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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 3467555" data-attributes="member: 3887">Me, self-serving? Never...I wasn't making a populist appeal, just an observation based on my experiences as a reader and cultural observer (I get to call myself that, I used to subscribe to the New Yorker <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ).Fiction that involves meticulously-detailed, wholly imaginary worlds is in the minority. It's a niche, outside the bounds of 'mainstream realism'. Ergo, quite a lot of readers are looking for something else out of fiction.And I've strenously tried to avoid elitism in my posts --unlike some people. Basically, all I've said with regards to literary merit was the Gatsby is concise, LotR is not, different works have different goals, methods, and thus resulting pleasures. And that Harrison's comments are more widely applicable than you claimed. Which, curiously enough, aren't value judgments.I should be offended. You implied I wasn't funny!Semi-seriously though, I know quite a few straight people, including the friend who I co-created my current game world with, not to mention my lovely wife, who'd gladly read gay pornography, but couldn't be forced into finishing Fellowship of the Ring, or Dune.It's not just a matter of trying to creative a convincing fictional space --the 'fictive dream' -- it's a matter of how you go about doing it. Maybe it's best to think of Harrisons as attacking a specific methodology common in F/SFWhy? How can chronicling Dublin not be inherently different from, say, Minas Tirinth?So your research includes actually reading Mr. Harrison's books?In an word, yes. Or if he is, he's doing so in a way that shuts me, as the reader, out. All I can see is the fantastic castle he's pulled out of his toychest. It's lovely, but it looks an awful lot like a retreat from the world around him, particularly the messy, dirty world of adult relationships (contrast this with the fantasies of Shakespeare). So long as the 'world-building' remains submerged and off the written page, I can agree with you. What do you consider good human drama, aside from LotR? I can't for the life of me see your point here. We should eschew attempts at mimetic realism?  Any storytelling mode has its limitations. Can you think of one that doesn't? Sure, TV dramas are contrieved. That doesn't mean that can't offer moments of meaningful drama. The enjoyment of any narrative form is predicated, in part, on looking past the obvious mechanisms flaiing about making it work. News flash: upset people don't really sing like they do in an opera.BTW, I'm quite fond of Wilde, his embrace of the patently fake is exhilirating. I never said such minutiae was all there was to see, I said those kinds of things fascinated me.It amuses me to no end. I demand a recount!(I'm going out now to have a proper talk about books. At a bar, with a copious amount of gin and finger pointing)</blockquote>

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