Moorcock blasts Tolkien

[Akrasia]

Hey! Where's the Jack Vance love? He belongs in any 'top 5' list of fantasy authors of the 20th century.

Certainly well ahead of Moorcock (IMO, etc.).

... Gene Wolfe deserves far more recognition then he gets. He's ben called the finest American author in any genre, but I doubt that many "fan" types have read him...

Gene Wolfe ... great writer. Shame on any fan of fantasy/science fiction who has not read his 'New Sun' stories.

 

[Warbringer]

My favorite quote from "Epic Pooh

"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."

 

[Raven Crowking]

No. It's completely comfortable because you can easily identify those failings and not feel ambiguous about them. It's the Eddas by way of Catholicism.

That the elves and Sauron are guilty of the same sin isn't at all easily identifiable. At least, it took me more than one reading to become aware of it. Are the failings of Aragorn obvious? What of the failings of Gandalf?

The failings of the characters in the movies are obvious. But then, the movies are nowhere near as complex.

From my point of view, though "Elric is not supposed to be a nice man and is not supposed to be someone who bucks up, redeems himself and helps everyone because of it." and "The point of Elric is that he succeeds because he is *weak* and *unhappy.* He's also a coward and engages in pointless diversions. The reason Elric wins is because he's not even good at being complicit with classism in its ultimate metaphoric form." describes something far more comfortable than what Tolkein describes.

It is easy to be weak and unhappy. It is easy to be cowardly. It is easy to engage in pointless diversions. It is hard, and uncomfortable, to sacrifice so that others may have that easy life.

RC

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Hey! Where's the Jack Vance love? He belongs in any 'top 5' list of fantasy authors of the 20th century.

Eh. He's one of those artists whose primary importance is that he influenced other artists (either directly or via Gygax). While that certainly qualifies him for a certain sort of list, he doesn't really belong on the top 5 fantasy authors of the 20th century, IMO. His work was neither a massive critical or commercial success.

But that's probably another (very fun) thread.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

All this discussion about black female characters, and nobody's mentioned Earthsea? Ursula Le Guin is definitely one of the founders of modern fantasy.

I think it's easier to make sense of claims about the top authors if you subcategorise them. So, for example: Epic fantasy: Tolkein, Donaldson, Le Guin. Sword and sorcery: Leiber, Moorcock, Howard. New Weird: Barker, Gaiman, Mieville. And Gene Wolfe, who needs to be mentioned but doesn't fit into pigeonholes easily...

 

[Raven Crowking]

All this discussion about black female characters, and nobody's mentioned Earthsea?

When I was talking about who the fantasy Big Four would be, I put Le Guin in the running.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

When I was talking about who the fantasy Big Four would be, I put Le Guin in the running.

My apologies.

All this discussion about black female characters, and nobody except Raven Crowking has mentioned Earthsea?

 

[Storm Raven]

My apologies.

All this discussion about black female characters, and nobody except Raven Crowking has mentioned Earthsea?

Well, the discussion really has only occurred in the context of discussing Heinlein's novel Friday, which features such a character, making it unusual in the genre (especially unusual at the time is was published), so there wasn't any real cause to bring up the handful of other examples.

I wouldn't put LeGuin in the "Big Three" (or "Big Four" if you prefer) of fantasy, but in the group just below that. Just as, say, Niven, Anderson, and LeGuin (among others) would be in the top tier down from the "Big Three" of science fiction, I'd put LeGuin, Moorcock, and Anderson in the top tier down from the "Big Three" of fantasy.

 

[ruleslawyer]

That the elves and Sauron are guilty of the same sin isn't at all easily identifiable. At least, it took me more than one reading to become aware of it. Are the failings of Aragorn obvious? What of the failings of Gandalf?

The failings of the characters in the movies are obvious. But then, the movies are nowhere near as complex.

From my point of view, though "Elric is not supposed to be a nice man and is not supposed to be someone who bucks up, redeems himself and helps everyone because of it." and "The point of Elric is that he succeeds because he is *weak* and *unhappy.* He's also a coward and engages in pointless diversions. The reason Elric wins is because he's not even good at being complicit with classism in its ultimate metaphoric form." describes something far more comfortable than what Tolkein describes.

It is easy to be weak and unhappy. It is easy to be cowardly. It is easy to engage in pointless diversions. It is hard, and uncomfortable, to sacrifice so that others may have that easy life.

RC

I tend to agree. Even when I first read the Elric books (in 6th grade), I found Elric to be extraordinarily melodramatic and unnecessarily mopey, and was a bit jarred by Moorcock's purple prose. Don't get me wrong; I like Moorcock's writing just fine (except for where I find it annoyingly pornographic, like Gloriana; I have the same problem with some of Leiber's later fantasy work). And I'm aware that there's self-parody built into the stories (there's a Moorcock-authored pastiche somewhere in my collection about a character who is undressed by his romantic conquest to unveil the Torso of x, the Hand of y, the Leg of z, and the... well, y'know). But I don't place his fantasy work on some level that's more complex than Tolkien's. Tolkien's vision is astoundingly complex, and thoroughly humanist in some very interesting ways; he and LeGuin share a commonality of interest in "adult" themes such as restraint, the varied uses of power, temptation, the lure of wealth, and a number of other subjects.

Now, I happen to agree with Moorcock's critique of Tolkien's work as being motivated by a particular set of political and religious ethics; I also don't think anything he says is vaguely new. (The Chesterton Journal and numerous Oxford Circle scholars have been saying the same thing for decades.)

 

[Rackhir]

A Gift from Earth. Another howler is his contention that it would only take less than a day for people to stat killing and raping each other in the absence of cops, despite the total absence of scarcity or a profit motive arising from any violence in the story. Niven somehow intellectually understands that people with less money than him are more often involved in bad things, but seems to have trouble visualizing exactly why.

First off you have failed to understand that the story "Cloak of Anarchy" isn't about what is likely to happen, it's about "what if this situation did happen" and the implications that follow from it. Most of Niven's stories are set up like that. He isn't interested in forcasting how things might be. He wants to think about how things would be IF x was the situation.

You also seem to have missed the fact characters were locked in the park with essentially no resources (no food and the only water resource the fountain had been taken over by the thugs), no way to communicate with anyone outside the park and no way to tell when they would be able to get out of the park. And of course nobody has ever panicked in such a situation.

Then you seem to have overlooked that the story was set in essentially a "golden age" society, where nobody was poor (at least nobody in the story) and they had pretty much anything they wanted. So the story was in fact about how spoiled, wealthy, jaded people would react if you put them in a situation where you take all that away from them. Not about these "bad poor people" you seem to have invented out of whole cloth.