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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9510129" data-attributes="member: 6671663">I think the Mythic Underworld of modern rpg talk seizes on a subset of stuff being talked about in the ‘70s as an interconnected whole. “Beyond our ken” is a good hook to hang things on, but this often involved depths of time in which makers and purposes were lost and would never be recovered in more than the merest scraps. In Tekumelani underworlds you have legacies going back hundred of thousands of years, to planetary conditions and societies genuinely unimaginable to people of present-day Tsolyanu. Likewise with Jack Vance’s Dyimg Earrh and, a few years after this particular moment, Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. And get this, the opening of the first Elric story: This too is mythical even if it’s not Myrhical by someone’s definition. Likewise Roger Zelazny’s mid-1960s stories “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” and “The Doors of His Face, The Lanp of His Mouth”, set in pre-Mariner/Pioneer versions of Mars and Venus, weaving together pulp traditions, then-modern rigorous technical details, and lush evocative New Wave prose. It’s overly (and wildly admired) mythopoesis.That’s what we were swimming in.ETA: the ‘70s talk was very much about testing possibilities: what could making things mythic mean in practice? What kinds of myths? In conception (smaller-scale versions of the transformation James Joyce worked in Ulysses), in environs, in modes of presentation, in events? Now we have the befit of another half century’s experience and can say “this is what making it mythic means”, if we’re so inclined.</blockquote>

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