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I liked Moorcock books as a teenager, especially the Runestaff cycle, but they felt a little shallow to me when I reread them recently. Maybe it's because of the new more sophisticated fantasy books I've read since then. Elric cycle was a little better in that respect, but still felt "backward".
I think there are a few writers more deserving to be called "Anti-Tolkiens": obviously George R. R. Martin for Game of Thrones, and less known Andrzej Sapkowski with his short stories cycle about The Witcher (only 1 out of 2 short stories collections - The Last Wish - is translated to English, but it is worth reading just for the fresh and original view on fantasy book structure - it's short stories, nicely packed with interesting and original multi-sided conflicts, each short story shows different conflicts, and it's about characters and conflicting interests (and points of view), not about Good and Evil, Chaos and Law or anything like that.
It's different from regular fantasy in the way that Stanisław Lem Cyberiad is different from regular sci-fi. Highly recommended. Novels by Andrzej Sapkowski are a little worse, but in the short stories he's brilliant.
BTW Moorcook accused Sapkowski of copying his character, because Geralt (the Witcher) is old albino fighter anti-hero. It always felt to me like Moorcook should actually read the books - the similarities are just apperances - Geralt is very different (and more intersting IMHO) character than Elric.
Good short review of The Last Wish with most points that make this a great book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP1cMitE530
Stephen Donaldson also would be in with a good shot as the "anti-Tolkien" - the first Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are in many ways a mirror opposition to Tolkien's work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Thomas_Covena...
Possibly the finest - and darkest, in the genuine sense of the world rather than "this has sex and violence in it" - portal fantasy ever written.
Completely agree. I greatly enjoyed the Thomas Covenant series as a teen. But really didn't like Moorcocks work.
A pet peeve of mine is when a writer uses "Sex and Violence" as a crutch to stand out and "push boundaries". I don't enjoy that sort of writing and as a general rule find that the whole trope gets used to hide the lack of good writing in a piece.
And the derision of Tolkien is just beyond me. The depths of Tolkeins characters is staggering. It seems like the complaints mostly boil down to Hero's with moral fiber are boring. I don't get it.
Lem is hands down my favourite Sci-Fi author, mostly because of how different he is to everyone else. His novels from 60s or 70s could have been written yesterday, they feel just as fresh. Unfortunately, it's incredibly difficult to recommend them to any of my English friends, as translations are poor and hard to come by. I've spent a little fortune trying to get a copy of "The Invincible"(my favourite) for a friend, because it was only released in English once, in New York, for two years(1971 and 1972), so good copies are very hard come by. And it's a poor translation because it was translated from Polish to German then to English.
I've heard Kandel translations of Lem are really good? Certainly the fragments I've read were fantastic - I didn't thought it's possible to translate the wordplay in Cyberiad and he did it:
http://english.lem.pl/home/bookshelf/how-the-word-was-saved?...
Are you aware of the recent translation of his Summa Technologiae to English? Have yet to read it myself, but read some very positive reviews!
I'd recommend the Malazan Book of the Fallen which is, in a lot of ways, what Tolkien wished he could have accomplished in the sense of how much creative freedom Erikson had available to him and how much world-building he's able to consequently do. Erikson is an archaeologist, which informs his world-building in the same way Tolkien's philology did, and as a bonus, the world is informed not by Catholicism but concepts of evolution.
Here's Erikson talking about the trope of "barbarians": http://www.stevenerikson.com/index.php/the-problem-of-karsa-...
Right, yes, the guy who famously despises escapist fantasy, and whose most popular and prolific character is an albino elf-prince who has the most awesome magical sword in the world, and totally kills anyone who fucks with him, and takes drugs any time he wants, and has bitchin' magical adventures, and totally acts like he doesn't give a fuck about anything, but horribly tragic things keep happening to the people he loves and it's so romantic you could just die.
Escapism for goths is still escapism, and there's nothing wrong with it either way. Tolkien is great. Moorcock is great. It's all good.
It makes me wonder if Moorcock has ever actually read Tolkien. As I've gotten older, some of the shine of Lord of the Rings has worn off, no doubt precipitated by the movies which relegated Tolkien's rich world and epic themes to consumerist junk pocked with spring-action Legolas toys and Hollywood-inspired video games. So, yes, Tolkien's world was sometimes very two-dimensional and naive. His characters and dialogue were sometimes laughably simplistic, but I prefer to think of LOTR as a vehicle for exploring larger themes of power and evil.
LOTR was written against the backdrop of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and a world where good and evil didn't seem very ambiguous, yet think about how many times this ambiguity comes up: Gollum. Good or evil? Saruman? Boromir? There is nothing childish or "Pooh-like" about these characters. They are very real, very intense confrontations with good and evil. Even Bilbo and Frodo themselves struggle with this. We assume the ring has the power to corrupt, but is the ring truly doing the corrupting, or is this lust for power something innate within that the ring simply exploits for its own purposes?
And what defines true power? Is it the ring itself? Is it the one who carries it? Frodo and Sam, two of the smallest of the races of Middle-Earth manage to bring down the most powerful of enemies with little more than courage and a desire to do what's right, while the powerful (the humans of Rohan and Gondor) quibble amongst themselves and their leaders are easily manipulated or go mad with sorrow and fear.
Long story short, I think Moorcock is wrong. I find the idea of a drug-addicted elf more ridiculous than anything Tolkien ever wrote. It's as though Moorcock defines fantasy as merely a setting through which he can play out his literary amibitions. That isn't to say there's anything wrong with a drug-addicted elf, it's just that drug addiction -- a so-called "real" problem to Tolkien's alleged "Pooh" problems -- does not alone elevate one's work to higher stature, nor should it be used a bludgeon to demote the work of others. I have learned far more about life and human nature from Tolkien than I have from Moorcock, and Tolkien's work was more entertaining too.
EDIT: Oh, and if you want to read some incredibly clever and unique sci-fi/fantasy, check out anything by Gene Wolfe or Jack Vance. Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is brilliant, and Vance's Lyonesse trilogy is amazing.
> It makes me wonder if Moorcock has ever actually read Tolkien.
Probably he just didn't read it thoroughly enough. Recent writers put characterization and moral ambiguities at the forefront of their stories, like Moorcock wanted. Tolkien (and the pre-modern works he imitated) put those elements in the background and make the reader dig them out.
Agreed about Jack Vance. I recommend Eyes of the Overworld/Cugel the Clever.
What I find so facinating about this is 'complex' charaters in modern fiction are really a dumbing down of the art form.
I think if you've gotten to the point where you have to assume ignorance in somebody obviously well read just to feel right, you've made a mistake.
If you want a modern fictional take, try Richard Morgan's stuff. He shares Moorcock's suspicion of power and antipathy to Tolkein's reactionary political leanings. And he likewise avoids Tolkein's indulgence of Manichean ethical notions.
Gene Wolfe is fantastic. The Book of the New Sun deconstructed the fantasy genre decades before G. R. R. Martin, in a much more sophisticated way than Moorcock. Unfortunately Wolfe has a much smaller readership, undeservedly so.
Having a different interpretation does not mean the other person didn't read the same thing or as thoroughly as you did. That shows great arrogance.
"But Moorcock, one of the most prolific living fantasists, sees Tolkien’s creation as little more than a conservative vision of the status quo, an adventure that brings its hero “There and Back Again,” rather than into a world where experience means you can’t go home again...”"
Can someone explain this to me? Well Bilbo does go home, he knows it is temporary and home - to/for him - is not what it once was, and Frodo's story line out-and-out states that he is going thru a change where he cannot go back.
If this is truly what Moorcock thinks, I don't see it.
I think he's talking about something very similar to China Miéville's critique of fantasy (and, frankly, some SF) literature: that so much of the genre is ultimately this politically reactionary, "Oh, if only we could restore the rightful king (or his heir — and notice how it's always a male), everything would be swell again!" sort of thing.
The "home" Moorcock is decrying Tolkien's return to is the golden age that never really existed in the first place — except in fiction, where you can paint a rosy picture of the past and proclaim it true by author's fiat.
Yes. If you look at protofascist movements, very often there's a hearkening back to a mythical golden age.
As an adult, I now am also not so comfortable with Tolkein's strong emphasis on race and tribe. Or how it's the intrinsically evil dark or unnatural peoples from the south versus the fading pure white peoples from the north.
Fun stories, and I'll happily read them, but I think it's instructive about some human inclinations that, if indulged, take us to ugly places.
Part of Tolkien's worldview was that the past really was a golden age in certain aspects. Yeah, it really is reactionary—but horrible events demand a reaction.
Interesting, thanks I hadn't thought about it from that higher level.
Moorcock's Tolkien take-down is here: http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953
It's a good read, although I'm partial to some big dumb sword-waving pulp fantasy anyway.
Ah yes, this was mentioned in the article. I was going to google it but didn't. Thanks, another 'tab for the weekend'!
In the book edition, moreover, Frodo can't go home again because (in an allegory of the English experience after WWII) the global conflict has brought a good dose of the ugly stuff back there, too. Much unlike the film, which has been "updated".
I'm in the process of reading The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft and there was an interesting brief comparison of the fantasies of Tolkien and Lovecraft (both born within ~2 years of each other).
While Tolkien's fantasy world is structured, ordered, able to be understood, and extremely detailed by its author, Lovecraft's fantasy world is unstructured, chaotic, any attempts at comprehension result in madness, and leaves much to the imagination by its author[0].
As a huge fan of Tolkien, D&D, and the typical fantasy tropes, reading Lovecraft as a sort of antithesis of Tolkien is very refreshing.
[0] Sadly, could also be because Lovecraft passed at a much younger age.
This article is a piece of shit. The guy has read Tolkien and Moorcock and draw generalizations from there. Man, Moorcock wrote epic pooh in 1978. Apart from this narrow point of view, he executes every other important ideas of Moorcock in few short sentences : its impacts on other writes, the development of the fight between chaos and law instead of good and evil, etc.
And as influence go by, the white walkers of game of thrones are way more moorcockquesque than anything else.
Let's make a piece on the New Yorker that would be called "the anti new york times".
Well, they do mention Pohl's evil twin, Frederik Phol (a soup nazi of the vietnamese persuasion)
I find the premise of the article odd. Characterization of Hobbit in the movies as something that was made "trying to honor every one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s footnotes, appendices, and letters" and fit into LOTR film trilogy. Since Jackson did not have a licence to anything other than Hobbit, LOTR books and its footnotes, that's what they used. Where they went with it made it impossible for me to watch more than the first film...
I don't get what are the values of this "morally bankrupt" middle class according to Moorcock, if Tolkien's work is confirmation of those. Destruction of nature for profit, corruption of power, strong being capable of using evil either blindly or wantonly. That is shown as bad, whereas simple, polite and modest (albeit with great amounts of food, ale and tobacco) life is good. I'd want a any "class" to adhere to those.
As for being Anti-Tolkien, I'd have to see some one produce as much content, build a world so intricate and even write a fable of it. Works of Tolkien have so many aspects beyond the stories of Hobbit and LOTR, that saying something is anti- to that feels too simplistic. I have read only a few of Eldrich books, but what I remember from those was not so encompassing or ambitious.
If you choose this one aspect from Tolkien's works and decide to attack that, you certainly can, but what you actually accomplish? I'd rather read good fantasy from any writer, be it simple or complex. I'm currently re-reading Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy, which might be classified as a children book, but it's still very enjoyable and intelligent for an adult me.
Kirill Eskov is the most literal Anti-Tolkien with his fanfic "The Last Ringbearer".
In the same vein, an article[1] in The Telegraph entitled "The Hobbit: How the 'clomping foot of nerdism' destroyed Tolkien's dream - and the fantasy genre" makes a few similar points.
I'm inclined to agree with them - Tolkein's brand of endless minutiae does not a good novel make. His is a world of casually racist undertones and completely shallow characters. The good and bad guys in Tolkein are good and bad for no particular discernible reason, and I think fantasy has yet to dig its way out of Tolkein's shadow.
However, I think new wave (and an emphasis on stylism in general) has done a lot to rehabilitate sci-fi. Personally, I think Gene Wolfe and M John Harrison deserve a lot of praise for pushing the genre along. Harrison's "Light"[2] comes to mind as a modern incarnation of a new wave novel that still manages to earn its sciency stripes.
1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/11289765/The-Hobbit-...
2: http://www.amazon.com/Light-M-John-Harrison/dp/0553382950
I find that Tolkein is far better than most fantasy authors at handling the minutiae. Rather than frontload a hundred new proper nouns into the first two chapters as many do, Tolkein manages to weave it naturally into the story, expanding on it and exploring the world through the protagonists. A poem or song here, a brief mention by another character there, without any massive infodumps.
Sure, there's the infamous appendices and the Silmarillion for even more backstory, but they're not required reading, just fun additions to the world.
> casually racist undertones
This is the first I've heard of such a thing. There's plenty of that in Lewis, Lovecraft, and many other writers, but unless you're referring to the general "elves are better everythings" meme (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurElvesAreBetter http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FantasticRacism) (which is commonly imputed and used in descendant works, but in Tolkein's own work frequently counterpointed by wistful musings about the future promise of Men with their much-vaunted mortality), I don't see any sensible basis for that in Tolkein. As much as Tolkein liked to create strong good/evil distinctions for the reader, those lines were not drawn between any analogue to human races; there were many sources of evil on many fronts.
It's tricky in fantasy, because of how race-based a lot of the plot is. To put the argument for racist undertones in Tolkein succinctly - all the bad guys in LOTR are basically dark and ugly. There are no even slightly good orcs, and if there are any bad elves, they are mostly good elves who have been tempted to some sin.
If I remember correctly, the swarthy eastern men were the bad humans.
Beyond that, it’s hard to argue that having an inherently evil race like the orcs doesn’t have racist undertones (particularly with the descriptions of the orcs mirroring racist caricatures). Sure, there were bad people in the other races as well (and not all of them swarthy!), but racism doesn’t claim that one race is without any bad people, it claims that certain races are inherently inferior (bad, weak willed, violent, etc.).
This doesn’t mean that Tolkein was or wasn’t a flaming racist, but it’s hard not to see the parallels in his work to actual racism.
> Tolkein's brand of endless minutiae does not a good novel make.
But Tolkien was not trying to write a good novel; he was writing a myth in the form of a serial. I don't really see why he should be condemned for having succeeded at the actual goal.
> The good and bad guys in Tolkein are good and bad for no particular discernible reason
That's ridiculously untrue. Tolkien's effort was to depict a fairly specific set of virtues, both for his children and for Britain at large. Whether or not he succeeded is debatable, but it's not terribly hard to figure out why character X is a good guy and character Y is a bad guy. Self-sacrifice, dauntlessness, generosity, and reliability are characteristics that all the "good guys" either exemplify or seek to exemplify. Selfishness, carelessness, cowardliness, and cruelty are characteristics that all the "bad guys" either exemplify or seek to exemplify.
> In the same vein, an article[1] in The Telegraph entitled "The Hobbit: How the 'clomping foot of nerdism' destroyed Tolkien's dream - and the fantasy genre" makes a few similar points.
My first impression of that article was that anyone who, in the 21st century, still thinks that "nerd" is a cutting insult, can be safely ignored.
Brief perusal of the original article that the Telegraph references (M. John Harrison's screed against worldbuilding as "the great clomping foot of nerdism" [1]) confirms that he's basically trying to prove that a writing style he doesn't like is, therefore, logically and objectively inferior to a style he does like. I'm comfortable that my first impression was accurate.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20080410181840/http://uzwi.wordpr...
You should expect people to try to prove what they believe! I also find the "I found X safe to ignore at Y point because of Z" to be a rather poisonous take on processing other viewpoints. I'm sure you mean well with it but you come off as looking for excuses to be dismissive.
Getting a little meta, but while Harrison's "Light" was indeed a refreshing blast of sea air, "Nova Swing" I found almost intolerable in what felt like a haphazard reapplication of some of the time-independent concepts that made Light so wonderful. It felt self-conscious and distracted, to be unkind.
Very much in agreement. The third novel, Empty Space, was a strong return to form, though.
What should I make of the basically terrible reviews of "Light"? I am curious to read it to see what you are talking about, but 3.2/5 on Amazon usually amounts to "really quite terrible".
Same thing you should make of the extremely high ratings that Cassandra Clare novels get (https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/150038.Cassandra_Clare). For those who aren't aware, this author is a serial plagiarist whose novels are basically ripoffs of already not-that-great books like Twilight (http://www.dailydot.com/fandom/fandom-guide-cassandra-clare-...).
I think a lot of great work is very polarizing - in this case I think a lot of people who are used to a very different sort of hard sci-fi went into "Light" expecting it to be something that it's not.
It is not a novel about a world with rigorously defined and cataloged physical law, and it's certainly not about a protagonist's moral crusade against evil.
It's a novel (in my personal estimation) about the breathtaking and magical pace of the advance of technology, and how it amplifies all the great and awful things that make us human.
For all the claims of devil worship lobbed at Led Zeppelin, Satan doesn’t make a single appearance in their lyrics. Tolkien is where their real allegiance lies, with references to Gollum, Mordor, the Misty Mountains, and Ringwraiths. Moorcock, however, came of age during rock’s ascension and understood rock’s power to give electrified life to his creations. Moorcock worked directly with bands like Hawkwind and Blue Öyster Cult as both a spiritual and literary guru.
Telling.
Here's "Epic Pooh", confusingly updated with references to JK Rowling and Philip Pullman:
http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953
And here's Auden's wide-eyed original review of _Fellowship_, referenced at the start of that essay:
http://www.nytimes.com/1954/10/31/books/tolkien-fellowship.h...
"For all the claims of devil worship lobbed at Led Zeppelin, Satan doesn’t make a single appearance in their lyrics."
Well sure, not if you play them forwards...
Someone needs to check out the lyrics to the song Houses of the Holy (which, oddly enough, is not on the album of the same name):
From the houses of the holy, we can watch the white doves go
From the door comes Satan's daughter, and it only goes to show
You know
I try not to get too deep into these literary controversies - newcomers always have to reject some of what came before to establish their sense of novelty. Every British rock band will trash-talk the Beatles a little for the same reason.
The comparison of Tolkein to the Fab Four (Five for those who count G. Martin) isn't accidental - both defined their genres.
And if I remember my Elric, his "drug habit" wasn't metaphorical heroin, but insulin. He needed it to survive.
> But more often his presence is seen the form of loving nods as, when, in the “Game of Thrones” television series, someone yells out “Stormbringer” when King Joffrey asks for possible names for his sword.
FWIW, I'm quite sure someone in the crowd also shouts "terminus" which would be a gene wolfe reference, and something else I didn't quite catch.
I think if you have to tell other people how deep and amazing your own work is, it might not be that deep or amazing.
This guy is the very definition of an ankle-biter.
I honestly think that lord of the rings is the worst piece of literature I've ever seen.
I really suggest you read more.