An auction, eight stories and a tease in today’s Scroll.
(1) Attention collectors! Somebody’s flipping Ray Bradbury’s original caricature from the Brown Derby Restaurant today on eBay. Jack Lane’s portrait once hung on the wall at the famed Hollywood & Vine tourist trap with hundreds more of the artist’s sketches of Hollywood stars.
Ray Bradbury by Jack Lane. Once displayed at the Brown Derby.
(2) The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis will hold three special events next month celebrate Ray Bradbury’s 95th birthday, which is on August 22.
From Aug. 3 to 28, the center will present a free exhibit, “Miracles of Rare Device: Treasures of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies,” in the Cultural Arts Gallery on the first floor of the IUPUI Campus Center…. The exhibit will feature art, artifacts, books and rare magazines from Bradbury’s own collection, gifted to the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI in 2013 by the Bradbury Estate and by Donn Albright, Bradbury’s close friend and bibliographer.
Two related public events will coincide with the exhibition’s run.
On August 19, Jonathan R. Eller, Chancellor’s Professor of English and director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies will deliver the Second Annual Ray Bradbury Memorial Lecture in the Riley Meeting Room at Indianapolis Public Library’s Central Library.
The lecture, “Ray Bradbury’s October Country,” reveals the timeless creativity and somewhat controversial publishing history of one of Bradbury’s most popular story collections on the 60th anniversary of its original publication.
On August 27, the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies will host a reception followed by another Eller lecture, on the collection’s amazing journey from California to IUPUI and the importance of Bradbury’s legacy in the 21st century. Both the lecture and reception are free and open to the public.
(3) James Artimus Owen is offering for sale his illustrations for Diana Pavlac Glyer’s forthcoming book about the Inklings, Bandersnatch, and has posted the images on Facebook. [Note: Despite being set to “Public”, the material can only be viewed if you have a Facebook account.]
Each illustration is drawn on 11″ x 14″ Bristol board, and includes an appearance by the Bandersnatch somewhere in the picture. Prices are as listed, ranging from $450 to $750, although I am willing to entertain offers from people I like. First request, first choice. Message me to reserve your favorite and to arrange payment and shipping.
(4) Everybody knows Sharknado 3 airs today on SyFy. But it came as a surprise for me to read that George R.R. Martin plans to show the movie at his Jean Cocteau Theatre in August.
“Check it out,” writes Martin. “Next year’s Hugo favorite, for sure.”
William Reichard says in honor of that crack, the movie should be renamed, “Snarknado 3.”
(5) SF Signal’s latest Mind Meld proposes this interesting premise —
A recent Guardian article about Tokyo awarding Japanese Citzenship to Godzilla got me to wondering: If you could pick a genre fictional character, from any media, and offer them honorary citizenship and residence in your city, county, state, country, who would it be, and why?
Responses from — Kelly Robson, Jenny Goloboy, Galen Dara, Anne Leonard, Patrick Tomlinson, Julie Czerneda, Alyx Dellamonica, Django Wexler, Jesse Willis, Diana Pharoah Francis, Mikaela Lind, Rhonda Eudaly, Gillian Philip, Ardi Alspach, and Laura Anne Gilman.
(6) Interested in stories read aloud? Open Culture has found another seam of the motherlode, 88 hours of free audio fiction original aired on Wisconsin public radio.
Listen to enough episodes of Mind Webs, and you may get hooked on the voice and reading style of its host Michael Hanson, a fixture on Wisconsin public radio for something like forty years. Back in 2001, just after wrapping up his career in that sector, Hanson wrote in to the New York Times lamenting the state of public radio, especially its program directors turned into “sycophantic bean counters” and a “pronounced dumbing down of program content.” Mind Webs, which kept on going from the 70s through the 90s, came from a time before all that, and now its smart storytelling has come available for all of us to enjoy.
The playlist above will let you stream all of the stories — roughly 88 hours worth — from start to finish. Or you can access the audio at Archive.org here.
(7) Of course they knew those comic books were stolen! The Verge has the goods on the great Texas comic book heist.
Whoever was after the Sub-Mariners and All Star Comics at the Heritage Auction wasn’t a collector. Their bids were too erratic, they didn’t know the market, and chances were, they weren’t terribly smart. It was also clear that they had a lot of money on their hands — too much money, maybe — and they were eager to spend it. Through months of interviews and hundreds of pages of public documents, The Verge reconstructed what they were seeing: a multi-million-dollar embezzlement scheme that would ensnare a crooked lawyer, a multinational corporation, and some of the most sought-out comics in the world….
$40,000 split between nine checks. The investigator said he was going through a nasty divorce, and was worried his ex-wife might raise trouble over any checks for more than $10,000.
But what about that foxing? When the buyers took their comics home, they noticed something strange: the All Star #3 that had sold in February had the same imperfections. In fact, it was the same book. But that book was slabbed — it had a barcode and provenance, sold to a private buyer who wouldn’t have deslabbed it without a reason. Had they bought stolen property?
It was worse. They had bought stolen evidence. The book had come direct from Chiofalo’s storage unit, smuggled out under the nose of the Harris County DA — and according to prosecutors, Blevins and Deutsch worked together to smuggle them out. More than $150,000 in comics had disappeared from the storage unit, and Blevins had spent the summer selling them at comics conventions across the country. The books were deslabbed to throw investigators off the trail, but even without the barcode, the cover gave it away. Collectors search for flawless comics, but it’s the imperfections that give them an identity, and this imperfection placed Blevins at the scene of a crime.
(8) Did Tolkien visit the Bouzincourt caves while on Army service during the Battle of the Somme?
In 1916, a 24-year-old British soldier named J.R.R. Tolkien went off to fight in World War I. He was stationed near the village of Bouzincourt, took part in the nearby Battle of the Somme and writes about the area in his diaries.
Jeff Gusky, an explorer and photographer who maintains a site called “The Hidden World of World War I,” believes Tolkien may have visited Bouzincourt’s caves, places where hundreds of soldiers took refuge during the Somme — and that some of his impressions ended up in “The Lord of the Rings.”
“I feel that this is the place,” Gusky said. “It’s so raw and unchanged from a hundred years ago.”
Tolkien scholar John Garth isn’t so sure.
“On the Somme, he certainly spent time in deep trench dugouts, and he would have been aware of the subterranean world of the army tunnelers — all of which would, I believe, have given his descriptions of Moria and other Middle-earth underworlds some of their vitality,” Garth, the author of “Tolkien and the Great War,” wrote in an email….
Regardless of whether Tolkien knew of the caves, there’s no question that the author’s experience at the Somme influenced “The Lord of the Rings.”
“The Dead marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme,” he wrote in a letter, according to a story on the Green Books portion of TheOneRing.net.
(9) “Stick a fork in the pup’s Tor boycott because their hushpuppy is done” says Jason Sanford.
Earlier this month I tracked the sales of a sample of ten book titles published by Tor Books. My desire was to see if the puppies’ boycott of Tor was having any effect on the publisher’s sales.
You can see the titles I tracked, and how I tracked the sales, in my original post or by looking at the endnote below.
But the flaw in my analysis was that I could only present two weeks of sales data since the boycott began on June 19. As a result, some people rightly said it was too early to tell if the boycott was failing or succeeding.
After examining two additional weeks of sales data it appears my initial analysis was correct. This new data shows that for the five weeks prior to the boycott starting on June 19, the weekly sales average for these Tor titles was 1652 books sold per week. For those same Tor titles, their weekly average sales for the last four weeks of the boycott has been 1679 books sold per week.
So on average, Tor’s sales for these titles are up slightly since the boycott started.
(10) Vox Day’s “Hugo Recommendations: Best Professional Artist” post is up. Don’t try and kid me, you know you want to read it.
[Thanks for these stories goes out to Dave Doering, Michael J. Walsh, William Reichard, Jim Meadows and John King Tarpinian as the Beaver.]
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The only thing I rank higher than LOTR is Wizard of Earthsea. If I go by enjoyment and not influence.
“I for one feel like it’s entirely defensible to describe –”
— Ulysses S. Grant as the best general of the American Civil War
— Casablanca as the best film ever made
— L.A.con III as the best Worldcon in history
God that feels good! I’m right behind you Andy!
I think it is like looking at a satellite picture of part of the Earth’s surface. The resolution isn’t great and you can’t see as much detail as you’d like. You can’t see any sign of a Tor-boycott – but it might be there but it is currently to small to see at that resolution.
Very true – but I do see how they veer around that by:
1. seeing it as allegorical (applied selectively)
2. it is being applied to bad people or being done by bad people
3. it is avoided altogether by the method of Bible study in which a person reads and contemplates de-contextualized passages.
In the case of Wright we know he not only reveres the Great Books but also centered his academic study around them and takes a Catholic approach to theology which itself reveres Plato and Aristotle as kinds of secular pagan honorary Catholic saints. So it is the same problem as you mention but worse in some ways. Agggh it made me go and look at his blog again and then I got even more distracted. The guy obviously has some brains and an interest in big and deep ideas and yet it is likely he is burning through all his cognitive resources to rationalize really dumb positions. It is like he is scared of writing a good book and hence must put all his attention into writing books of a quality that less capable people can do naturally.
I do enjoy the book recommendations here but there is also this feeling of guilt that arises when I see statements like that about authors who I know of but never got around to reading.
I don’t think I can rank them.
I grew up in the UK and a children’s program they had on at the time was called ‘Jackanory’ – which was basically just a person reading a book. They would occasional cut away to an illustration but otherwise it was very simple TV.
When they did Wizard of Earthsea, I was blown away as a kid. It was the best thing.
So effectively it was a more seminal work in my head than LotR.
Camestros Felapton on July 23, 2015 at 1:06 pm said:
Sigh. I has envy. If you’ve never read Diana Wynne Jones, you have SUCH a treat in store. The Merlin Conspiracy is my favorite but none of them are bad. And as CJ Charles (I think) mentioned on Twitter the other day, all Fantasy Writers must read The Dark Lord of Derkholm annually to help avoid becoming a twit over time. She was such a good writer. Sooooo good.
Lord of Light!
Abstain on the second, love Tiptree, but haven’t read Left Hand.
Cool! I contributed to a pixel!
Also, I for one like the honesty of “I for one feel like it’s entirely defensible to describe –” It’s liberating. I can see it acronymized: IFOFLIEDTD.
IFOFLIEDTD Buckaroo Banzai as the greatest crime-fighting black-belt neurosurgeon scientist of all time.
There is an unread copy of Howl’s Moving Castle in the house – bought in wake of the movie. Intended as a story for the kids but fell into that spot when we stopped reading to them.
Also, methinks a Brian Z.-Camestros filk-off (filk-down?) would be an incredible thing to behold.
And finally, a doff of the cap to those from Ye Olde Fandomme discussing Bill Shakespeare. Has been educational. I still sub to the theory that she (in the Radchaai sense) was an alien stranded on earth who was amusing herself insulting the powerful.
Camestros Felapton: There is an unread copy of Howl’s Moving Castle in the house – bought in wake of the movie. Intended as a story for the kids but fell into that spot when we stopped reading to them.
Read it! Read it! Honestly, anything by Diana Wynne Jones is worth the read–she has a way of using and subverting fantasy tropes that is utterly amazing. Do you enjoy Gaiman? He cites Jones as a major influence . . .
I know what you mean about guilt over unread books–but I prefer to think of them as undiscovered treasures. I may never actually read all of the books recommended in these threads, but just knowing that they are Out There makes me believe that the world is a richer place than I had previously been aware.
IFOFLIEDTD the movie “Locke” as a prequel to “Mad Max Fury Road”.
I’ll drink to that!
@Mary Frances:
I hear and I shall obey! Well once the queue of books on the Kindle gets a bit lower. Seveneves next – I’m only 1% in and the moon has been blown to smithereens…
Stevie –
I found it difficult to care because it went from sort of interesting to a Twilight retread by the time it reached the middle part. I picked it up the first because it was so highly ranked on Goodreads. The rest of the series feels like an attempt to see how much convoluted ridiculous plot developments an audience will accept. Apparently a lot.
My Grumpy Retelling of the first volume in the Deborah Harkness “All Souls” Trilogy (WARNING — Much snark and spoilers ahead):
MATTHEW: I am a sexy vampire who is sexy, with a Ph.D. I am also extremely jealous, creepily overprotective, a stalker, and prone to sudden fits of rage.
DIANA: Hot! I am a sexy witch, raised entirely by witches yet bizarrely ignorant of any useful information about them due to childhood trauma. However, I must warn you that I am also an independent woman, with a Ph.D.
MATTHEW: Does this mean you will be bothered by my jealousy, rage, overprotectiveness, and stalking?
DIANA: No, but I will complain when you hold the door open for me at a restaurant.
MATTHEW: Now that I have known you for almost a day, I love you and/or want to eat you.
DIANA: Does this mean you will share with me vital information about the people who might have plans to kill me?
MATTHEW: No. But I will overshare my emotions in a way that would be uncomfortable this early on for any normal person.
DIANA: Awesome! Let’s start dating.
MATTHEW: Oh, no! An ancient medieval covenant between the vampires and witches states that they cannot become emotionally involved with each other, because it attracts too much notice from the humans! Any who do shall be put to death!
DIANA: What?! Was there any reason you didn’t mention this to me *before* we started dating?
MATTHEW: No, no reason.
DIANA: Oh. Well, this sucks.
MATTHEW: Incidentally, since you were raised entirely by witches, wouldn’t you have logically already known about –
DIANA: Childhood! Trauma! How many times do I have to repeat myself?
MATTHEW: Oh, right. Anyway, I will not permit us to be together, as it puts you in danger! I will kill you myself before I let anyone hurt you! [That last sentence is an actual line of dialogue from the book, by the way.]
DIANA: No! I love you! Incidentally, am I going to be allowed at any time to point out in character that you’re 1,500 years old and I’m –
MATTHEW: No.
DIANA: – in my early thirties so you wanting to bone me is kind of like me getting hot for a gerbil?
MATTHEW: I said no.
DIANA: But seriously, what point of connection could you possibly actually have with someone 1/50th your age –
MATTHEW: Enough! I am returning to Oxford to deal with the peril, and I order you to stay in my palatial estate in France while I do!
DIANA: So hot.
MATTHEW: To convince you to stay at my palatial French estate, I’m going to bribe you with this unknown, rare, unusual, important 15th century illustrated manuscript in precisely your field that I happen to have lying around.
DIANA: As a historian, with a Ph.D., I am aware that such a thing would be the most important find of the decade! Therefore, I’m going to spend most of my time ignoring it.
YSABEAU: I am Matthew’s mother. I hate witches, because Nazi witches killed my husband.
DIANA: Oh, dear. Is the fact that your son is romantically involved with me, a witch, going to cause any tension between us?
YSABEAU: No, not really. Diana, there is much about vampires you do not know, and you are in grave danger until you do. It could take you years to learn.
DIANA: Please, teach me!
YSABEAU: Very well. Vampires behave exactly like Norwegian wolves.
DIANA: OK. And?
YSABEAU: That’s it. You have learned all.
DIANA: Sweet!
MATTHEW: Incidentally, we’re married now.
DIANA: What?
MATTHEW: Surprise!
DIANA: I have no problem with this development at all.
MATTHEW: Cool.
DIANA: I am aware that there are people who can fly who want to kill me, but surely it will do no harm if I take a long walk in the garden, right?
SATU: Ha ha ha! I am an evil witch who has kidnapped you! Now, I will attempt to turn you against your husband by maliciously telling you things about him that are absolutely true, like the fact that he is a creepy murderer who drugs you against your will.
DIANA: You horrible person!
SATU: Um … I meant it when I said that these things actually happened. In a sane book, this would be an intervention.
DIANA: I forgive him instantly for these small transgressions.
SATU: That means it’s TORTURIN’ TIME!
MATTHEW: I have rescued you! Thank goodness she chose to hide you only a few miles from where I live, rather than, say, anyplace else on earth! Now I will drug you against your will, as I have in the past.
DIANA: No, Matthew! I am an independent woman, with a Ph.D.! From now on, I will let you drug me VOLUNTARILY!
MATTHEW: Works for me.
DIANA: It turns out that everybody hates me because I’m so awesome!
MATTHEW: I knew it!
DIANA: I’m the most powerful witch in the world because I absorbed my unborn twin brother in the womb, and also because of a lot of really boring blather about mitochondrial Eve. I can fly and shoot fire from my hands like Charlie Sheen and travel backwards in time and even get pregnant by vampires.
YSABEAU: Yes, that is why we have been giving you contraceptives without your knowledge or consent.
DIANA: … Thank you?
MATTHEW: Oh no, I have been mortally wounded by my ex-girlfriend!
DIANA: I will slay her with fire before she has a chance to become an interesting character or have any point! Oh, my love, I must bargain with the goddess to save your life.
GODDESS: What price will you pay for this favor?
DIANA: Anything! I will give anything you ask!
GODDESS: What, seriously? You’re dumb enough to make an open-ended offer in this kind of situation? Have you never read a book or something?
DIANA: No, I mean it. In fact, I’ll pretty much explicitly say that as part of this bargain you can kill anyone and everyone you want, up to and including the women who raised me from a child, if you save this seriously creepy vampire I’ve known for a few weeks now.
GODDESS: It is done!
MATTHEW: I’m starting a war against the evil vampires and witches who want to kill you! But first, let’s go back in time for some reason.
DIANA: Yay!
@Mike: I can certainly say with truth that I had a great time at LACon III.
Zelazny, Tiptree.
Come now, be fair, the moon blew up in the first sentence…
Come now, be fair, the moon blew up in the first sentence…
Disaster Area would not approve of dispensing with the boy being/girl being prelude.
“Locke” has been in my Netflix queue for a while now…really need to move it up.
Kyra, can I change my tie to a vote for Lord of Light. I tracked down my copy and I have to vote for it.
@Mike I am always pleased to make the acquaintance of another Blue Blaze Irregular.
> “Kyra, can I change my tie to a vote for Lord of Light.”
That change has duly been made.
Camestros Felapton: There is an unread copy of Howl’s Moving Castle in the house – bought in wake of the movie. Intended as a story for the kids but fell into that spot when we stopped reading to them.
I hope you don’t expect it to be too much like Miyazaki’s vision. I adore both movie and book, but they are from alternate universes.
Still, Howl’s Moving Castle is one of my all-time favourite Jones books, and might even be something you can convince kids too old to be read to to listen to you read. (Archer’s Goon and Fire and Hemlock being the other two bests, and I’d leave some room for the Homeward Bounders and Charmed Life. Fire and Hemlock is for more of a teen audience, though, and the Homeward Bounders, though kid-friendlier, has a somewhat tragic aspect.)
I think I agree that fantasy would need to be in two brackets, kid and adult (I hesitated over that phrasing because adult fantasy can mean something else…) and that the adult one should probably limit itself to books marketed as fantasy or at minimum as romances by the old definition (Book length prose works of fancy). Fiction explicitly directed at children is I think a new enough phenomenon I don’t think it has the same issue.
Kyra, thank you for that amazing grumpy retelling! I wanted to throw the Harkness with great force (except it was an ebook, oh well) and was flabbergasted to see it at the top of the Goodreads poll.
Kyra, re: All Souls Trilogy — <incredulous voice> really??? </incredulous voice> Good god, and you actually finished the thing??? Yeesh. After the first four or five giant plot holes and/or characterization fails I’d’ve chucked it across the room….
Another DWJ booster here. Personally I’d leave the more adult books she wrote later – Deep Secret and The Merlin Conspiracy have their moments, but they don’t have the unadulterated joy of the Chrestomanci books.
And there’s nothing Lenora names I’d argue against.
Kyra, I love the demographic comments on the brackets. Thank you a lot for doing those up.
I so agree with those saying that having Diana Wynn Jones ahead of you is a particularly special treat.
I need to pick up more of her books — right now! My first read of hers was Charmed Life” and I fell in love. “Fire and Hemlock” knocked me out.
@Jon at 3:15 pm,
I see what you did there. Guess I’m one of you?
> “I think I agree that fantasy would need to be in two brackets, kid and adult (I hesitated over that phrasing because adult fantasy can mean something else…)”
It’s probably a good idea, but decisions would need to be made regarding a number of borderline cases (Watership Down? Earthsea? The Last Unicorn?)
> “… the adult one should probably limit itself to books marketed as fantasy or at minimum as romances by the old definition (Book length prose works of fancy).”
Hmm … currently books like A Christmas Carol, Animal Farm, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Orlando, Beloved, The Master and Margerita, Gormenghast, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court are on my vague longlist … should those be removed as being books with fantastic elements, rather than “fantasy” per se? And again that would leave borderline cases — it’s harder to argue for the removal of, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude or Nights at the Circus.
When I was a kid, my favorite DWJ book was Dogsbody, followed by Charmed Life, The Magicians of Caprona, and Power of Three. “When I was a kid”, though, means nothing later than about 1983. Of the books I’ve read or re-read more recently, I thought pretty well of Howl’s Moving Castle and the Dalemark Quartet, and found that Power of Three held up well, Charmed Life not so much. I just don’t have the unconditional enthusiasm for her books that I used to, though. I certainly don’t blame any adult who can’t read children’s books.
Kyra,
I haven’t been participating in the brackets because in the first round for almost all of them I had only read 1 of the 2 books. But I’m enjoying reading your comments, and those of the other people here. Thanks for all your hard work on this — and for your incomparable filks and pastiches.
I’ve just started reading Lord of Light. It seems to me that I tried to do so many years ago and bounced off it. I’m about 5 pages in and all I can say is that it seems tedious and overwrought. I would really be interested in hearing what everyone loves so much about it. It may be that I’ll understand when I get farther in — but if it wasn’t Zelazny, if I wasn’t such a huge Amber fan, and if you all weren’t continuously raving about it, I’d have put it aside at this point.
I…I think Kyra has persuaded me to try Harkness. Send help!
Alain, I appreciate the help but, for whatever reason, Amazon says that’s not available for purchase. Likewise, can’t find Female Man or Smoke in the play store. Ah well.
Howl’s Moving Castle is not at the top of my favorite DWJ books. I really like the movie. The book is a different thing, as mentioned above.
She’s another writer who writes very different things each time. If you don’t like Howl’s Moving Castle, try something else. Deep Secret is a good one for SF convention fans. Part of it takes place in an SF convention.
I have DWJ’s Tough Guide to Fantasyland and the Dalemark books.
The Dalemark books I have re-read a number of times. I love that each book follows a different character and so has a different voice.
(I’m currently planning on calling an end to voting for the penultimate bracket round in about 45 minutes, by the way.)
While I would recommend DWJ as well, I’d caution against reading too many of her books at once. Her characters tend to have illogical tics that keep the plot moving, and if you encounter that tic too often in a short period of time, it tends to make her characters come across as idiots.
So enjoy ’em, but spread ’em out. You’ll have more fun that way…
The Family of Science had a great dinner-table discussion about our voting. Their comments:
1. They all feel that having story collections in the bracket-of-32 warped the results, because of apples & oranges.
2. It’s been suggested that the Fantasy bracket not include works published before 1818, when Frankenstein was published, to make the SF & Fantasy competitions roughly comparable.
3. On the other hand, Shakespeare certainly wrote Fantasy: The Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream. So maybe the start point should be 1500.
4. Does Journey to the West count as Fantasy? Discuss.
5. Sprog the Younger, who took a course on Fairy Tales last semester, argued that the Brothers Grimm and other fairy tale compilations should not qualify, but all agreed that Hans Christian Andersen definitely should.
6. Having separate competitions for Adult and Sub-Adult Fantasy has the advantage that more than one Pratchett can be nominated.
7. We might want to declare an Adult winner, a Sub-Adult winner, and then have a three-way competition with LOTR to get the overall winner. Basically, LOTR is getting a bye until the final round.
Seconding/thirding/etc the Diana Wynne Jones recs. I did not read Jones until I was muchly adultier, and I adore some of them with a mad passion (Howl’s Moving Castle, Archer’s Goon, Derkhelm and Year of Phoenix duology)–and madly enjoy others.
Also: Harkness, BLEH. Kyra, I dropped out before finishing the first one (though the blurb and opening intrigued me enough to buy it hard cover at a local bookstore), but I could still heartily enjoy your Grumpy Retelling (because clearly I Made the right Decision!).
I am declaring voting on the penultimate SF bracket round closed.
Results will be posted momentarily.
Well, in a stunning upset which … no, just kidding, this result isn’t going to surprise anyone who was paying attention. Lord Of Light did rather well, and Her Smoke Rose Up Forever had real support, but ultimately the two powerhouses of this bracket rode over them:
WINNER — Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, 30 volleys
Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light, 15 volleys
WINNER — Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness, 33 volleys
James Tiptree Jr.: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, 12 volleys
The two winners have been the stand-out favorites since the first round of the game.
Frankenstein scored an overwhelming victory against The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, easily vanquished Childhood’s End, scarcely broke into a sweat while taking down War Of The Worlds, and now has convincingly won against Lord Of Light.
The Left Hand Of Darkness, meanwhile, dominated against Solaris, did the same against The Female Man, took out Neuromancer handily, and has just done the same versus Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.
These two works, written more than 150 years apart, have been seeded first and second since the seeding started. They’ve got the offense, they’ve got the defense, they’ve got the deep-field passing game. This is the 1941 New York Yankees against the 1984 Boston Celtics. This is the 1989 San Francisco 49ers against the 2001 Colorado Avalanche. This is — you get the idea.
They’ve taken on all comers, but no one can readily predict what will happen when these two genre titans face off against …
EACH OTHER.
The final bracket has been posted in Pixel Scroll 7/23.
TL;DR genre fantasy overly academic blather.
I have team-taught Tolkien’s work with a medieval historian (NOT medieval lit person), and she has a really excellent lecture about how she does not consider Tolkien’s work fantasy (while acknowledging that it originated the genre fantasy publishing category against all odds). Part of her argument is connected to the claims being made above about Shakespeare’splays (and earlier works) being “fantasy” (while I do like the idea of claiming canonical works for popular genre categories, I do start twitching after working with her because of the historicity issue, i.e. genre terms are not ahistorical/universal/uncontested, but quite the opposite).
The purpose of her lecture is to get students thinking about the constructedness of genre categories, the fuzziness of them all, and the socio-historical context for all human productions.
While there is a sub-section these days of what one might call “New Age” fantasy (fantasy novels written by Wicccans about their religion), one characteristic of the contemporary genre fantasy is that (most) readers do not believe in the fantastic elements. Since Tolkien was a medievalist (his area of specialization was 400-500 but as a philologist he worked with ALL the texts that were known to exist), he was expert in the ways in which many texts incorporated pre-Christian (Germanic) beliefs (mediated by the extent to which the people writing down the works were likely to be Christians, albeit Germanic in culture–specifically, Beowulf, but others, reflecting the syncretic tradition).
Disclaimer: I’m not saying everybody before X date believed in Y religion–there was always a range. But looking at literary works (or other creations) which originated in cultures in which the fantastic elements are linked to a religious belief means that the both production and reception differed than the contemporary genre elements. Since Tolkien was drawing on the myths and folklores of northern Europe, but did not believe in the existence of Elves and Dwarves–his stance as I recall is more or less that the only true story/myth is Christianity, but that the earlier religions were sort of precursors to it–he was not intending to write what we’d now call genre fantasy-and nobody could “read” it in that way because that category didn’t really exist.
There are many other genre elements/conventions in his work–including Boy’s Own Adventure Tales–but right now I’m focusing on the fantasy.
One of the primary sources my colleague has our students read is a 17th century version of a charm to keep dwarves away (it starts with collecting the dung of a white dog). Her point is that the popular belief in elves, dwarves, etc. continued in Europe well into the early modern (when our students start making dismissive noises about the primative earlier types, we ask them how many would feel at ease walking under a ladder, or seeing a black cat, etc–and they have to admit that they know people for whom those beliefs are still present–in the area of rural Texas where we live, I’ve seen people freak out when they saw one or more of my black cats suddenly appear).
So–stops to breathe–her argument is that one way to look at Tolkien’s LOTR is that it is an imagined version of the type of novel that writers from the Germanic cultures which originated Beowulf and other texts *might* have written IF there had not been the widespread conversion to Christianity and the loss of the pre-Christian myths and legends (because of the late arrival with print culture that only came with Christianity).
It’s an asterisk novel (in the same way that Shippey talks about how philologists try to reason back to common roots of words from more contemporary languages: it’s speculation but informed speculation. So, philologists create *words, and Tolkien created an *text (someone in a much earlier thread was talking about LOTR as epic romance, or prose romance–and I think that’s a good term–his fiction isn’t really “novel” as defined by the period/culture/time in which he was writing which is why so many critics got so weirded out about it).
There was also the hilarious time when several students protested that of course Tolkien’s work had to be fantasy, completely made up, because there were dragons, castles, and knights. She got this funny look on her face and pointed out that in fact the people who lived in and around castles did in fact believe that dragons existed — and yeah, knights sort of an historical fact.
Kyra: These two works, written more than 150 years apart, have been seeded first and second since the seeding started. They’ve got the offense, they’ve got the defense, they’ve got the deep-field passing game. This is the 1941 New York Yankees against the 1984 Boston Celtics. This is the 1989 San Francisco 49ers against the 2001 Colorado Avalanche. This is — you get the idea.
You are fantastic! I love this, and you win the Internet!
@rrede: I’m afraid I find your colleague’s argument entirely unpersuasive. I’m as postmodern as the next SJW, and happy to consider genre a slippery concept, but this particular case reminds me of the old joke about the tailor trying to convince his customer that the suit fits fine if he just cocks his shoulder like this, and rotates his hip like that and so on. (I believe the punch line is, “And the other friend says, ‘Nice hat, though.'”)
I’d stand The Last Unicorn toe to toe with LotR. It might get driven into the sea, but I’d root for it for beauty, if not cultural impact.
> “… she has a really excellent lecture about how she does not consider Tolkien’s work fantasy …”
Well, but.
Sure, I can buy that Tolkien may have been trying to create an “imagined version of the type of novel that writers from the Germanic cultures which originated Beowulf and other texts *might* have written IF there had not been the widespread conversion to Christianity”.
But (1) we have chosen, retroactively, to call such a work a fantasy novel. I can think of modern novels that take a similar approach that no one wouldn’t call a fantasy novel.
And (2) for that matter, it wasn’t really retroactive. Magazines dedicated to fantasy fiction have been around since at least 1923. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction was first published in 1949. The International Fantasy Award was founded in 1951 … and The Lord of the Rings won it a few years in. Not only was fantasy a term in use when Tolkien was writing, but Tolkien’s writing was, clearly, considered fantasy by his contemporaries.
So … I don’t think it’s actually true that “nobody could ‘read’ it in that way because that category didn’t really exist” — it did, and they did. But even if it didn’t and they hadn’t, that doesn’t make it not fantasy. Fantasy is the term we use now for what Tolkien did — fantasy includes works about elves, written by people who don’t believe in elves. I don’t see why Tolkien would get exempted because he did a heck of a lot of research about people who *did* believe in elves.