Posts by B Jones
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Deborah - yes, that's exactly the bit I was thinking of about the Pelennor. We appear to have spent out teenage years in similar fashion :-)
"why?" is SF/fantasy so strong
Good question. There's an element of sheer fun to the genres in their speculative nature that gives you scope for a bit of wish-fulfilment. So do spy novels and the like, but science fiction lets you explore the universe and fantasy does away with the laws of physics entirely. Harry Potter is classic wish-fulfilment - oppressed kid finds out he's really special, etc. Fantasy also has roots in the very oldest storytelling traditions, where monsters and gods were just part of the landscape. It's only in modern times that we've done away with them.
So that explains the popularity of pulp SF and sword and sorcery. But there are a handful of authors who take it beyond the stereotypes and use the broader rules of the genre to explore more complex ideas. The impact of technology on society is a classic science fiction theme, and the critiques of various kinds of societies taken to an extreme. Good vs evil is the archetypical fantasy theme, but I've also seen free will vs pre-determination, tradition vs innovation and even how music can save the world. Terry Pratchett uses a fantasy-like setting to satirise all kinds of things from Shakespeare to the free market reforms of the 80s.
The opportunities to run riot with your imagination shouldn't be discounted as a factor either. It's just fun.
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Tolkien and the economy - the man was a raging conservative and hated what industrialisation was doing to the English countryside (regardless of the fact that it was feeding and clothing more people better than feudalism could). LOTR does touch on the economy of the nations of Middle Earth, but it's usually negatively - the effect of Saruman's war machine on the nearby forest, the extent of its trade networks as far as the Shire; the gatherers and sharers of the Scouring of the Shire. And there are references to food-growing regions in Mordor, the townlands around Minas Tirith that become battlefields, wagons bringing trade goods and so on. It's just not the main point of the book. But I'll be betraying how many times I read the damn things as a teenager by going too much further.
It's got a whole heap of flaws in terms of characterisation, the massive change in tone from book 1 to book 3, and that kind of stuff just isn't everyone's cup of tea. But it's still a giant in terms of its lasting popularity and influence.
Mary Gentle wrote a satire of the genre called Grunts that may appeal to people with more robust senses of humour. It hit my good taste boundaries real fast, but it does deal pretty effectively to the innate unfairness of the whole beautiful goodies always win against ugly baddies thing. I just had to scrub the inside of my head for a while afterwards.
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Conversely A Secret History by Mary Gentle saw me piking less than a third of the way in. Pages and pages of tedium interspersed with very graphic, and often sexual, violence. Probably not unlike 15th Century warfare really.
Yeah? I loved it from the get-go. Not the violence part, but the incredible detail and plot. Arquebuses! Brigantines! Milanese full-plate armour! Carthaginian Visigoths! It's to standard big fat fantasy what Foucault's Pendulum is to The DaVinci Code. The price of writing like that is that it's slow to get going.
Eddings, well. To his credit, he perfected the commercial form of Tolkienesque fantasy and managed to get umpteen books published while doing so. I remember desperately waiting for the concluding volume of one series to be released when I was 15. I can't read the things now. It's as cheap, efficient and nourishing as your average cheeseburger.
Back to the classics, well, Victor Hugo gets way too much respect. What do you mean, the love of your life is the former neglected fosterling of the man who saved your father on the battle of Waterloo and her foster sister is her hopeless rival for your affections? Unlikely coincidence? Never. And about those hundred page diversions on the sewers, or slang, or Waterloo. It's like a soap-opera, but educational.
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I'm reminded by the story a few years back about some Aussie tourists (I think) who used their in-car nav system to go from Nelson to Chch - it chose the most direct route - some time later on a one lane dirt farm road tacked to the side of a mountain they realised it may not have been be exactly the best idea -
Christchurch to Nelson, and it was a rental car with the GPS default setting on shortest route. They ended up driving through farm roads, gates, and fords in the mountains in the middle of the night. The problem was they didn't realise how screwed they were until they were so screwed they needed the GPS to get them out again. This is the route that Google Maps gives for the journey. It doesn't seem too bad.
Navigating through back roads can be fun - I had a really good map of English roads that got me through the Cheddar Gorge and to the Cerne Abbas Giant via several much quicker back roads, but a map gives you a bigger picture than GPS does, and a sense of when to trust your own judgement.
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Artificial gravity? Bah. The first and last episode of Enterprise I watched involved a plot point based around the difficulty of hauling a landing craft off an unstable asteroid. While asteroids may well be unstable, they're also notable for having very little in the way of gravity and tend not to be blessed with the artificial sort either.
I'm not sure whether I'm channelling Professor Frink or the Comic Book Guy there, but still.
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I always thought Mr Irons would have made a much better Aragorn than Viggo. In thinking that, I totally forgot until this minute he also costarred with Liv Tyler in Stealing Beauty. That would have been a tad creepy.
He plays Vetinari competently in the otherwise awful Colour of Magic tv adaptation. It amazed me watching that how a really good cast could ruin good material through such rotten pacing and directing.
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A friend of mine, while in his early 20s, lied upwards about his age to impress an older woman. He said it was very difficult, and involved inventing five years of a plausible life history.
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Any prole can pick up a book and read it - it takes socialisation among the better sorts to hear a name pronounced correctly :-)
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Hah, I see the two short stories we studied were on the "less successful answers" list. Must have fluked that A1, then.
I remember struggling with the literature questions in the mock English exams, until someone pointed out to me that "write paragraphs on x in your short story" meant at least 200 words. It was an epiphany.
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Good grief alright. When I sat School C (which I think is now NCEA level one), I turned 15 that year. Our texts were an SE Hinton's That Was Then, This Is Now, which I mainly remember as being about bad trips on LSD, a Witi Ihimaera short story Big Brother, Little Sister about some kids that ran away from their violent home in Newtown with the intent of catching the train to their Nan's, and another called On the Sidewalk Bleeding about a guy dying from stab wounds. The film was The Makutu on Mrs Jones, ie witchcraft. I also remember some off-curriculum conversations about the book Once Were Warriors.
Of course it's heady stuff, that's how you get people's attention. If you're lucky you can squeeze in a few ideas about imagery and themes and character development at the same time.