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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 2025719" data-attributes="member: 6533">Satires a big ol' bunch of wonder.  What encourages me about it these days is that we seem to be slowly moving away from the idea that satire is targetted.When the Simpsons, for instance, first came out they were famously seen as the enemy of conservatism, but now there are conservative societies that meet in the name of Flanders and books on how the Simpsons do the bible.  Doesn't mean that the Simpsons have lost their liberal cred just they've got a lot of cred with a lot of people.For me the essence of satire is often far more technical than content based, and I think the very structure of it suits fantasy and makes it possible.Tolkien's influence is, I think, largely based on his invention or codification of a new genre technology that let us escape much of the feel of satire.  Just as the novel took the narrative form of Don Quixote and made it less challenging.My hope is that in the next fifty years or so we'll have gotten good enough at the second world phenomena to begin moving back to the great bits of the original satirical form and attempt some sort of reconciliation.Terry Pratchett is an obvious potential early runner for this, but China Mieville, from what I've heard and read, is almost explicitly attempting just that and in a way that fits the broader categories of satire with their darkness and grit.I think you can also see it in simpler more pervasive things too like George RR Martins viewpoint per chapter format or even the work to create fantasy in a variety of odd settings whether cultural as in Sean Russel's Gatherer of Clouds or epochal as in the phenomena of urban fantasy ala Charles DeLint or the literally post-modern works of Sean Stewart.Galveston, by the way, is an excellent work and one I highly recommend everyone get their hands on if they can.</blockquote>

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