Survivor Appendix N Authors- LEIBER WINS!

[tglassy]

deleterious effects:

1) not reading other authors;
2) failing to understand what Tolkien was actually doing with Lord of the Rings.


Tolkien would be horrified with anyone who wasn't familiar with Beowulf.

1) I’ve read many other authors. I read at least a dozen, sometimes upwards of two dozen, books a year for the last fifteen years, most in the fantasy genre, though not all. I just never read THESE authors. So that definition doesn’t really apply.

2) it doesn’t matter what an author is “trying” to do with a work. What matters is what the reader takes away. If the author is “trying” to do something with a work, and the reader takes away something different, it’s the author who failed, not the reader. I know. I’m an author.

Therefore, just because readers don’t know what the author was “trying” to do, doesn’t make it a “deleterious effect”, so your second definition doesn’t apply.

As no deleterious effect is present, no problem is present.

 

[Bradley Hindman]

Bellairs, John 11
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 18
Carter, Lin 14
de Camp & Pratt 7
Dunsany, Lord 17
Fox, Gardner 3
Leiber, Fritz 17
Merritt, A. 16
Offutt, Andrew J. 14
Pratt, Fletcher 12
St. Clair, Margaret 12
Tolkien, J.R.R. 15 - 2 = 13
Wellman, Manley Wade 14
Williamson, Jack 16
Zelazny, Roger 16 + 1 = 17

 

[Maxperson]

And adventurer arrives in a settlement plagued by a monster. The hero kills the monster and is rewarded by the people of the settlement. However, that leads to a conflict with another, more powerful monster...

Sound familiar? Beowulf is pretty much every D&D player character ever.

It sounds like multiple old stories, really. Only it doesn't sound like much of D&D. Very often you get rewarded by the settlement(or even not) and there is no more powerful monster. Very often there isn't even a monster for the adventure. Sometimes you go to another plane of existence. Sometimes you have a naval or completely underwater adventure. D&D isn't much like Beowulf at all. It sounds like you're grasping at straws to try and force D&D to be Beowulf just because occasionally it matches that story.

There are no new stories, so pretty much everything you come up with is going to sounds like dozens of stories that have been told before. That doesn't make those old stories inspiration. Beowulf isn't mentioned, where Tolkien is. If you can't show me some explicit proof, then I'm just not going to buy the tenuous(at best) connection that you've come up with.

It would be difficult to include the author of Beowulf in a list of authors, since no one knows who wrote it! The anaemic Rosemary Sutcliffe version would probably have been the only version available to Gygax, assuming he didn't read Old English. The Tolkien translation was lost, and Heaney's was written after 1979.

Or, you know, he could just have mentioned Beowulf as being an inspiration. He didn't. He does name Tolkien multiple times, though. And use more than one name unique to Tolkien.

 

[Maxperson]

Bellairs, John 11
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 18
Carter, Lin 14
de Camp & Pratt 7
Dunsany, Lord 17
Fox, Gardner 1
Leiber, Fritz 17
Merritt, A. 16
Offutt, Andrew J. 14
Pratt, Fletcher 12
St. Clair, Margaret 12
Tolkien, J.R.R. 14
Wellman, Manley Wade 14
Williamson, Jack 16
Zelazny, Roger 17

 

[squibbles]

Bellairs, John 11
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 18
Carter, Lin 14
de Camp & Pratt 7
Dunsany, Lord 17
Fox, Gardner 1
Leiber, Fritz 17+1=18
Merritt, A. 16
Offutt, Andrew J. 14
Pratt, Fletcher 12
St. Clair, Margaret 12
Tolkien, J.R.R. 14-2=12
Wellman, Manley Wade 14
Williamson, Jack 16
Zelazny, Roger 17

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[rczarnec]

Bellairs, John 9
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 18
Carter, Lin 14
de Camp & Pratt 7
Dunsany, Lord 17
Fox, Gardner 1
Leiber, Fritz 18
Merritt, A. 16
Offutt, Andrew J. 14
Pratt, Fletcher 12
St. Clair, Margaret 12
Tolkien, J.R.R. 10
Wellman, Manley Wade 14
Williamson, Jack 16
Zelazny, Roger 19

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Grognerd]

Never done one of these, but I'm in!

Bellairs, John 9
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 19
Carter, Lin 14
de Camp & Pratt 7
Dunsany, Lord 17
Fox, Gardner 1
Leiber, Fritz 18
Merritt, A. 16
Offutt, Andrew J. 14
Pratt, Fletcher 12
St. Clair, Margaret 12
Tolkien, J.R.R. 10
Wellman, Manley Wade 14
Williamson, Jack 16
Zelazny, Roger 17

Because I've always thought Zelazny was overrated (and a bit pretentious), and ERB brought us John Carter (the real John Carter of the books, not the horrid movie version(s))!

 

[Eltab]

Bellairs, John 9
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 19
Carter, Lin 14
de Camp & Pratt 7
Dunsany, Lord 17
Fox, Gardner 1 - 2 = -1 Wow, I take a week off, and not much progress thinning down this list. Here's some help.
Leiber, Fritz 18
Merritt, A. 16
Offutt, Andrew J. 14
Pratt, Fletcher 12
St. Clair, Margaret 12
Tolkien, J.R.R. 10 + 1 = 11
Wellman, Manley Wade 14
Williamson, Jack 16
Zelazny, Roger 17