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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6082848" data-attributes="member: 42582">I regard S&S as modernist, in so far as the vision of human life and value that it puts forward is essentially a modern one rather than a romantic one. The contrast with Tolkien in this respect, and CS Lewis, is very marked. (And is at least partially brough out in Moorcock's "Epic Pooh" attack on Tolkien.)One marker of this is the tendency of S&S to cynicism and a materialist metaphysics. Another is the hero being master of his/her own fate, rather than an instrument of fate (contrast this with Aragorn or Frodo or Gollum in LotR).A piece of fantasy that I think is an interesting from this point of view is Wagner's Ring Cycle: it is romantic, but not conservative in the way that Tolkien is - for instance, the resolution to cosmological crisis is achieved not by restoring order (as in Return of the King) but by an uncontrollable outsider (Siegfried) breaking all bonds and imposing his personal will onto the world. But it is also optimistic in the final analysis, but only because of the possibility of transcendence. (S&S does not involve transcendence! - that's part of its anti-romanticism.)I am with Bluenose and  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] on this one. (Though I'm going mostly off REH's Conan - ouside Conan and HPL my pulp reading is pretty minimal.)No doubt in those Conan stories in which he is leading armies into the field there has been planning that takes place off-screen; but the very fact that it happens off the page shows that (in the author's view, at least) it does not contribute to the central thrust of the story.When I think of Conan's preparation on-screen, I think of The God in the Bowl or The Tower of the Elephant. And in my view these are not that close to "calculate encumbrance, plan spell load-out, etc" operational play.In some recent thread I posted an example from my Rolemaster play of incredibly intricate spell load-out stuff (involving nested Stored Spells, inlcuding Storing the Spell Store spell itself so that new Stored spells could be set up at the right time to make the whoe sequence unfold properly). I don't mind this sort of thing in limited doses, thought it was more fun when I had more time, and so could do other stuff in a session as well as elaborate planning. But for me it doesn't evoke Conan at all. It's a bit like solving a crossword, and in genre terms feels more like a certain sort of procedural - for some reason I'm thinking Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators! (Especially Jupiter Jones.)</blockquote>

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