China Mieville on Tolkien and Epic/High Fantasy

[Salthanas]

Another point on this topic, if people really want to look for Tolkien's message as such they should rather read the Silmarillion and his various essays on Middle Earth. Thats where the philosophy behind his creation lies and its outlined alot more clearly. In fact looking at most of Tolkien's remarks and also his various writings on Middle Earth merely serves to illustrate just how off base Melville is.
Lord of the Rings as a standalone book is simply not the place to go to get a really clear idea regarding what Middle Earth is about IMO.

Political strutures in Middle Earth are not their because Tolkien might have had a preference for them, they are their because those were the structures that he figured would exist in a medivial setting, and as he was a professor of Anglo -Saxon studies who am I to argue with him He expressed two favoured forms of goverment in his letters, either total anarachy or a monarch with total power who hardly ever exercised it ( a model you can see in both Aragorn and Manwe). It was all the forms inbetween that he was suspicious about. As for Tolkien trying to glorify war this is patently absurd seeing as how the central character is essentially a pacifist who by the end of the book has a problem with even wearing a sword. The fact is that some medivial societies did glorify war, the vikings considered death in battle as the only way to go. And what a surprise Tolkien incorperated some of this in his work.

As for Tolkiens quote about the book being a fundamentally religious work, well I take that in the same vein as I took his quote about it being deviod of allegory, particually as that quote came after the book had been written. I don't see how people can argue that you can't take Tolkien's remark about allegory seriously and that you have to consider only the text and then raise a quote he came out with afterwards as some standard of proof. You can't have it both ways, you either ignore all comments he made about the book and just concentrate on the text( which won't get you very far because you have to look at the whole body of work on ME not just the LOTR) or just accept that as his perspective changed so to did his ideas about the book, which is why some of his remarks are contradictory. He changed his mind about a number of things regarding the book so that would be nothing new. If he definetly knew it was a religious message I probably think he'd have been aware of this at the time. It also flies in the face of what he has said on more than one occassion that the book is fundamentally about death, a topic he says that any book having the virtue of being written by a man will ultimately be about.

 

[drnuncheon]

Beautiful and evocative? Agyar, Brokedown Palace and The Sun, the Moon and the Stars. Brust is a very terse writer and never wallows in his own sentences -- which subjectively is a style I prefer, so I find a great deal of beauty in his writing.

When I think of 'beautiful and evocative' in reference to Zelazny's works, I think more of his short stories - especially ones like "For a Breath I Tarry", "The Man who Loved the Faoli", and "A Rose for Ecclesiastes".

For Zelazny's long novels, the prize (for me) goes to Creatures of Light and Darkness, which often gets unfairly overlooked in favor of Lord of Light - if you want to talk about someone playing with structure, messing with your expectations, that's the book to look in. As far as that goes it's way beyond anything Brust's done. IMO, of course.

Dragging back on topic, I think I went into Meiville's work with completely wrong expectations - essentially, I didn't expect it to be an monster-hunting story, I expected it to be something really different. So I wasn't quite sure what to make of PSS, and I'm going to give it a second read at some point now that I've got a better understanding of what is going on.

J

 

[Celtavian]

Salthanas,

I think alot of the reason Tolkien contradicts himself is because after a work becomes popular an author is forced to justify his work to the fanbase and critics. I know Tolkien was also very sensitive about how fellow Catholics would view his work.

I feel alot of sympathy for Tolkien because I firmly believe his original intent in writing the story was to tell a good tale. Once it was published and became popular, it grew into more of a responsibility than the man expected. He had to answer alot of questions without offending anyone, especially the religious folks he held in high regard.

I still recall a discussion on the One Ring where he was expected to justify the fact that the orcs were seemingly irredeemable because it was considered heresy by the Catholic church to imply such a thing of a living sentient being. Very different times when Tolkien wrote his book.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Since I've also compared Mieville to Gibson, I'll just say here that the writing style of Perdido Street Station reminded me of The Difference Engine and the attitude reminded me of the "Sprawl" stuff.

I may be mistaken, but wasn't The Difference Engine primarily written by Bruce Sterling from ideas the Gibson came up with? Gibson's name is credited first, but thats just a publishing feature to have the book shelved with the more popular of the authors. The writing was more akin to Sterling than Gibson.

I actually didn't outright dislike Perdido Street Station, though my previous description of it was far from a ringing endorsement. It was vastly overhyped, though that can hardly be blamed entirely on the author. Mostly I was frustrated with it, since Mieville's skill with the language strongly indicates that he could have done a better job with his ideas - instead, we get a very "hey, this sounds cool, let's throw it in the mix" hodgepodge worthy of August Derleth.

Derleth? I wouldn't even mention that name in comparison with authors I dislike. Thats pretty low. He was nothing more than a hack who happened to have been friends with Lovecraft, and managed to weasel his way into literary history by exploiting the name of someone who trusted him. The only good thing he ever did was bring HPLs stories back into print. After that, he shamelessly promoted his own works as being "co-authored" by HPL, when most of them were little more than ideas that HPL mentioned in letters and Derleth expanded upon. He did more harm than good to HPL and others, mainly by his attempts to force their works into a "Mythos," claiming that there was an heirarchy among the various creations, and making things up when he needed to in order for everything to work.

 

[Desdichado]

How did Derleth do more harm than good to HPL by trying to force things into a Mythos? I honestly don't know; I don't think I've ever read a Derleth piece.

 

[Desdichado]

This statement is very true. He knew he could not stop the changes, they were inevitable. So he created a place to escape from the bothers of daily life, and he did such an extraordinary job that others grew to love the work when it was published.

The above statement is exactly the reason why I don't think he intended to send a message. He was escaping, much like we do when we game. That doesn't mean that you can't gain insight into the man and his beliefs through his work, I just don't think he was sending a message to the masses in the same way that Orwell or Twain did in some of their works.

You don't think that is a message? The fact that he resented the way modern society and literature was going and wrote something that deliberately thumbed it's metaphorical nose at both isn't a powerful message?

Granted, I'll agree with you if you restrict your comments to the details of Lord of the Rings only, but if you talk about the work as a broader whole, it most certainly did send a message, and a powerful one at that.

 

[Tratyn Runewind]

Hello,

Posted by Cthulhu's Librarian:
I may be mistaken, but wasn't The Difference Engine primarily written by Bruce Sterling from ideas the Gibson came up with? Gibson's name is credited first, but thats just a publishing feature to have the book shelved with the more popular of the authors. The writing was more akin to Sterling than Gibson.

Not sure on this. The only other Sterling I'm sure I've read is The Artificial Kid, and that was a while ago; I may have caught some of his short work in Mirrorshades or other places. Nothing in the writing of The Difference Engine seems beyond Gibson's capabilities, to me at any rate. Who actually did how much of the writing, I'm not aware of.

Posted by Cthulhu's Librarian:
Derleth? I wouldn't even mention that name in comparison with authors I dislike. Thats pretty low.

It wasn't a comment on Mieville's ethics or technical skill, just the way he shoehorned concepts into Perdido Street Station. In the few Derleth stories I've seen in Mythos anthologies, he tends to throw in extraneous references to various Mythos-beings to an extent that resembles little more than blatant name-dropping, putting them in just for the purpose of having them there because he thought them "cool", regardless of any coherence with the rest of the story, the way Mieville seems to do with some of his concepts. A little of that goes a long way with me, especially when the concepts are widely disparate. Derleth was no great shakes with the language, drew heavily on Lovecraft and his circle of correspondents for his concepts, and produced concepts of his own that were arguably bad for the Mythos. But I've seen worse from people with better reputations, usually writing for licensed properties like Forgotten Realms novels, Star Trek novels, and so forth. I suspect that, with a sharp editor, Derleth could have been competent for that sort of thing.

Posted by Joshua Dyal:
How did Derleth do more harm than good to HPL by trying to force things into a Mythos? I honestly don't know; I don't think I've ever read a Derleth piece.

He attempted to rationalize that which gains much of its power from its irrationality, trying to organize the Mythos beings along "elemental" lines and such. If I remember correctly, he didn't do all of this in his stories; much of it was attempted in correspondence, commentaries, and introductory essays to other works.

Hope this helps!

 

[Pielorinho]

It wasn't a comment on Mieville's ethics or technical skill, just the way he shoehorned concepts into Perdido Street Station. In the few Derleth stories I've seen in Mythos anthologies, he tends to throw in extraneous references to various Mythos-beings to an extent that resembles little more than blatant name-dropping, putting them in just for the purpose of having them there because he thought them "cool", regardless of any coherence with the rest of the story, the way Mieville seems to do with some of his concepts.

Could you give some specific examples of this? I read PSS because I'd heard it recommended, but I was skeptical that I'd enjoy it. It blew me away when I read it, though: the sheer force of Mieville's nightmarish imagination tapped directly into my own fears in a way few authors have ever managed to do.

I don't understand comparing him to Gibson. Gibson's storylines are utterly forgettable (I've read Neuromancer three or four times, and I can't remember or care what it's about), and his characters are little more than personifications of Kewl. I read Gibson not for his plots or characterization, but for his imagery. For women whose tear-glands are rerouted to their mouths so that instead of crying, they spit. For ATMs that spritz saboteurs with salt-water and then charge their chassis with electricity. For battles atop sonically-amplified shrieking platforms of discarded machinery strung between the tops of abandoned skyscrapers. And i read him for his direct, glossy, Kewl prose, the kind of writing that makes me want to hop on a motorcycle and race down the highway.

Mieville's got the images, sure -- beetle-headed lovers, cactus-men, sphincter-headed mosquito creatures. But he's also got a richness to his world, a suggestion that there are far more stories going on than the few we hear about. His characters are far better developed. And his prose, while not bad, is the opposite of Gibson's: rather than being glossy and Kewl, it's dense and difficult and borderline-academic.

The only similarities I see between Gibson and Mieville is that they both describe decaying urban environments. Inasmuch as that's true, one could equally compare either author to Charles Dickens.

Daniel

 

[Tratyn Runewind]

Hi again,

Posted by Pielhorino:
Could you give some specific examples of this?

• the monster bones big enough to encompass a city, right out of Heavy Metal,
• the tough cactus-people, lacking only a "10,000 Needles" attack to have come straight out of Final Fantasy,
• Motley struck me as a winged Gibbering Mouther, with perhaps some Mongrelman elements thrown in,
• the devils the city leaders bargain with, seemingly thrown in just to establish how much cooler his villains were compared to "traditional" fantasy antagonists,
• the magical steampunk-cyber of the Remade, seen in different forms in various places, from Nuada of the Silver Hand to the half-golem template for D&D.
• the sheer plethora of races that seems like the contents of monster manuals from several different RPGs mixed together at random.

There are others. And there's no denying that a lot of the stuff is cool, but there is such a thing in a novel as having too much cool background material. It's great in, say, a game setting, where you can extrapolate it into lots of interesting adventures. But it can certainly distract from the narrative in a novel.

In the comparison with Gibson, there seems to be a shared fascination with little cults and sub-cultures, and some of these in Perdido Street Station seemed to have rough parallels in Gibson's stuff; the machine-cult, and Tough Sisters and Palgolak and the Insect Aspect put me in mind of the likes of Gibsons Big Scienists and Christ the King terrs and net voodoo and Pantisocrats. There's also a similarity between the "crisis energy" stuff and the early perceptions of chaos theory and "catastrophe" in The Difference Engine, with the main characters both disdained for their unconventional views.

I should probably point out in particular that it was the combination of magic-and-Industrial-Revolution-tech, with guns, airships, railroads, cyber, Cactus Men, untrustworthy authorities of scattered independent city-states, and adventuring parties of warrior and mage types that brought the Final Fantasy comparison from me.

Hope this helps!

 

[Pielorinho]

Tratyn, I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you suggesting that because many of the ideas in PSS have appeared in disparate works, PSS is itself a kluged-together mess?

If so, I disagree. The history of fantasy fiction is one of stealing liberally from other sources, whether from classic mythology or from other authors. PSS is firmly in this tradition, and indeed steals a lot less from other sources than do many works.

Take, for example, the cactus-men. I'm unfamiliar with the ones in Final Fantasy. DO they live in a great glass greenhouse? Is their imperviousness to pain one of their main features? Do they have special bows designed for killing other cactus-men? Are they xenophobic? These are the main traits I remember about PSS's cactus-men; if they're different from FF's version, I'd guess that each source came up with the idea separately.

Or take Motley. By a stretch you can compare him to a gibbering mouther with a mongrel-man thrown in, but that's ignoring the ultra-nifty biothaumaturgy that runs through PSS, of which Motley is the pinnacle achievement. Motley comes across to me not as a gibbering mouther (which is insanity personified) nor as a mongrelman (who is ashamed of his appearance and was born into it), but rather as an avant-garde artist, a body-modification junkie who sees himself as creating an entirely new aesthetic. Beyond a vague superficial similarity to a mongrel-man, Motley's theme, his emotions, his motivations are diametrically opposed to a mongrel-man's.

There's a lot of stuff in the book, but I find that an asset, not a problem: he's writing about a metropolis, and he's got lots of different cultures there. Instead of feeling that it was disorganized, I got the feeling that it was a developed world in which many other stories were happening at the same time.

As for the Gibson comparisons: sure, the fascination with cults is a similarity. I'd suggest this is something we're seeing more of in modern SF -- look also at Phillip Pullman's Dark Materials and at Tim Power's entire oevre. I'm not sure I see the other parallels, though, and certainly the things that interest me about Gibson are not the things that interest me about Mieville.

Daniel