Moorcock blasts Tolkien

[dcas]

And, as I hope we all know, there is a whole lot of subjectivity in determining who is or is not "one of the 100 greatest writers who ever lived" or "one of the 100 greatest writers of the 20th century."

Yes, in fact if we submitted the question to a popular vote, it might well turn out that Tolkien is considered the greatest author of the 20th century (which, if memory serves, was the result of just such a poll in the UK . . . prompting cries of outrage from various academics, educators, and literary critics).

FWIW, Tom Shippey makes a very strong case for Tolkien's greatness as an author in his book Tolkien: Author of the Century.

 

[Elfdart]

Well, no. Brin will be remembered for his Hugo and Nebula award winning novels such as Startide Rising and The Uplift War. Just because someone has an opinion concerning pop culture doesn't mean they are a hack, and Brin is decidedly not a hack.

Anyone who uses the word "bailiwick" in the last 80 years without the slightest trace of irony is a hack. Case closed. Brin, like Moorcock, has no compunction whatsoever about lying to smear those who are more successful, as the link I posted earlier shows in the case of the former, and the letter to Salon.com (where Moorcock claims Leigh Brackett told him working with Irvin Kershner was such a bad experience) proves in the latter case.

(And for the record, I am of the opinion that Brin's fiction is decidely superior to Lucas').

Aside from two novels ghost written by others, George Lucas hasn't written any fiction. He's a moviemaker. Your statement is as absurd as saying that Randy Moss' touchdown catches are "decidedly superior" to Tiger Woods', when Woods plays golf and not football.

 

[taliesin15]

The best analogy I could think of would be criticizing Duke Ellington for not coming up with Free Jazz, or switching to that style once Ornette Coleman came along.

The irony is that Moorcock's prose is itself very straightforward narrative. Nothing about what I've read (all of Elric, some Hawkmoon, some Jerry Cornelius, and Gloriana) is particularly revolutionary. Basically, its a bit more intellectual than Conan, and many of his main characters are eccentric, and at least one is a kind of rock star anti-hero (the one with the Black Blade). Contrast this to two of his British contemporaries Brian Aldiss and JG Ballard. Or to (crikey) some Americans from Phil Dick to the Cyberpunks...

The point here is Tolkien is working under different assumptions, and I think it is fair to say that he is the strongest of the mythmakers of his generation. Moorcock has an aesthetic issue with Tolkien, but doesn't quite articulate that. And of course he has his own issues.

 

[takyris]

Well, no. Brin will be remembered for his Hugo and Nebula award winning novels such as Startide Rising and The Uplift War. Just because someone has an opinion concerning pop culture doesn't mean they are a hack, and Brin is decidedly not a hack.

I disagree.

The novels you mentioned have indeed won Hugos and Nebulae, but those particular awards, while of great interest to those in the SF Fandom community, aren't widely known by your average Joe outside the SF Fandom community.

If you take SF readers as a whole, you will have, for purposes of this argument:

- Casual SF readers, who likely haven't heard of him, because they read Orson Scott Card and Star Wars tie-ins.
- People who read enough to know who Brin is, who may or may not love him but will likely respect him for his work.
- People in the actual community who have met the man and know that he's an egotistical jerk of monumental proportions, thus poisoning the well.

I've been trapped in a hotel room with him as part of an apparently blessed group of Clarion folks who got to bask in the radiance of his sexist and condescending knowledge. The well has been poisoned. If I want cardboard characters to explain scientific principles to me, there are other authors I can turn to.

If he's remembered, it'll be as a footnote for people who like hard SF and run out of other stuff to read, or as an example of an unpleasant social situation of the times.

Beyond my personal dislike for him, that's not a slam on his writing. He writes stuff that sells well enough to support him. He gets free tickets to conventions. He gets to preach to people who can't make it past him to the hotel room door. But the list of "Who will be remembered 100 years from now?" is pretty small.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Oh.

My mistake, and my apologies, Mark Hope. It seems I let anger override reason.

And it seems I recalled the wrong search method. Heh, nice one. Now I'm not sure what I did, or how I ended up reading those charming diatribes of Moorcock's.

I think I'll bow out at this stage, before making (more of?) a fool of myself. Besides, what the hell is this commie heathen doing defending(?) some dead, allegedly conservative, Anglican dude?

Craziness. And yeah, I've had my fill.

 

[Umbran]

I think what you mean to say is writers in the ABSTRACT can have opinions. Any time a writer ACTUALLY has an opinion, in my experience, an ulterior motive is ascribed so the offending opinion can be disregarded as soon as possible.

What you are looking at is human nature.

I attended a keynote speech at a conference recently, in which the speaker was talking about working well with others. She noted some studies (without cites, I'm afraid, but it rings pretty true regardless) that had revealed the following:

When a person screws up, or behaves in what might be seen as a negative manner, he or she almost always attributes good and solid reasons for what they do. To each person, their own actions make sense.

When someone else does something similar, it is generally ascribed to a flaw in character - the other person is stupid, incompetent, evil, avaricious, egotistical, and so on.

That's basically it - when someone else does something bad, it is rarely due to some good solid reasoning that we don't happen to know. They're just bad people.

 

[Storm Raven]

I am guessing that Bill Ferny would fit the bill. I recall him being described as "swarthy". Don't recall what colour the Mouth of Sauron was, though - sorry.

I didn't think Bill Ferny was described as "swarthy", I thought his unnamed Southron companion was.

 

[Storm Raven]

Why don’t you offer an alternate theory of why Tolkien chose to make the humans who served Sauron mostly non-white whereas the humans who fought against him were all white?

That's easy. Tolkien was a professor focused on studying the Anglo-Saxon language, and intended his work to serve as a "national eipc" of the English language (something that it does not have, while other Germanic languages all do). Drawing upon historical sources, it is apparent that the various germanic peoples in history were oftentimes invaded by waves of eastern and southern neighbors, who happened to be either Asian or Arabic/Moorish. Using actual history as his guide, he set the Anglo-Saxon protagonists of his stories against their historical enemies, and portrayed them in ways that they would have been portrayed had the epic been written at a historical agen in which the various other national epics were written.

Tolkien, in other words, was going for historical accuracy in his creation of an epic for the English language.

 

[Storm Raven]

Fine. Here goes.Now, while I'm at it...Satisfied?

No, not really. I don't see any of those people being descibed as evil. I see some of them being described as seduced or deceived by evil, but not even that in most cases. For example, Bill and his friend aren't even actually shown doing anything evil, or described as anything more perfidous than "ill-favored", which is a physical description, not a moral statement, they are just disliked as annoying loudmouths.

 

[Storm Raven]

Anyone who uses the word "bailiwick" in the last 80 years without the slightest trace of irony is a hack. Case closed. Brin, like Moorcock, has no compunction whatsoever about lying to smear those who are more successful, as the link I posted earlier shows in the case of the former, and the letter to Salon.com (where Moorcock claims Leigh Brackett told him working with Irvin Kershner was such a bad experience) proves in the latter case.

Considering that baliwick is a term in current use in the U.S. legal community, anyone who has had any degree of contact with the U.S. court system should be comfortable using the word. Having a vocabulary that includes words currently in common use among significant professions in your country is not evidence of being a hack.

And do you have actual evidence of Brin lying? Or are you just going to rely on something Moorcock said about someone completely different than Brin?

Aside from two novels ghost written by others, George Lucas hasn't written any fiction. He's a moviemaker. Your statement is as absurd as saying that Randy Moss' touchdown catches are "decidedly superior" to Tiger Woods', when Woods plays golf and not football.

Star Wars, and all of the following movies are fiction. They are fantasy fiction, and hence, close to being in the same genre as the fiction that Brin writes. Translating preferences from one genre to another is not absurd in any way, shape, or form. To wit, I think the various Uplift books are far better fiction than any of the Star Wars movies.