This is despite allynh's attempt to deny its belonging to that branch. However, the title of the third volume is a bit of a giveaway: 'Return of the King'. It is all about trying to cling on to the past, to resist change, to put things back the way they were. Not everything can be put back - some eggs can't be unbroken, and JRRT is too good a writer - but the whole tone of the story is that of wanting to stay in a comfortable past, not of moving on to the future.
One bit of the future which is completely rejected is the industrial revolution. The transformation of Isengard is regarded with horror by all the protagonists, and is one of the changes that is joyfully reversed.
]]>As to "modern LoTR" presumably you could have a few elves/ hobbits/ ents/ orcs etc remaining in remote places, or archaeologists digging up Isengard, or various nasties from Mordor emerging from the deep places where they hid themselves but I don't see how it could "be" LoTR.
]]>I should really learn to take this stuff less seriously.
]]>Yep. As I was going along I developed quite a violent allergy to the Ayn Rand style competent industrialist hero(ine) who sets the world to right (and makes shedloads of money on the side) just by having a clear understand of The Way The World Works™.
(In other words, I don't subscribe to the Great Man theory of history. History is made, for the most part, by lots of little people going about their ways, with the occasional turbulent/nonlinear catastrophe point where a handful of individuals may exert disproportionate influence -- but seldom know what the hell is going on.)
Back in the late 90s, I concluded that I actually hate the pre-enlightenment conservativism inherent in high fantasy (such as "The Lord of the Rings" -- and don't get me started on the Christian propaganda that is Narna), and that if I ever wrote a fantasy trilogy I'd start with the structure of the "poor but honest son of kind peasant folks who discovers his destiny", revealing in book #2 that the destiny in question is to become the Dark Lord and Modernizer who drags Middle Earth kicking and screaming into the Iron Age. (Except it's been done, and better, by folks who know a lot more about sword-smithing and mediaeval logistics than I do, so why bother?)
NB: Two books I would strongly recommend to fantasy fans:
a) "The Magicians" by Lev Grossman -- starts out as a literary take on Harry Potter, then turns sideways into a literary take on Narnia, savagely vivisecting both of them along the way (and Grossman is a far better writer than Rowling and, arguably, Lewis).
b) For a comic pratfall, "Grunts" by Mary Gentle -- starts out as "Lord of the Rings" from the orcs' point of view, then takes a left turn into weirdville. Hysterically funny, if you've read too much high fantasy and always wanted to know how a Strategic Air Command War Elephant would fly ...
]]>(I shall not expand on that, because it's not impossible that they'll come out over here eventually ...)
NB: I buy American-only region-locked ebooks from mzn's Kndl* store using a gmail account I set up for that purpose, linked to an mzn.com account with a US address, and paid for using *mz*n gift vouchers. I then use a python script called MobiDeDRM to strip the DRM off them (this only works for ebooks I've bought and have the registered device ID for), transcode them to epub, and read them on my iPad using Stanza.
It's not hard, if you have a CS degree, a willingness to tinker with a UNIX command line, and no scruples. (Insert anti-DRM rant here to taste.)
]]>But ebooks are another matter.
Disclaimer: I'm conflicted on region encoding for ebooks, because, er, I get more money if I sell UK and commonwealth rights separately from North American rights. Simples, eh? (If you sell world English language rights your publisher will squeeze you on the advance. And they'll still fuck up the region restrictions, based on experience ...)
]]>(Do I need to add that I sneer disbelievingly at the folks who think JRRT -- a professor of Anglo-Saxon literature and poetry -- was focussed on nuts and bolts science fiction? It's as bonkers as suggesting that Shakespeare's plays and poems were actually written by Elizabeth Tudor.
]]>Ayn Rand was big on the idea of the Great Man (or woman), the visionary leader who through sheer excellence could move mountains. My point is, history isn't predicated on them. Certainly, some people have a disproportionate impact on events -- but if you could remove them from the past, if you could re-run time without them, events would still play out: probably with someone else getting the credit for occupying the role of pivotal figure. The pivotal figures of history are fungible (although depending on your choice of actor you may get a different outcome).
My original outline positioned Miriam as a Randian heroine (minus the ideology) and I decided I really didn't want that (because most of the time the world doesn't work that way -- if you push, it pushes back).
Possibly it's a symptom of having written the last of six books when I was seven or eight years older than when I wrote the outline and the first volume. Authors aren't changeless and if I ever plan a long series in future I'm going to leave lots of wiggle room for me to change my mind about where I'm going along the way.
]]>Firstly, let's be clear: today, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror are not unitary stylistic forms -- they are, rather, marketing tools that are applied to books and tell store staff which shelves to put them on, the better for the buying public to find what they want. However, fantasy out-sells SF by 2:1. Thus, lots of items are mis-categorized for commercial reasons -- if you can plausibly disguise an author's work as being part of a more lucrative field, you can up-sell.
Secondly, his definitions. I generally agree with his take on Fantasy (restoring the balance) and SF (constant change) -- although per #1 there's plenty of fantasy marketed as SF (e.g. prime offender: "Star Wars") and some (a lot less) SF marketed as fantasy ("Merchant Princes") -- but the caveat is that SF is descended from ideological agitprop for a post-enlightenment modernist political agenda; that the age of machines will alter the human condition and the way we live must therefore change (and will change for the better). Fantasy generally (but not invariably) harks back to the Divine Right of Kings and the Great Chain of Being -- it's intrinsically pre- or anti-enlightenment. If nothing else, in urban fantasy we have the wider non-magical world which remains beyond the protagonists' concerns, the denizens of which are excluded from consideration while the citizens of the kingdom of magic duke it out using policies and tools familiar to Shakespeare.
(His choice of 1750 as a rupture date in the purpose of the fantastic is not an accident; remember, it's about a generation after the Scottish Enlightenment, with its philosophical sea-change in attitudes to religion, science, and morality, and a decade or two before the modernizing political debate in the New England colonies -- about the true function of governance in the post-monarchical world -- got under way.)
But most importantly, I disagree with his definition of horror. Horror isn't a genre with an outlook, it is a tone or an angle of inquiry which can be applied to a work of any other genre. You can write a mainstream novel and apply a glaze of horror to it; or a science fiction horror, or a fantasy horror, or a detective tale of horror, or a horrifying romance. Moreover, what constitutes horror is a variable relative to where the reader stands: some things that one reader (or author) would find horrifying, another would find mundane or even desirable -- miscegenation, for example, or Lovecraft's phobia of "inferior mongrel races", or the not-uncommon use of homophobia in pre-1980s fiction.
]]>(Crawling does not earn you course credits.)
(Neither does continuing the derailing -- and annoying -- discussion of Tolkein.)
]]>That sounds like a tagline for one of your books.
(I definitely want to read that one)
]]>But I digress ...
]]>