly:

The Horned King stood motionless, his arm upraised. Lightning played about his sword. The giant flamed like a burning tree. The stag horns turned to crimson streaks, the skull mask ran like molten iron. A roar of pain and rage rose from the Antlered King's throat.
With a cry, Taran flung an arm across his face. The ground rumbled and seemed to open beneath him. Then there was nothing.

The Book of Three, 1964

One does become a little tired, too, of Hern the Hunter turning up here. Another legacy from Frazer. Sometimes he appears in books of this kind almost as an embarrassment, as if convention demands his presence: an aging and rather vague bishop doing his bit at official services.
There are a good many more such fantasies now being written for children and on the whole they are considerably better than the imitations written ostensibly for adults. Perhaps the authors feel more at ease when writing about and for children - as if they are forced to tell fewer lies (or at least answer fewer fundamental questions) to themselves or their audience.
Among these newer writers, Gillian Bradshaw has produced yet another Arthurian trilogy. This one, however, is written from the point of view of Gwalchmai, the son of the King of Orkney and Queen Morgawse (who might be a sorceress). He encounters the Sidhe, some of whom help him as he journeys to be with King who is fighting a desperate battle against the Saxon invaders. Bradshaw's writing is clear and vibrant, her story-telling has pace and verve.

She lifted her arms and the Darkness leapt. But she was distant again, and I stood at Camlann. I looked up and saw Lugh standing in the west, opposite Morgawse, holding his arm above the island so that the Queen could not touch it. Behind was light too brilliant, too glorious to be seen. For a moment I saw these two confronting one another, and then my field of vision narrowed. I saw the island and the figures of armies. I saw the Family and myself in it. The armies began to move, and the sounds of battle arose. I realized that I saw things that were yet to come, and was terrified. I covered my face with my arms and cried, "No more!"
And abruptly there was silence.

Hawk of May, 1981

The subsequent books in this sequence are Kingdom of Summer (1982) and In Winter's Shadow (1983).
Several of the emerging children's novelists actually display more original gifts and greater talent than the majority of those ostensibly for adults. In my view Robin McKinley is one of the very best of these. Her The Blue Sword (1982) won the John Newbery Medal in 1984 and she is building an excellent reputation. The Blue Sword is the first of her Chronicles of Damar. She has a fresh and interesting approach to the genre which immediately makes it into something of her own. Her style is robust, elegant and considered, qualities which are a great relief after so many clunking archaicisms and cuticisms which inhabit the great majority of present-day fantasies. Angharad Crewe, the young woman who is her central character, is far more likeable than the tribe of leggy, slightly awkward, pony-loving teenagers appearing all too frequently in recent fantasies. Again McKinley's writing makes me wish I had been able to read them when I was young. They would have been a wonderful antidote to the bland fare which generally became acceptable on all the myriad planes and demi-planes of the English middle-class when I was young.

The power that washed over that face, that rolled down the arms and into the sword and shield, was that of demonkind, and Harry knew she was no match for this one, and in spite of the heat of Gonturan in her hand her heart was cold with fear. The two stallions reared again and reached out to tear each other; the white stallion's neck was now ribboned with blood, like the real ribbons he wore in his mane. Harry raised her sword arm and felt the shock of the answer, the hilts of the swords ring together, and sparks flew from the crash, and it seemed that the smoke rose from them and blinded her. The other rider's hot breath was in her face. His lips parted and she saw his tongue: it was scarlet, and looked more like fire than living flesh.

The Blue Sword

After reading a good many of these contemporary fantasy stories I remained impressed by the number of authors of adult books who described their characters as children and the number of children's writers who produce perfectly mature and sensible characters who think and act intelligently. I found myself wishing that the likes of McKinley would choose to do more work for grown-ups. Perhaps the reason they don't is that they find they can, writing for teenagers, preserve a greater respect for their audience.

Another variety of book has begun to appear, a sort of Pooh-fights-back fiction of the kind produced by Richard Adams, which substitutes animals for human protagonists, contains a familiar set of middle-class Anglican Tory undertones (all these books seem to be written with a slight lisp) and is certainly already more corrupt than Tolkien. Adams is a worse writer but he must appeal enormously to all those many readers who have never quite lost their yearning for the frisson first felt when Peter Rabbit was expelled from Mr. Macgregor's garden:

As Dandelion ended, Acorn, who was on the windward side of the little group, suddenly started and sat back, with ears up and nostrils twitching. The strange, rank smell was stronger than ever and after a few moments they all heard a heavy movement close by. Suddenly, on the other side of the path, the fern parted and there looked out a long, dog-like head, striped black and white. It was pointed downward, the jaws grinning, the muzzle close to the ground. Behind, they could just discern great, powerful paws and a shaggy black body. The eyes were peering at them, full of savage cunning. The head moved slowly, taking in the dusky lengths of the wood ride in both directions, and then fixed them once more with its fierce, terrible stare. The jaws opened wider and they could see the teeth, glimmering white as the stripes along the head. For long moments it gazed and the rabbits remained motionless, staring back without a sound. Then Bigwig, who was nearest to the path, turned and slipped back among the others.
"A lendri," he muttered as he passed through them. "It may be dangerous and it may not, but I'm taking no chances with it. Let's get away."

Watership Down, 1972

Adams's follow-up to this was Shardik (1974), better written, apparently for adults, and quite as silly. It was about a big bear who died four our sins: Martyred Pooh. Later, The Plague Dogs(1977) displayed an almost paranoid conservative misanthropism.

I sometimes think that as Britain declines, dreaming of a sweeter past, entertaining few hopes for a finer future, her middle-classes turn increasingly to the fantasy of rural life and talking animals, the safety of the woods that are the pattern of the paper on the nursery room wall. Old hippies, housewives, civil servants, share in this wistful trance; eating nothing as dangerous or exotic as the lotus, but chewing instead on a form of mildly anaesthetic British cabbage. If the bulk of American sf could be said to be written by robots, about robots, for robots, then the bulk of English fantasy seems to be written by rabbits, about rabbits and for rabbits.
How much further can it go?

Of the children's writers only Lewis and Adams are guilty, in my opinion, of producing thoroughly corrupted romanticism - sentimentalized pleas for moderation of aspiration which are at the root of their kind of conservatism. In Lewis's case this consolatory, anxiety-stilling "Why try to play Mozart when it's easier to play Rodgers and Hammerstein?" attitude extended to his non-fiction, particularly the dreadful but influential Experiment in Criticism. But these are, anyway, minor figures. It is Tolkien who is most widely read and worshipped. And it was Tolkien who most betrayed the romantic discipline, more so than ever Tennyson could in Idylls of the King, which enjoyed a similar vogue in Victorian England.

Corrupted romanticism is as unwholesome as the corrupted realism of, say, Ayn Rand. Cabell's somewhat obvious irony is easier to take than Tolkien's less obvious sentimentality, largely because Cabell's writing is wittier, more inventive and better disciplined. I find William Morris naïve and silly but essentially good-hearted (and a better utopianist than a fantasist); Dunsany I find slight but inoffensive. Lewis speaks for the middle-class status quo, as, more subtly, does Charles Williams. Lewis uses the stuff of fantasy to preach sermons quite as nasty as any to be found in Victorian sentimental fiction, and he writes badly. A group of self-congratulatory friends can often ensure that any writing emerging from it remains hasty and unpolished.

Ideally fiction should offer us escape and force us, at least, to ask questions; it should provide a release from anxiety but give us some insight into the causes of anxiety. Lin Carter, in hisImaginary Worlds - the only book I have been able to find on the general subject of epic fantasy - uses an argument familiar to those who are used to reading apologies from that kind of sf or thriller buff who feels compelled to justify his philistinism: "The charge of 'escapist reading,'" says Carter, "is most often levelled against fantasy and science fiction by those who have forgotten or overlooked the simple fact that virtually all reading - all music and poetry and art and drama and philosophy for that matter - is a temporary escape from what is around us." Like so many of his colleagues in the professional sf world, Carter expresses distaste for fiction which is not predominantly escapist by charging it with being "depressing" or "negative" if it does not provide him with the moral and psychological comforts he seems to need. An unorthodox view, such as that of Tolkien's contemporary David Lindsay (Voyage to Arcturus), is regarded as a negative view. This, of course, is the response of those deeply and often unconsciously wedded to their cultural presumptions, who regard examination of them as an attack.

Carter dismisses Spenser as "dull" and Joyce as "a titanic bore" and writes in clichés, euphemisms and wretchedly distorted syntax, telling us that the PreRaphaelites were "lisping exquisites" and that Ford Madox Brown (1821-93) was a young man attracted to the movement by Morris's (1834-96) fiery Welsh (born Walthamstow, near London) dynamism and that because Tolkien got a CBE (not a knighthood) we must now call him "Sir John" - but Carter, at least, is not the snob some American adherents are (and there is nobody more risible than the provincial American literary snob - Gore Vidal being the most developed example). In a recent anthology compiled by Robert H. Boyer and Kenneth J. Zahorski, The Fantastic Imagination, we find the following: "In addition to their all being high fantasy, the stories selected here are good literature." Amongst the writers to be found in the volume are C. S. Lewis, John Buchan, Frank R. Stockton and Lloyd Alexander, not one of whom can match the literary talents of, say, Fritz Leiber, whose work has primarily been published in commercial magazines and genre paperback series. For years American thriller buffs with pretensions ignored Hammett and Chandler in favour of inferior English writers like D. L. Sayers and here we see the same thing occurring with American fantasy writers. Those who produce the closest approximation to an English style are most praised. Those who use more vigorous American models are regarded as less literary! The crux of the thing remains: the writers admired are not "literary" or "literate". As often as not they flatter middle-brow sensibilities and reinforce middle-class sentimentality and therefore do not threaten a carefully maintained set of social and intellectual assumptions.
Yet Tennyson, who had his moments, inspired better poets who followed him, who sought the origin of his inspiration and made nobler use of it. Both Swinburne and Morris could, for instance, employ the old ballad metres more effectively than Tennyson himself, refusing, unlike him, to modify their toughness. Doubtless Tolkien will also inspire writers who will take his raw materials and put them to nobler uses. I would love to believe that the day of the rural romance is done at last.

The commercial genre which has developed from Tolkien is probably the most dismaying effect of all. I grew up in a world where Joyce was considered to be the best Anglophone writer of the 20th century. I happen to believe that Faulkner is better, while others would pick Conrad, say. Thomas Mann is an exemplary giant of moral, mythic fiction. But to introduce Tolkien's fantasy into such a debate is a sad comment on our standards and our ambitions. Is it a sign of our dumber times that Lord of the Rings can replace Ulysses as the exemplary book of its century? Some of the writers who most slavishly imitate him seem to be using English as a rather inexpertly-learned second language. So many of them are unbelievably bad that they defy description and are scarcely worth listing individually. Terry Pratchett once remarked that all his readers were called Kevin. He is lucky in that he appears to be the only Terry in fantasy land who is able to write a decent complex sentence. That such writers also depend upon recycling the plots of their literary superiors and are rewarded for this bland repetition isn't surprising in a world of sensation movies and manufactured pop bands. That they are rewarded with the lavish lifestyles of the most successful whores is also unsurprising. To pretend that this addictive cabbage is anything more than the worst sort of pulp historical romance or western is, however, a depressing sign of our intellectual decline and our free-falling academic standards.

[Nowake]

That might be one of the most articulate and insightful reviews I've ever read. If you make a post without pointing out the flaws in his reasoning, you are the one who seems to simply not like what his "revision" taught you about the author and who decides to dismiss without being able to disprove it.

Lets be fair

[Nowake]

he’s trying to tout his opinion as the unspoken truth

I think this is where we disagree. He of course wishes to express his thoughts. Those being overly critical, they may seem to cut deep, yet I cannot see how he could develop his train of thought or how is he claiming the infallibility you write of.

I also think nothing there talked about Tolkien’s fault for not producing the very best fantasy; it addressed the shallowness of the cultural anxieties expressed in his prose and the corrupting influence those had on the genre.
There are a few passages where I simply cannot find any fault in his logic; boldfaced a few

The sort of prose most often identified with "high" fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room

. It is a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles; it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies. (...) It is the predominant tone of The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down and it is the main reason why these books, like many similar ones in the past, are successful.

(...) The great epics dignified death, but they did not ignore it, and it is one of the reasons why they are superior to the artificial romances of which Lord of the Rings is merely one of the most recent.

Since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, at least, people have been yearning for an ideal rural world they believe to have vanished - yearning for a mythical state of innocence (as Morris did) as heartily as the Israelites yearned for the Garden of Eden. This refusal to face or derive any pleasure from the realities of urban industrial life, this longing to possess, again, the infant's eye view of the countryside, is a fundamental theme in popular English literature. Novels set in the countryside probably always outsell novels set in the city, perhaps because most people now live in cities.
If I find this nostalgia for a "vanished" landscape a bit strange it is probably because as I write I can look from my window over twenty miles of superb countryside to the sea and a sparsely populated coast. This county, like many others, has seemingly limitless landscapes of great beauty and variety, unspoiled by excessive tourism or the uglier forms of industry. Elsewhere big cities have certainly destroyed the surrounding countryside but rapid transport now makes it possible for a Londoner to spend the time they would have needed to get to Box Hill forty years ago in getting to Northumberland. I think it is simple neophobia which makes people hate the modern world and its changing society; it is xenophobia which makes them unable to imagine what rural beauty might lie beyond the boundaries of their particular Shire. They would rather read Miss Read and The Horse Whisperer and share a miserable complaint or two on the commuter train while planning to take their holidays in Bournemouth, as usual, because they can't afford to go to Spain this year. They don't want rural beauty anyway; they want a sunny day, a pretty view.
Writers like Tolkien take you to the edge of the Abyss and point out the excellent tea-garden at the bottom, showing you the steps carved into the cliff and reminding you to be a bit careful because the hand-rails are a trifle shaky as you go down; they haven't got the approval yet to put a new one in.

(...) After reading a good many of these contemporary fantasy stories I remained impressed by the number of authors of adult books who described their characters as children and the number of children's writers who produce perfectly mature and sensible characters who think and act intelligently.

(...) Of the children's writers only Lewis and Adams are guilty, in my opinion, of producing thoroughly corrupted romanticism - sentimentalized pleas for moderation of aspiration which are at the root of their kind of conservatism. In Lewis's case this consolatory, anxiety-stilling "Why try to play Mozart when it's easier to play Rodgers and Hammerstein?" attitude extended to his non-fiction, particularly the dreadful but influential Experiment in Criticism. But these are, anyway, minor figures. It is Tolkien who is most widely read and worshipped. And it was Tolkien who most betrayed the romantic discipline, more so than ever Tennyson could in Idylls of the King, which enjoyed a similar vogue in Victorian England.

Corrupted romanticism is as unwholesome as the corrupted realism of, say, Ayn Rand. Cabell's somewhat obvious irony is easier to take than Tolkien's less obvious sentimentality, largely because Cabell's writing is wittier, more inventive and better disciplined. I find William Morris naïve and silly but essentially good-hearted (and a better utopianist than a fantasist); Dunsany I find slight but inoffensive. Lewis speaks for the middle-class status quo, as, more subtly, does Charles Williams. Lewis uses the stuff of fantasy to preach sermons quite as nasty as any to be found in Victorian sentimental fiction, and he writes badly. A group of self-congratulatory friends can often ensure that any writing emerging from it remains hasty and unpolished.

Ideally fiction should offer us escape and force us, at least, to ask questions; it should provide a release from anxiety but give us some insight into the causes of anxiety. Lin Carter, in his Imaginary Worlds - the only book I have been able to find on the general subject of epic fantasy - uses an argument familiar to those who are used to reading apologies from that kind of sf or thriller buff who feels compelled to justify his philistinism: "The charge of 'escapist reading,'" says Carter, "is most often levelled against fantasy and science fiction by those who have forgotten or overlooked the simple fact that virtually all reading - all music and poetry and art and drama and philosophy for that matter - is a temporary escape from what is around us." Like so many of his colleagues in the professional sf world, Carter expresses distaste for fiction which is not predominantly escapist by charging it with being "depressing" or "negative" if it does not provide him with the moral and psychological comforts he seems to need. An unorthodox view, such as that of Tolkien's contemporary David Lindsay (Voyage to Arcturus), is regarded as a negative view. This, of course, is the response of those deeply and often unconsciously wedded to their cultural presumptions, who regard examination of them as an attack.

(...)The commercial genre which has developed from Tolkien is probably the most dismaying effect of all. I grew up in a world where Joyce was considered to be the best Anglophone writer of the 20th century. I happen to believe that Faulkner is better, while others would pick Conrad, say. Thomas Mann is an exemplary giant of moral, mythic fiction. But to introduce Tolkien's fantasy into such a debate is a sad comment on our standards and our ambitions. Is it a sign of our dumber times that Lord of the Rings can replace Ulysses as the exemplary book of its century? Some of the writers who most slavishly imitate him seem to be using English as a rather inexpertly-learned second language. So many of them are unbelievably bad that they defy description and are scarcely worth listing individually. Terry Pratchett once remarked that all his readers were called Kevin. He is lucky in that he appears to be the only Terry in fantasy land who is able to write a decent complex sentence. That such writers also depend upon recycling the plots of their literary superiors and are rewarded for this bland repetition isn't surprising in a world of sensation movies and manufactured pop bands. That they are rewarded with the lavish lifestyles of the most successful whores is also unsurprising. To pretend that this addictive cabbage is anything more than the worst sort of pulp historical romance or western is, however, a depressing sign of our intellectual decline and our free-falling academic standards.

[Montmorency]

Sounds exemplary of the arrogance of the Eng. Lit. elites.

The great epics dignified death, but they did not ignore it

In what sense does LOTR "ignore" death? Is it literal, referring to the Gandalfian resurrection?

Since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, at least, people have been yearning for an ideal rural world they believe to have vanished

That's Tolkien's idea, not necessarily his readers'.

I think it is simple neophobia which makes people hate the modern world and its changing society; it is xenophobia which makes them unable to imagine what rural beauty might lie beyond the boundaries of their particular Shire.

It's not parochialism that fantasy readers seem to be motivated by, but rather a thirst for the exotic.

The authors' biggest mistake is taking the fact of fantasy as a typically escapist genre, and somehow coming to the conclusion that readers and Roman consumers of pastoralist poetry are identical.

This, of course, is the response of those deeply and often unconsciously wedded to their cultural presumptions,

*ahem*

Corrupted romanticism

Is there an uncorrupted romanticism? Wouldn't all those 19th c. novels be guilty of "coddling" and "telling comforting lies" as well?

The commercial genre which has developed from Tolkien is probably the most dismaying effect of all.

Inspired by Tolkien, but not really like Tolkien. Important thing to note.

What does Watership Down have to do with any of this, though. I remember it as a book concerning the massacre of anthropomorphized rabbits. Doesn't seem to jive with

expresses distaste for fiction which is not predominantly escapist by charging it with being "depressing" or "negative"

Neither does LOTR, for that matter. Unless he's merely against happy endings. Hm, maybe that's the problem. Has this guy ever actually read any fantasy?

Meh. While we're dropping 'erudite' essays - this one actually takes the idea of escapism and examines it critically, instead of wailing about WESTERN INTELLECTUAL DECLINE FANTASY BOOGEYMAN.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Dragons Over Spaceships: Fantasy and Science Fiction as Cultural Prostheses
OPENING REMARKS

I should begin by saying that I’m not qualified to make any of the claims that follow. I think I have something interesting to say, but there’s a damn good chance I don’t. I leave that for you to decide, while sheltering behind that ancient axiom of informal reasoning which asserts that the truth or falsity of claims is independent of those foolish enough to make them.

INTRODUCTION

I want to talk about the relation between our contemporary experience of time and the genres of fantasy and science fiction. In particular, I want to discuss the process of what might be called ‘stranding,’ the way in which technological innovation and theoretical disenchantment, the twin dividends of institutionalized science, have marooned us outside of time.

ARGUMENT

My argument then, might run something as follows: Both genres, I will argue, are a result of a pernicious way ‘scientific progress’ has transformed our experience of the world.

To model this transformation of experience, I will adapt what the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck calls the ‘horizon of expectation’ and the ‘space of experience.’ Science fiction and fantasy, I will contend, are the result of the way the applications and implications of science have crippled these two fundamental features of our experience. On the one hand, the applications of science have pressed our horizon of expectation to the point of collapse by accelerating the pace of change. On the other hand, the implications of science threaten to collapse our space of experience by eradicating, rather than simply discrediting, intentionality.

Both science fiction and fantasy are attempts to compensate for these impending phenomenological disasters. Both genres are consolatory. Where science fiction attempts to recover our lost horizon of expectation through narrative, fantasy attempts to recover our lost space of experience through narrative.

REINHART KOSELLECK: AN ADAPTATION

Since the Enlightenment, science has gradually supplanted traditional forms of cognition, becoming the very paradigm of rationality in contemporary society. In addition to telling us how the world works, science now tells us what to eat, how to live, even how to raise our children. And well it should. Science is, without any doubt, the most powerful instrument of discovery humanity has ever known.

Insofar as scientific truth claims make things like cures for smallpox and thermonuclear explosions possible, science cannot simply be one network of ‘language games’ among others. Declaring that scientific truth claims ultimately stand upon the same consensual or formal quicksand as, say, literary or philosophical truth claims elides the very distinction that demands explanation. Theoretical truth claims generated by scientific institutions empower in a way at drastic odds with theoretical truth claims generated elsewhere–end of story. Any theory of meaning that cannot convincingly explain this remarkable difference is either incomplete or insolvant.

My point here is not so much to dismiss ‘fiction friendly’ theories such as contextualism, social constructivism, post-structuralism, and the like as to recall the incontrovertible difference between science and other institutional modes of theoretical cognition. When it comes to efficacious theoretical cognition, science really is the only game in town. We should be as much in awe of science as we are of the horrors and marvels that it makes possible. Whatever knowledge is, science is its most powerful expression. Whatever rationality is, science is its most forceful example. Far and away.

Before science, we largely relied on intentional explanations to understand ourselves and the world. Intentional explanations, crudely put, generate understanding by giving reasons and purposes for things and events. They also reference norms and values. Whenever we give reasons for our actions, we are not only providing others with explanations, we are often providing justifications as well. We ground our children ‘to teach them a lesson.’ We buy a bottle of fine wine ‘to make an impression.’ We give to charity ‘to do the right thing.’ And so on.

We moderns generally confine such explanations to human interactions and activities. Our premodern ancestors, on the other hand, used them to understand the entire world. For them, everything possessed ‘intent,’ criminal or otherwise. Storms, animals, madness, menstrual cycles, nearly everything was understood intentionally, attributed either to invisible agencies or to grand designs. For our premodern ancestors, the world was simply an extension of their community, constrained by similar codes of conduct, and moved by similar passions and purposes.

But storms are the result of complex meteorological processes, not the instruments of vengeful gods. Likewise, madness is the result of complex neurophysiological processes, not the sign of demonic possession. Our ancestors, in other words, were deluded. Our intentional understanding of ourselves and one another, it turns out, is entirely inappropriate to the world.

Since the Enlightenment, our understanding of the world has become less and less intentional and more and more functional. What is commonly referred to as ‘the scientific disenchantment of the world,’ is in fact a scientific ‘deintentionalization’ or ‘functionalization’ of the world. Wherever science has turned its scrutiny, intentionality has evaporated, to be replaced by functional accounts that have given us extraordinary power. The world, it seems, is a vast, stochastic mechanism. After four scant centuries of substituting intentional with functional explanations, we have acquired a power that our forebears would consider godlike.

Both the picture and the power, the theories and the technological applications of science, have irrevocably changed the status and character of our experience when compared to that of our ancestors. In order to chart this transformation, I will adapt a schema used by the German intellectual historian, Reinhart Koselleck. The specifics of his account, and the problems he encounters (such as equivocating categories like expectation and hope), stand outside the scope of this paper. For those of you interested in exploring his ideas further, I refer you to his Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time.

In Futures Past, Reinhart Koselleck investigates the history of our modern experience of historical time–what he calls Neuzeit. The first problem posed by such an investigation, he realizes, is the fact that we, as moderns, are forced to study the history of Neuzeit through the lense of Neuzeit. We become embroiled in what Koselleck calls ‘the vortex of historicization.’ (271). We can never quite be certain what belongs to the history and what belongs to the lense.

Rather than adopting a hermeneutic methodology, where the circular relation between our initial implicit understanding and our final explicit understanding is virtuous rather than vicious, Koselleck turns to what can only be called a phenomenology of time consciousness, namely, the relation between experience and expectation. Experience and expectation, he claims, provide the fixed phenomenological framework needed to map the mutation of our premodern experience of historical time into Neuzeit.

Though Koselleck poses experience and expectation as transcendental categories, what he means by the terms is quite straightforward. Experience, for Koselleck, is simply what has been lived, whereas expectation is simply the apprehension of what will be lived. Since we experience what has been lived as a kind of differential totality, Koselleck refers to the ‘space of experience.’ Since we experience our apprehension of what will be lived as a kind of limit, he refers to the ‘horizon of expectation.’

For Koselleck, our continually mutating experience of historical time is constituted by the shifting relationship between the space of our experience and the horizon of our expectation. By considering the impact of different socio-cultural phenomena on experience and expectation, we can infer crucial differences between the contemporary experience of time as opposed to say, the ancient experience.

So for example, the fact that the accelerating pace of technological innovation has rendered us the first generation in the history of the human race that cannot reliably anticipate that even fundamental social institutions such as universities will exist in a recognizable form in a generation’s time, means that our horizon of expectation differs profoundly from that of, say, a pre-Enlightenment yeoman. Add to that the false ideology of individualism (which produces an exaggerated sense of individual agency), the myth of ‘upward mobility’ (which produces an exaggerated sense of economic possibility), and what are essentially theological concepts of ‘progress,’ and our experience of the future is even further transformed.

Given the slow pace of technological innovation, our pre-Enlightenment ancestors could reliably expect that their children and their grandchildren would live much the same as they lived, work much the same as they worked, and that the social institutions they served would remain largely unchanged. Also, locked into a rigid social hierarchy and lacking any concept of secular ‘self-improvement,’* they would not hope for much beyond what experience had already offered them.

What this suggests is that the horizon of expectation for our pre-Enlightenment ancestors was continuous with the space of their experience, whereas ours has become discontinuous in the extreme, to the point that we now expect　the obsolescence of our experience, which is to say, we expect the unexpected.

For our ancestors, the future could be known on the basis of past and present experience. Not so for us, primarily because of science (and it’s evil twin, capitalism, but that’s another story. In modernity, everyone ‘hopes to be a millionaire,’ which is to say, everyone hopes to join the largely hereditary elite that subsists on the surplus labour of the masses. We are accustomed to entertaining hopes detached from our daily experience).

Some might suggest that losing cognitive access to the future is a small price to pay for the cognitive access to the present we moderns have gained as a result of science. Our ancestors may have been assured a future that conformed to the space of their experience, but in so many ways that experience was utterly deluded. The intentional explanations they adduced for the world were at best flattering palliatives and at worst subreptive rationalizations of oppression. Good riddance.

The problem, however, is that experience is fundamentally intentional. Not only is it intentional in Brentano’s sense of ‘aboutness,’ it is also intentional in the umbrella sense of the term, which includes normativity, affectivity, and purposiveness. Experience is intentional through and through. This is why we say the intentional explanation of the world results in anthropomorphism, the erroneous attribution of human norms, affects, and purposes to what is in truth an arbitrary and indifferent world.

In addition to closing down our horizon of expectation, science also assails our space of experience. In order to cognize the world we must filter out the intentional malapropisms that fundamentally characterize our experience. What this means is that in a large measure, we no longer recognize the world we presently experience. We quite literally live in an alien world. Since we are part of that world this also means we no longer recognize ourselves. We are ourselves alien.

So for instance, where our pre-Enlightenment ancestors lived in a world steeped in moral significance, we live in a world where value is an illusion. Evolutionary biology, for instance, states that ‘moral intuitions’ are experiential subreptions selected for because they provide the requisite social cohesion necessary for the successful rearing of offspring. There’s no good, no evil, not really, only the effective transmission of genetic material. The same might be said of familial cohesion and ‘love,’ or should we say ‘pair bonding.’ Or how about babies? Infants are cute, not because they are in fact cute, but because cuteness as an experiential response was selected for because it facilitated parent-child pair bonding, which in turn effected the successful transmission of genetic material… And so on, and so on.

Of course the same goes for that other cherished feature of experience, purposiveness. In contrast to our pre-Enlightenment ancestors, we moderns know ‘shit just happens’–though a great many of us hope otherwise. There’s no reasons, only causes. The power of science to monopolize rationality has reached such an extent that one can no longer ask the question, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ and still be ‘rational.’ Since there’s no scientific answer to this question, and since science is the paradigm of rationality, the question becomes irrational, silly, the subject matter of Monty Python spoofs.

Compared to our ancestors then, we are stranded, shipwrecked, not just in the present, but in a present that isn’t real. Our horizon of expectation has collapsed, and the space of our experience has been dispossessed. And it is this state of affairs, I would like to argue, that provides the socio-phenomenological foundations of science fiction and fantasy. Both genres, I want to suggest, are best understood as symbolic compensatory mechanisms for our stranded souls. In other words, both genres are best understood as cultural prostheses.

THE SOCIO-PHENOMENOLOGY OF SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

If a culture were trying to compensate for phenomenologico-cognitive deficits such as these, for our contemporary experience of stranding, what might we expect to arise as a result?

Given the cognitive opacity of the future one might expect a culture to offer ‘cognitive seeming’ accounts of what we might expect. Since we know only that the future will be different, and since what we want is cognition–or the semblance of it, anyway–what need is someway of getting from here and now to there and then which gives the impression of cognition. What we need, in other words, are pseudo-cognitive transformation rules that provide the semblance of a horizon of expectation. Since science is the paradigm of knowledge, one might expect these rules to be ‘apparently scientific.’ Since technological innovation is the obvious ‘problem,’ one might expect it to constitute the primary locus for these rules.

In other words, one might expect the development of science fiction or something like it.

Given the gap between the intentional world of our experience (what is commonly called, following Husserl, the Lebenswelt, or ‘lifeworld’)–the world we recognize–and the deintentionalized world described by scientific theory–the world we cognize–one might expect a culture to generate surrogates, worlds where recognition is cognition. Since the scientific deintentionalization of the world has caused this lacuna, one might expect these alternate worlds to repudiate the validity of science. Since all we possess are pre-scientific, historical contexts as models for ‘intentional worlds without science,’ one might expect these to provide the models for these alternate worlds. Put differently, one might expect culture to provide ‘associative elimination rules,’ ways to abstract from the present, for the production of alternate intentional contexts which conform to, and so repatriate, the otherwise displaced space of our experience.

One might expect the development of fantasy literature or something like it.

For us, the future world is as opaque to cognition as the present world is transparent and alien. For our prescientific ancestors, the situation was the opposite: the future world was as transparent to cognition as the present world was opaque and familiar. Where the future is our mirror, the present was theirs. We now bounce light off the future to symbolically illuminate ourselves, while our ancestors, unable to penetrate experience, saw themselves literally reflected across their present–they anthropomorphized. Where we write science fiction and fantasy, they wrote scripture–what we now call myth.

SOME SUGGESTIVE HIGHLIGHTS

1) The prevailing assumption seems to be that science fiction and fantasy are wedded in the vague sense that both are ‘speculative,’ and that, for arbitrary historical reasons, they share the same cultural industrial outputs–the publishers of the one tend to be the publishers of the other. The suggestion here is that their connection is both far more intimate and far more profound. We have already considered how, socio-historically, they are both a consequence of the institutional dominance of science.

2) The novum or nova which as as I can tell, are typically thought of as points of differentiation, should be seen the points of extension, the points which explain, and therefore domesticate, the differences which define the alternate context at hand. Science fiction is primarily involved in establishing pseudo-cognitive continuities. The ‘encounter with difference’ characteristic of science fiction, on this account, is simply a side-effect of rule-governed mapping of the familiar onto the alien–which is the structure of cognition. In this account, estrangement is the phenomenological origin, rather than the result of science fiction. Science fiction, in other words, is primarily a literature of recovery. On this account, otherness or alterity belong first and foremost to the future.

3) If science fiction is comparatively ‘socially progressive,’ it has more to do with the implicit understanding that traditional biases against various groups will be progressively discredited, (leaving only the economically rationalized biases against the longest suffering and most systematically oppressed: the poor). In other words, it belongs to the transformation rules. Likewise, if fantasy is comparatively ‘socially conservative,’ it has to do with the elimination rules: the associative connections between traditional biases and traditional conceptions of the world are difficult to overcome.

4) Both genres are invested in providing the semblance of recovery, which is why science fiction is no more about the actual future than fantasy is about the actual past. Both genres offer the illusion of cognition, be it functional or intentional.

5) In terms of what Heidegger calls the ‘ontological difference,’ science fiction is primarily an ontic discourse, a discourse concerned with beings within the world, whereas fantasy is primarily an ontological one, a discourse concerned with Being itself. What this suggests is that the socio-phenomenological stakes involved in fantasy are more radical than those involved in science fiction. In Adornian terms, science fiction, it could be said, is primarily engaged in the extension of identity thinking, whereas fantasy, through its wilful denial of cognition, points to the ‘messianic moment,’ the necessity of finding some way out of our functional nightmare.

[Nowake]

Oh come on, a little bit more substance

i) Sounds exemplary of the arrogance of the Eng. Lit. elites.
ii) In what sense does LOTR "ignore" death? Is it literal, referring to the Gandalfian resurrection? (...) Unless he's merely against happy endings
iii) That's Tolkien's idea, not necessarily his readers'.
iv) Is there an uncorrupted romanticism? Wouldn't all those 19th c. novels be guilty of "coddling" and "telling comforting lies" as well?
v) What does Watership Down have to do with any of this, though.

i) Odd, as the man is criticising Tolkien and Lewis, both part of the Oxford literary elite.

ii) He protests against:
J. R. R. Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories": And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy stories provide many examples and modes of this - which might be called the genuine escapist, or (I would say) fugitive spirit. But so do other stories (notably those of scientific inspiration), and so do other studies... But the "consolation" of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. For more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending.

Because, he argues in a salient paragraph:
Moderation was the rule and it is moderation which ruins Tolkien's fantasy and causes it to fail as a genuine romance, let alone an epic. The little hills and woods of that Surrey of the mind, the Shire, are "safe", but the wild landscapes everywhere beyond the Shire are "dangerous". Experience of life itself is dangerous. The Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a declining nation with a morally bankrupt class whose cowardly self-protection is primarily responsible for the problems England answered with the ruthless logic of Thatcherism. Humanity was derided and marginalised. Sentimentality became the acceptable subsitute. So few people seem to be able to tell the difference.

The Lord of the Rings is much more deep-rooted in its infantilism than a good many of the more obviously juvenile books it influenced. It is Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic. If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob - mindless football supporters throwing their beer-bottles over the fence the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom "good taste" is synonymous with "restraint" (pastel colours, murmured protest) and "civilized" behaviour means "conventional behaviour in all circumstances". This is not to deny that courageous characters are found in The Lord of the Rings, or a willingness to fight Evil (never really defined), but somehow those courageous characters take on the aspect of retired colonels at last driven to write a letter to The Times and we are not sure - because Tolkien cannot really bring himself to get close to his proles and their satanic leaders - if Sauron and Co. are quite as evil as we're told.

iii) Great, as he is arguing against Tolkien and his generation in that paragraph after all.

I have to remark time and again the amazing skill of so many posters of criticising an opinion without reading it. Quite astounding. In this case (iv)
He very precisely defines his usage of the term:

“corrupted romanticism - sentimentalized pleas for moderation of aspiration which are at the root of their kind of conservatism. In Lewis's case this consolatory, anxiety-stilling "Why try to play Mozart when it's easier to play Rodgers and Hammerstein?" attitude extended to his non-fiction, particularly the dreadful but influential Experiment in Criticism.”

If you believe 19^th century romantic authors to have made “sentimentalized pleas for moderation of aspiration”, I imagine quite a few are right now turning in their grave.

v) A second case of disagreement based upon the critic not having read the material he is berating. Adams was quoted in very different context:

Another variety of book has begun to appear, a sort of Pooh-fights-back fiction of the kind produced by Richard Adams, which substitutes animals for human protagonists, contains a familiar set of middle-class Anglican Tory undertones (all these books seem to be written with a slight lisp) and is certainly already more corrupt than Tolkien. Adams is a worse writer but he must appeal enormously to all those many readers who have never quite lost their yearning for the frisson first felt when Peter Rabbit was expelled from Mr. Macgregor's garden.

Hmm, maybe that's the problem. Has this guy ever actually read any fantasy?

You are giving me pause. The chap comments on dozens of specific passages of fantasy literature taken from the works of a score of authors, and you accuse him of not having read fantasy.

The actual mind-bending irony is that the critic is a Nebula prize award winning author himself, one of the most influential fantasy aficionados in the world, was the editor of publications focused on the genre for decades and one of the original promoters of the “New Wave” current in the ‘70s: Michael Moorcock

I suppose anyone who shakes one’s cosy feelings of yearning for bad fantasy literature is to be dismissed as one who never read any of it, of course...



As to your jab on “ ‘erudite’ essays”, what’s next, condemning well-read persons for being “intellectuals”?

[naut]

Ubik. Philip K. Dick.

V.good.

[Nowake]

In the end, though, I think even he would agree that reading Tolkein is essential for establishing a young reader's literary foundation.

Hmm, I personally agree with you, but I have a feeling he would also want to provide a solid alternative on the same bookshelf. Otherwise, I do not think he would want Tolkien to be ostracized by young readers.



Oh and you guys, what about The Man in the High Castle?!
To have it published at that point in time must've been groundbreaking; as in, opening the dialogue.
Although I didn’t agree with the I Ching bits he inserted and overall influence, I found the book awesome! Have it as audio, still among my picks during a long drive.

[Montmorency]

Odd, as the man is criticising Tolkien and Lewis, both part of the Oxford literary elite.

The literary in-crowd is riddled with exclusive and highly specialized cliques who have become "out of touch" with everyone and thing outside: that's the point.

I have to remark time and again the amazing skill of so many posters of criticising an opinion without reading it.

Physician, heal thyself! But I'm cool with it if you are. :S

I suppose anyone who shakes one’s cosy feelings of yearning for bad fantasy literature is to be dismissed as one who never read any of it, of course...

Nice strawman, bro.

If you believe 19th century romantic authors to have made “sentimentalized pleas for moderation of aspiration”, I imagine quite a few are right now turning in their grave.

Moderation of aspiration in fantasy? Where? *Don't actually reply to this, please. It's rhetorical, and is addressed below-low. *

As for romanticism: this should make it clearer -

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

He begins
by dividing fiction, somewhat unorthodoxly, into three divisions—
romantic, realistic, and imaginative. The first ‘is for those who
value action and emotion for their own sake; who are interested in
striking events which conform to a preconceived artificial pattern’.
The second ‘is for those who are intellectual and analytical rather
than poetical or emotional … It has the virtue of being close to life,
but has the disadvantage of sinking into the commonplace and the
unpleasant at times.’ Lovecraft does not provide an explicit definition
of imaginative fiction, but implies that it draws upon the best
features of both the other two: like romanticism, imaginative
fiction bases its appeal on emotions (the emotions of fear, wonder,
and terror); from realism it derives the important principle of
truth—not truth to fact, as in realism, but truth to human feeling.
As a result, Lovecraft comes up with the somewhat startling
deduction that ‘The imaginative writer devotes himself to art in its
most essential sense.’

The attack on what Lovecraft called ‘romanticism’ is one he
never relinquished. The term must not be understood here in any
historical sense—Lovecraft had great respect and fondness for such Romantic poets as Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge—but purely
theoretically, as embodying an approach not only to literature but
to life generally:

The one form of literary appeal which I consider absolutely
unsound, charlatanic, and valueless—frivolous, insincere, irrelevant,
and meaningless—is that mode of handling human
events and values and motivations known as romanticism.
Dumas, Scott, Stevenson—my gawd! Here is sheer puerility—
the concoction of false glamours and enthusiasms and
events out of an addled and distorted background which has
no relation to anything in the genuine thoughts, feelings,
and experiences of evolved and adult mankind.

...

"But that's Tolkien!", you might protest. Sure is - I'm just making myself understood. Do not take this as alignment with Lovecraft's aesthetic sensibilities!

The actual mind-bending irony is that the critic is a Nebula prize award winning author himself, one of the most influential fantasy aficionados in the world

Tolkien was more influential. This is irrelevant. The point I should have made is that this guy restricts his analysis to a very specific subgenre of fantasy, as demonstrated by what he quotes.

I'd love to pick on some of his lines, as they are, standing alone, but I'd also rather not belabor this (too much). So...

As to your jab on “ ‘erudite’ essays”, what’s next, condemning well-read persons for being “intellectuals”?

Interesting. Discredit those you disagree with by repackaging their words as anti-intellectual. Useful trick. Will have to get that one down.

I'm surprised you didn't remark on the essay in the spoiler. It uses similar premises as yours, but takes them somewhere more interesting than the latter does, with its hackneyed this make society dumb wraghghg message.

the Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a declining nation with a morally bankrupt class whose cowardly self-protection is primarily responsible for the problems England answered with the ruthless logic of Thatcherism. Humanity was derided and marginalised. Sentimentality became the acceptable subsitute. So few people seem to be able to tell the difference.

is equivalent to a wet fart in the shower. What you call the ambience, I call the miasma.

But look, we've clarified this: that I find Moorcock's conclusions hysterically silly, and particularly disagree with his view on the motivations for reading 'Tolkienesque' fantasy.

Moorcock: Tolkienesque is taken to mean 'pastoral'.

I think it is simple neophobia which makes people hate the modern world and its changing society; it is xenophobia which makes them unable to imagine what rural beauty might lie beyond the boundaries of their particular Shire.

Me: Tolkienesque is taken to mean something closer to 'hack-n-slash', or 'adventure'.

It's not parochialism that fantasy readers seem to be motivated by, but rather a thirst for the exotic.

Inspired by Tolkien, but not really like Tolkien. Important thing to note.

Take it or leave it, that's what I'm trying to get across. However, maybe I'm off the mark in even the specially highlighted respects!

Bakker: Maybe corroborates Moorcock! In a way. Then again - read it for yourself.

Sample:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Both science fiction and fantasy are attempts to compensate for these impending phenomenological disasters. Both genres are consolatory. Where science fiction attempts to recover our lost horizon of expectation through narrative, fantasy attempts to recover our lost space of experience through narrative.

...

Given the gap between the intentional world of our experience (what is commonly called, following Husserl, the Lebenswelt, or ‘lifeworld’)–the world we recognize–and the deintentionalized world described by scientific theory–the world we cognize–one might expect a culture to generate surrogates, worlds where recognition is cognition. Since the scientific deintentionalization of the world has caused this lacuna, one might expect these alternate worlds to repudiate the validity of science. Since all we possess are pre-scientific, historical contexts as models for ‘intentional worlds without science,’ one might expect these to provide the models for these alternate worlds. Put differently, one might expect culture to provide ‘associative elimination rules,’ ways to abstract from the present, for the production of alternate intentional contexts which conform to, and so repatriate, the otherwise displaced space of our experience.

One might expect the development of fantasy literature or something like it.
...

5) In terms of what Heidegger calls the ‘ontological difference,’ science fiction is primarily an ontic discourse, a discourse concerned with beings within the world, whereas fantasy is primarily an ontological one, a discourse concerned with Being itself. What this suggests is that the socio-phenomenological stakes involved in fantasy are more radical than those involved in science fiction. In Adornian terms, science fiction, it could be said, is primarily engaged in the extension of identity thinking, whereas fantasy, through its wilful denial of cognition, points to the ‘messianic moment,’ the necessity of finding some way out of our functional nightmare.

[Nowake]

Oh boy, you’re opening yourself so much that I find myself feeling in the mood for a handful of very biting remarks pertaining to your style and reasoning, yet at the same time I cannot, in good conscience, do that when I believe we simply started on the wrong foot somehow.

The point I should have made is that this guy restricts his analysis to a very specific subgenre of fantasy, as demonstrated by what he quotes.
I'd love to pick on some of his lines, as they are, standing alone, but I'd also rather not belabor this (too much).

I mean, look at this It is the core of our disagreement.
Moorcock criticizes Tolkien and the ones who subsequently copy him. He never confused this “subgenre” with fantasy on the whole, and for every author he comments on negatively in his essay, he mentions another fantasy writer which in his opinion treats the genre with the respect he thinks should be given to it.
What he does assert at one point, and which may have confused you into thinking the above, is that this subgenre had gained such a following that it was, at the time of his writing, the most visible.
I also know a score of Tolkien readers, a few of them Brits, who would very much disagree with Tolkien being read as a “hack-n-slash”, and these chaps are really hardcore, they read The Hobbit every year. They are actually very much rejoicing in the cosy miasma (I may be using the term unrelated to the concept which you expressed) of the book. Certainly Tolkien’s apologists disagree with you, I am sorry to say, “hack-n-slash” are really not the virtues they extol in his works.
It was my opinion, expressed in this thread in passing, that most fantasy literature of not very long ago was dominated and defined by the epigones of Tolkien, or at least they were the most commercially successful; through their tripe they suffocated quality prose within the genre until a few, like Martin, finally obtained wide accolades from the public. That doesn't mean quality fantasy was not being written in the period, yet it simply didn't survive commercially near the former - in most cases. Moorcock cites more than a handful of writers who did just that in his essay.
I can’t honestly say you made a dent in this conclusion, and I am really not writing this to provoke you.
EDIT: Oh and "picking on his lines", as you put, is exactly how you should always argument your positions, as opposed to generic judgements.



As to the essay you linked, it was the smartest piece I read today by far (and I read it whole; more than ten hours ago; it simply did not contradict any of my arguments), and I thank you for introducing me to its author and I thank its author for introducing me to Koselleck, I’ve enjoyed it so much reading it over lunch today that I ordered both
The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Cultural Memory in the Present) and
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.) without even researching his biography – if you’d know me in life, you’d know why this is a big deal, I’m the type of neat freak who doesn’t even download a movie without reading its reviews for two hours. Wish I had read him six years ago during my Semiotics and Imagology courses.

[Montmorency]

I also know a score of Tolkien readers, a few of them Brits, who would very much disagree with Tolkien being read as a “hack-n-slash”, and these chaps are really hardcore, they read The Hobbit every year. They are actually very much rejoicing in the cosy miasma (I may be using the term unrelated to the concept which you expressed) of the book. Certainly Tolkien’s apologists disagree with you, I am sorry to say, “hack-n-slash” are really not the virtues they extol in his works.

Tolkienesque.

Inspired by Tolkien, but not really like Tolkien. Important thing to note.

That should do it.

1.Resembling or influenced by the works, ideas, or literary style of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973).

What Moorcock does not like is the bold. I get that. That's done, then?

I can’t honestly say you made a dent in this conclusion, and I am really not writing this to provoke you.
EDIT: Oh and "picking on his lines", as you put, is exactly how you should always argument your positions, as opposed to generic judgements.

Dare I say that it wasn't warranted? :P

But I wasn't hoping to provoke a debate about the social impact of Tolkien, so that's fine.

As to the essay you linked, it was the smartest piece I read today by far (and I read it whole; more than ten hours ago; it simply did not contradict any of my arguments), and I thank you for introducing me to its author and I thank its author for introducing me to Koselleck, I’ve enjoyed it so much reading it over lunch today that I ordered both
The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Cultural Memory in the Present) and
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.) without even researching his biography – if you’d know me in life, you’d know why this is a big deal, I’m the type of neat freak who doesn’t even download a movie without reading its reviews for two hours. Wish I had read him six years ago during my Semiotics and Imagology courses.

Our entire exchange has been a mechanism of control designed to influence you into following this path.

[Tsar Alexsandr]

Shakespeare's "The Tempest."

[Nowake]

Finally finished Snow by Orhan Pamuk last night, as I was reading it in parallel to Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, at GC's recommendation. As I wrote in an above post, if you've read My name is Red, you should definitely pick Snow up as well, in spite of the chronological gap.


So, to comment on Quicksilver, leaving aside that its prolonged excursions into the debates of the day have exactly the type of detail you feel too many other novels only glance into, I find the vividness of the world depicted amazingly well done. You won't regret giving it a chance.

[edyzmedieval]

Any recommendations for good medieval, historical fiction novels?

[Nowake]

Perhaps I could throw in my two cents.
Most astoundingly, considering the male-dominated medieval field, in my opinion the two most superb writers of historical fiction based on the period are two absolutely genial female historians Marguerite Yourcenar and, especially, Zoe Oldenburg. Not a “Get these books, you’ll have a good time” recommendation, rather a “These books will forever shape your views on the era more than any other literary work” and I went through more than a score of the best of them.




The world is not enough is perhaps the most moving of Zoe Oldenburg’s novels, though do not misinterpret it for sentimentality. It simply treats superbly the psyche of the medieval human being.
Yet the ones you should probably start with, and which you will find most gripping, are The Crusades and The Cornerstone, which you will absolutely relish. Oldenburg penetrates so well the minds of the crusading peasants, knights and mercenaries, it outlines so amazingly the horizon of their world and the depth of darkness they perceived to surround them; the experience of going through these two works is unforgettable.
She wrote a seminal novel on the Albiegensian Crusade as well, Massacre at Montsegur: A History of the Albiegensian Crusade, of which I was reminded quite a few times when reading Martin’s description of the war raging through Westeros. I would recommend reading it last however.




Placed towards the end of the Middle Ages, Marguerite Yourcenar’s The Abyss is to the beginning of the Renaissance what Oldenburg’s The Crusades are to the beginning of the millennium. Again, it will shape your thinking and educate your perception of time, not to mention Zenon is a terrific character.




And, because I mentioned it before, you should obtain Maurice Druon’s Les Roi Maudits. To quote myself from a few posts above:

I believe I read in an interview Martin wished initially to stay well clear of fantasy, and simply create an alternate world.
A pity he did not follow up on that, I think he would have come very, very close to Maurice Druon's Les Roi Maudits. In fact, the vivid medieval world ASoIaF depicts seems to me to have been very much modelled on Les Roi Maudits and A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings could have very well taken place in Druon's setting, while a host of Martin's characters were almost transposed from the French historical novel - compare Martin's Tywin Lannister to Druon's Phillipe the Fair for an exact mirror. Plus, despite it being a historical novel, Druon takes great care to render the collective mental horizon of the age by illustrating belief in magic as an element almost as present and real as it seemed in Martin's first two books. But I'm totally rambling off-topic by now, apologies!

It’s basically Martin’s Game of Thrones without all the fantasy – though you should not understand magic to not be present.
There is a Romanian translation from a few decades ago for it, yet I would recommend reading it in French if it’s within your grasp. If not, at least get it in English, as ours (the translation) simply isn’t doing it justice.

[edyzmedieval]

Multumesc Nowake.

[CountArach]

Anyone read 'The Blade Itself' by Joe Abercrombie? It looks quite good based on Amazon reviews. I like my fantasy dark and gritty and it seems that is what it delivers. Anyone have any thoughts?

[Nowake]

Thoughts yes, a direct answer, mmmmnot really sigh.
That is, after reading ASoIaF I kept bringing it up with some my friends and, since this was literally the first fantasy book I had read, they were falling over themselves to recommend other authors.


In this context, I began reading Abercrombie’s The Heroes – so I can at least attest he’s an able author, I certainly wouldn’t qualify buying one of his books as a waste of money under no circumstances.

On the other hand, I couldn’t finish the book. For no fault of its own I might add.
I also abandoned The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch while having gone through a third of the book or so. Again, for no fault of its own.

Both The Heroes and The Lies of Locke Lamora are very, very well written, the plot is masterfully weaved, the personages are vivid and the colour and gritty realistic portrayal of warfare characteristic for this new type of fantasy, introduced in the past decade or so, is there. However smart though, they’re pure adventure books. They lack the in-depth world-building which ASoIaF offers; in Martin’s books you continuously gather details, hints and subplots which allow you to guess the demographics, the economical details, the social interactions, the military potential, the technology available – you discover the world thought of by Martin as a modern day historian would by delving into a chronicle.

Abercrombie and Lynch... how should I put... they build up a world for their characters, while Martin tends to build up characters to populate his world. In the beginning of their books, this difference is merely a nuance, a few chapters in it becomes too prominent to ignore.

Hope this gives you an idea as to where Abercrombie goes with his prose.

[CountArach]

Thoughts yes, a direct answer, mmmmnot really sigh.
That is, after reading ASoIaF I kept bringing it up with some my friends and, since this was literally the first fantasy book I had read, they were falling over themselves to recommend other authors.


In this context, I began reading Abercrombie’s The Heroes – so I can at least attest he’s an able author, I certainly wouldn’t qualify buying one of his books as a waste of money under no circumstances.

On the other hand, I couldn’t finish the book. For no fault of its own I might add.
I also abandoned The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch while having gone through a third of the book or so. Again, for no fault of its own.

Both The Heroes and The Lies of Locke Lamora are very, very well written, the plot is masterfully weaved, the personages are vivid and the colour and gritty realistic portrayal of warfare characteristic for this new type of fantasy, introduced in the past decade or so, is there. However smart though, they’re pure adventure books. They lack the in-depth world-building which ASoIaF offers; in Martin’s books you continuously gather details, hints and subplots which allow you to guess the demographics, the economical details, the social interactions, the military potential, the technology available – you discover the world thought of by Martin as a modern day historian would by delving into a chronicle.

Abercrombie and Lynch... how should I put... they build up a world for their characters, while Martin tends to build up characters to populate his world. In the beginning of their books, this difference is merely a nuance, a few chapters in it becomes too prominent to ignore.

Hope this gives you an idea as to where Abercrombie goes with his prose.

Thanks, that really does help me. I'll buy it then, but I won't expect a second ASoIaF.

[Martok]

I finally finished Starfighters of Adumar (by Aaron Allston), the 9th and final book in the Star Wars: X-Wing novels.

It wasn't my favorite, but it was still a decent enough way to end the series. I'll definitely be picking up the books for myself!



Am now simultaneously reading two books: Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia (which I received as a Christmas present) and George Orwell's classic 1984.

I've never gotten around to reading the latter until now. However, contrary to my expectations -- I'm a little ashamed to admit that there's a lot of classics that I don't enjoy -- I'm actually finding myself quite intrigued with 1984. I'm already at the halfway-mark, and am very curious to see how the rest of the book goes.

[Visor]

Footprints, the sorta biography of powderfinger, as well as The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin.

[Graiskye]

I just received and started 'A People History of the United States', authored by Howard Zinn(RIP).
Its considered by many to be the unvarnished version of the history of the Americas, and starts with Columbus's rather complete genocide of the Arawak Indians, of what is now known to be Haiti/Dominican Republic.
And then it on to the Americas...yipee yee haw.
Mans own inhumanity to man, is deeply disturbing, to put it mildly.
Dont want to get too into it, but it seems a pretty interesting read, and I look forward to finishing it.
In his own words Zinn tries to tell the history from the view of the the people who were often oppressed by it.
Its a well known fact that history is wrought by the victors, and they simply don't tell the losers story.
In this book Zinn tries to correct some of these historic imbalances.
If you are interested in the more real history of the USA, and North America in general, you would do well to check it out.
If nothing else it should help me to achieve a more rounded, and complete understanding of our forefathers in the USA.
While I am Canadian, I am a child of history, and especially the more recent history of our world.
We just seem to forget things so quickly nowadays.
Peace all.

[Peasant Phill]

Just finished 'I kill giants'. Actually it's a short comic series (not a book per se) but the subject, symbolism and pacing was very well done.
Great for a quick read in between bigger volumes.

[CountArach]

I've got several books going in my post-Christmas binge...

I'm finally reading through Polybius cover-to-cover and comparing him to Livy as I go. This is for my PhD so is likely to be an ongoing project for quite some time.

I'm more than half way through the second part of A Storm of Swords. I think it is the second best book thus far in the series (after the original) - so many huge things happening. That and I really like all of the POV characters.

I've read a couple of chapters of 1813 Leipzig: Napoleon and the Battle of the Nations by Digby Smith. I admittedly know very little about the 1813 campaign and so asked for this as a Christmas present. The book is immensely detailed, but this can slow the narrative somewhat. Still, it uses a lot of fascinating translated accounts, particularly from the Prussian soldiers, that adds a real sense of 'closeness' to the battle.

[naut]

Childhood's End. Sir Arthur C. Clark. In three words: Frantic, haunting, beautiful.