Dwarves don't sell novels

[Gez]

Twain introduced bicycles in gentle mockery of fantasy/historical fiction. It supports my point that introducing advanced technology into fantasy upsets the imagery of fantasy.

King Arthur isn't fantasy, it's myth. Introducing time-traveler in the Arthurian myth turns it into fantasy.

That's fine when the intention is comedic as in Twain's book. Otherwise, it's absurd. How many gamers would take seriously a paladin in full plate with a lance couched under his arm peddling his bike as furiously as he can at a dragon?

A bike's purpose is not to be a combat vehicle. The paladin in full plate will not peddle on a bike, however, it wouldn't be so silly to have a thief fleeing the guards on a bicycle.

Tolkien cautioned against the introduction of science and technology in fantasy. Hickman and Weis even used the incompatibility as the theme of their Darksword novels and RPG.

Good thing Gygax found Tolkien's books annoying and preferred the works of Howard, Burroughs, Leiber, Vance, Anderson...

Seriously, read Poul Anderson's Three Hearts, Three Lions. It is a major inspiration behind D&D, and behind all of Moorcock's novels. It's the book from which the conflict between Law and Chaos originates. And its main hero is an engineer.

D&D has always been a hodgepodge of styles. Sure, there are ents and hobbits and giant eagles taken from Tolkien. Great. That's what, three things on how many hundreds? Beholders and mind flayers are pulp scifi aliens. Gelatinous cubes and other oozes are straight from The Blob. Blackmoor, Greyhawk, and Mystara all feature a lot of scifi aspects, and I don't speak merely about Expedition to Border Peak, here.

Fantasy is fantasy. It's not serious. It's not rigorous. It's not a heavily-constrained genre with strict rules to follow. Fantasy is, and has always been, anything goes. I think you're the one who's confusing fantasy with something else -- namely, with mythology or with fairytales, maybe.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Show them how it's done, buster.

Lovecraft, Leiber, Howard, Vance, Mieville, Anderson, Baum, Martin, and Duane - to name a few - already have.

 

[rounser]

Lovecraft, Leiber, Howard, Vance, Mieville, Anderson, Baum, Martin, and Duane - to name a few - already have.

At least a couple of these guys predate Tolkien, so it's reasonable to assume that he was aware of them and had them in mind when he made such comments.

My facetious challenge was to the poster with the nerve to say that his take on things is better than Tolkien's, without framing it as an opinion, but rather a fact. Counter-examples don't help - it's quite possible for a millions of people to be wrong, all at once, and choose the suboptimal, trendy, or knee-jerk reactionary path. Democracy proves that. What sells for D&D better with "magic" or "dragon" in the title also proves that. Machiavelli and marketers seek to exploit (or at least operate in spite of) such oh-so-human behaviour. Your opinion is no more definitive than mine - objectively, Tolkien could well be right and we'd never know.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Last things first- Tolkien wasn't wrong, but neither was he right. LotR is not the Bible of fantasy- there isn't one. He was expressing his personal opinion. That's all.

He didn't create the fantasy genre- not unless he had a time machine and wrote under an alias. His opinion on what belongs in fantasy is no more or no less valid than the sci-fant writers who followed him or predated him.

And to imply Hickman and Weis's similar opinion somehow invalidates the work of the luminaries I and others have mentioned...

Words fail.

Science
- The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.

Science uses maths, but maths itself isn't a science. Maths per se doesn't explain phenomena. It allows you to measure and describe them.

I'm pretty sure legions of mathmeticians, astronomers, architects and engineers would disagree with your belitlling of math- it at least meets the first criteria you posted.

Magic isn't cognate with the physical world either- its just a method to break the rules...and you don't need to know and understand the rules to be able to break them.

If you subject one part of the physical world to reasoned, scientific scrutiny, there's no rationale for not doing the same elsewhere. When you start to do that to magic, mythical creatures etc, the fantasy breaks down.

If my 20 year scientific enquiry (following all the rules of research) on the subject of why Faerunese Dragons fly or how Wish spells violate the laws of thermodynamic turns up with only one answer- Magic- then so be it.

Twain introduced bicycles in gentle mockery of fantasy/historical fiction. It supports my point that introducing advanced technology into fantasy upsets the imagery of fantasy. That's fine when the intention is comedic as in Twain's book. Otherwise, it's absurd. How many gamers would take seriously a paladin in full plate with a lance couched under his arm peddling his bike as furiously as he can at a dragon?

Yep- you apparently think comedy invalidates fantasy as well. Like anachronisms, comedy is as much a part of fantasy as a magic dagger.

A two-wheeled human powered cart (bike) at Arthur's court is no more inherently absurd than a 100' long flying reptile that breathes fire or a castle that floats on clouds.

Bikes are great, but as I and others already pointed out, you wouldn't have a knight riding one into battle against a dragon- its unsuited to the task- a horse is superior for reasons of balance, mass and leverege. He'd no more use a bike for such an attack than he'd use a Braun Electric Shaver as his main weapon. "Suffer the death of 1,000 shallow cuts and nicks, and the the burn of the Brut aftershave, vile Wurm!"

If I detailed every mistake they made because they had attempted to rewrite fantasy without due regard for the genre, it would take too long.

So you say...still waiting for some kind of evidence that is not indicative of a very narrowly defined view of fantasy literature.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

... it's quite possible for a millions of people to be wrong, all at once, and choose the suboptimal, trendy, or knee-jerk reactionary path.

And that would be why dwarves don't sell novels?

 

[rounser]

He was expressing his personal opinion. That's all.

It was a response to a personal opinion presented as fact that "Tolkien was wrong"! Police your own side, I'm not claiming that his opinion is fact.

 

[Zander]

A bike's purpose is not to be a combat vehicle. The paladin in full plate will not peddle on a bike, however, it wouldn't be so silly to have a thief fleeing the guards on a bicycle.

Heroes riding bikes, whether they're fighting dragons or fleeing a castle, isn't my idea of fantasy. I suspect it isn't for most D&D gamers.

Good thing Gygax found Tolkien's books annoying and preferred the works of Howard, Burroughs, Leiber, Vance, Anderson...

You're attributing positions to me that aren't mine. I'm not saying that Tolkien is the only model of fantasy there is. I even brought up Howard earlier in this thread.

Seriously, read Poul Anderson's Three Hearts, Three Lions. It is a major inspiration behind D&D, and behind all of Moorcock's novels. It's the book from which the conflict between Law and Chaos originates. And its main hero is an engineer.

I have read it. Although the protagonist is an engineer (and a time traveller), the engineering he introduces doesn't threaten the fantasy. As has already been pointed out in this thread, there is a difference between engineering and fantasy. If the main character had been a scientist and started applying scientific scrutiny to the fantasy world arround him (such as how the troll's severed parts were able to continue attacking), the fantastic elements would have lost plausibility.

It is the folks at WotC who should read 3H3L. It seems to have been the inspiration, at least in part, for the 1E gnome.

Fantasy is fantasy. It's not serious. It's not rigorous. It's not a heavily-constrained genre with strict rules to follow. Fantasy is, and has always been, anything goes. I think you're the one who's confusing fantasy with something else -- namely, with mythology or with fairytales, maybe.

Fantasy does not equal fiction. Fantasy is a subset of fiction.

 

[Zander]

Last things first- Tolkien wasn't wrong, but neither was he right. LotR is not the Bible of fantasy- there isn't one. He was expressing his personal opinion. That's all.

He didn't create the fantasy genre- not unless he had a time machine and wrote under an alias. His opinion on what belongs in fantasy is no more or no less valid than the sci-fant writers who followed him or predated him.

And to imply Hickman and Weis's similar opinion somehow invalidates the work of the luminaries I and others have mentioned...

Words fail.

The fantasy genre has evolved over millennia starting with the earliest mythology and distilled by countless storytellers and audiences over the ages. Along the way, such greats as Homer, Apollonius of Rhodes and Edmund Spenser have contributed to it.

WotC are happy to disregard that tradition and, by extension, all the people great and small who have contributed to the genre.

Words fail.

I'm pretty sure legions of mathmeticians, astronomers, architects and engineers would disagree with your belitlling of math- it at least meets the first criteria you posted.

They can argue with Karl Popper, perhaps the most eminent philosopher of science of the 20th century, if they like.

Incidentally, I didn't belittle maths at all. French literature isn't a science either (though for different reasons). How am I "belittling" it by saying so?

If my 20 year scientific enquiry (following all the rules of research) on the subject of why Faerunese Dragons fly or how Wish spells violate the laws of thermodynamic turns up with only one answer- Magic- then so be it.

Science abhors the irrational. If after 20 years of scientific research you found that various phenomena were due to magic, you would need to continue your research until you found otherwise.

Yep- you apparently think comedy invalidates fantasy as well. Like anachronisms, comedy is as much a part of fantasy as a magic dagger.

When comedy is being used to parody fantasy, that may tell you more about comedy than it does about fantasy. When examining the effect of science and technology on the integrity of a fantasy setting, introducing elements such as comedy only serves to complicate the analysis by introducing another variable. When addressing the science / fantasy question, it helps not to introduce other complicating factors.

So you say...still waiting for some kind of evidence that is not indicative of a very narrowly defined view of fantasy literature.

Fantasy is a genre and, as such, is limited. If you believe that fantasy = all fiction, then my own view of fantasy might be considered "very narrow". I'm not alone though. If you look at the various threads on these boards about gnomes, knights and so on, you will see that other posters not just myself have voiced dissatisfaction with the flavour of these elements in the latest version of D&D. The criticisms raised by many of them are a result of WotC's willingness to over-write fantasy tropes.

 

[MarkB]

Science abhors the irrational. If after 20 years of scientific research you found that various phenomena were due to magic, you would need to continue your research until you found otherwise.

Only if you consider magic irrational. D&D doesn't treat it as such. Neither do a lot of excellent fantasy novels.

 

[Gez]

You're attributing positions to me that aren't mine. I'm not saying that Tolkien is the only model of fantasy there is. I even brought up Howard earlier in this thread.

No, I'm attributing positions to Gygax and Arneson. Specifically, the position that Tolkien is boring and that fantasy is better when it includes pulp sci-fi rather than try to be mythology. Tolkien wanted to create something that could be England's mythology, he wanted to make something that would be the equivalent of Beowulf or the Iliad and Odissey.

I have read it. Although the protagonist is an engineer (and a time traveller), the engineering he introduces doesn't threaten the fantasy. As has already been pointed out in this thread, there is a difference between engineering and fantasy. If the main character had been a scientist and started applying scientific scrutiny to the fantasy world arround him (such as how the troll's severed parts were able to continue attacking), the fantastic elements would have lost plausibility.

Then re-read it, because you forgot how he defeated the dragon and the water faerie, and how he knew the giant's gold would be cursed.

Fantasy does not equal fiction. Fantasy is a subset of fiction.

And classical mythology does not equal fantasy. It's not even a subset of fantasy, rather an ancestor.