6 Best Fantasy Novels

The Lord of the Rings, fer sure.

The Hobbit. Why not?

Zelazny’s Amber Series.

Way more than 6 total here.

Happy Thanksgiving

Cheers!
JzB

My six:

Crowley, the Ægypt tetralogy
Crowley, Little, Big
Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (the reason ‘why not The Hobbit?’ is because it’s nowhere near as good as LOTR)
Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials
Kai Meyer’s “Merle-Trilogie” (in their English translations, The Water Mirror, The Stone Light, and The Glass Word)

I’ll give Harry Potter honorable mention.

Hm, is Riddley Walker SF or fantasy?

I would put together Caitlin Kiernan series Threshold, Low Red Moon, and Daughter of Hounds, even though the last is the only one that’s anything like a true urban fantasy–but you have to read all three in order to understand any of them.

Kit Whitfield Bareback (and I only took a short look but In Great Waters look as good or better)

Sean Stewart Galveston

Catherynne Valente–pretty much anything, really but I read In the Night Gardens Orphan’s Tales.

Guy Gavriel Kay Tigana

George R.R. Martin A Song of Ice and Fire

New wierd has not made an especially interesting epoch, as far as I’m concerned.

my list (in no particular order)

Ursula K LeGuin – A Wizard of Earthsea
Susanna Clarke – Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Dante Alighieri – Inferno
Mervyn Peake – Titus Groan
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
Horace Walpole – The Castle of Otranto

Like Neil, I blame Henry for several days spent trying to read Little, Big, mostly failing, and for subsequently being left with the feeling that wherever I went there was someone playing a sad little tune on an oboe almost, but not quite, just out of earshot.

Jonathon Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
Soldier of the Mists by Gene Wolfe.
Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin.
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch.

Thanks to all for your suggestions!

I’m afraid I cannot claim to be even tolerably well-read, let alone intolerably so, but I would like to recommend Patricia McKillip, say The Book of Atrix Wolfe or Alphabet of Thorn, or any of many others.

I’m also reading a terrific graphic novel (comic), Aaron Alexovich’s Serenity Rose, which is just brilliant. It’s a few years old by now, but I see a new volume is out in a few weeks.

William Morris.

cf MJH’s list (>6)

The persistent presence of Strange & Norrell on these lists puzzles me. I found it bland and average, despite my best intentions, and have yet to see a compelling reason to re-read the thing and (potentially) change my mind.

Not limiting myself to six, not claiming “best of”, listing only authors not so far mentioned:

Peter Beagle: The Last Unicorn
Emma Bull: The War for the Oaks, Bone Dance
Diane Duane: So You Want to Be a Wizard, Deep Wizardry
Linda Haldeman: Star of the Sea
Diana Wynne Jones: Fire and Hemlock
Madeline L’Engle: A Wrinkle in Time
Robin McKinley: Beauty, The Blue Sword, Deerskin, Spindle’s End, Sunshine
Susan Palwick: Flying in Place
Patricia Wrede: Talking to Dragons

I notice that many of these are marketed as Young Adult books.

I actually like your list better than Grossman’s—maybe because I haven’t read most of the books on yours, to my own surprise (Also, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell? Really?). But I am interested in the genre and wrote a longish post on the subject called Science Fiction, Literature, and the Haters that deals with SF/Fantasy and their relationship to the larger literary world. Maybe my own conception of the genre is more limited than it should be: the chief examples of good fantasy I’m aware of include Tolkien, Philip Pullman, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

Anyway, I thought Grossman was making some unusual and interesting moves in The Magicians, as described in more detail in this review. His style is strong, he mostly avoids cliches, and there’s much to recommend the moral confusion and fine writing in a genre that too often lacks both.

For the rest of you, 6 titles, please.

I don’t really get what “the genre” is. Just from this list I’d draw

Chimera by John Barth
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien
The Unholy City by Charles G. Finney
The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien

And then maybe off the bookshelf
Krazy Kat by Jay Cantor
1001 Nights

A correction;

Kushiel’s Avatar is the third book in a trilogy, they should be read in order.

Kushiel’s Dart
Kushiel’s Chosen
Kushiel’s Avatar

This is hard for me to do because I like a lot of fantasy novels, but I don’t really feel like they speak to me most of the time. Usually they’re just fun entertainment.

But Pratchett, Mieville, and Valente. Each uses fantasy to say something meaningful about the world.

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

G.K. Chesteron, The Man Who Was Thursday

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

Mieville, Swanwick, Bulgakov, Gaiman, Borges. Works as above, or not. Doesn’t really matter.

Hm.

And Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth.

another vote for Little, Big, over here.

Kieran, you should persevere. It’s extraordinary. I’m prone to broad, pompous statements like “I shouldn’t have to work that hard for an author; he should be working hard for me ” and so on, but for Little, Big and lots and lots of Iain Banks, I will happily admit that I’m an idiot and need to be schooled. The new novel by the latter is Transition, and it’s definitely heavy going initially, but it’s so worth it.

Seriously, though – try Little, Big again. It’s so much more than a genre novel, and he never gets it anywhere near as beautiful as this again. The books curls in on itself so cleverly and so softly and so warmly that you find yourself lost and wandering, away with the faeries, long before you officially notice that the stars are now different overhead.

2. The Last Unicorn

3. The Earthsea Trilogy

4. Any one of Terry Pratchett’s determined efforts to write moral tales. (Thud, The Truth, Nightwatch, etc).

5. The Sandman Series of graphic novels. I think they’re now collected in an anthology.

6. Mythago Wood. Like L,B I think it’s a type of one-off. The follow-ups were never as good.

I loved Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman has more ideas in a morning than many people have in a life – but I never felt it was well-written.

I’m also not seeing any Michael Moorcock on the list, which is a little weird. (He’d have made any list 20 years ago.) I read and liked The Warhound and the World’s Pain a lot as an adolescent. If I remember right, it was the first place I ever saw the character of the Angel-Gone-Mad, that so features in the Sandman and Lucifer graphic novels, and in the Constantine series, and in Neverwhere. Did he invent it, I wonder?

And no votes for Mervyn Peake?

d

@Yarrow #22: You’re right that many good fantasy books are marketed as young adult fiction. It’s an industry rule of thumb to market fiction to an audience that looks like the lead or narrating character. So, for example, to Alice Sebold’s chagrin, The Lovely Bones was marketed (at least initially) as YA fiction. But as I-can’t-remember-which author–maybe it was Roald Dahl–once said, good fiction is good fiction.

Speaking of genre-busters, though: does Dahl belong on the fantasy list? How about authors like Kenneth Graeme or Richard Adams? And how about Lewis Carroll?

Peter Beagle has acknowledged on several occasions that The Last Unicorn was his lightning-in-a-bottle book. Which it was. He’s written plenty of other stuff, and some of it is decent. But that one is just so much better that it hardly belongs on the same shelf.

Swanwick’s Iron Dragon’s Daughter — and its companion volume, Dragons of Babel — I would put at the very top of the second rank. Very much worth reading if you have any interest in fantasy at all. Swanwick is a deeply unappreciated writer, because he’s stayed almost exclusively within fantasy and (shudder) science fiction. But he’s a solid stylist, a cunning plotter, and he knows how to make a literary reference get up and dance.

I acknowledge the greatness of The Book of the New Sun, and I don’t even like Gene Wolfe all that much. It’s just massively awesome.

I have learned not to despise people who don’t love Little, Big. Either you inherited the gene that codes for those receptors, or you didn’t; no blame applies. That said, it is a remarkable book: a 20th century family saga. Except with /fairies/.

Doug M.

And I second the puzzlement over why people rate Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel so highly. I could never get past the ridiculous “Northern England gets split off and run as a separate magical kingdom for centuries, but the Napoleonic wars happen pretty much the same way they do in the real world” premise.

Corrections to above:

“…the kind of reader who has a kind of on/off switch..”

and

“The Great and Secret Show”

Farren Hayden has it right about the imaginative cul de sac that so much of the fantasy on the shelves still seems to inhabit. I blame Tolkien and Gary Gygax. It’s all so very tiresome.

In re: those who praise the greatness of the Book of the New Sun, I find myself in a position not unlike sitting with someone who’s singing the praises of Steely Dan, and trying as politely as I can to figure out why they can’t see that Steely Dan sucks (for all their cleverness and technical proficiency). On the other hand, then I look at people saying in apparent seriousness “what’s the big deal about Strange & Norrell?” and suddenly, in a flash, I understand all the frustrations that poured from those Steely Dan evangelists of yonder days… and I feel a certain strange kinship with them, a bond of shared adversity bridging the gulf of incomprehension.

I liked the Covenant books fine as a teenager, but wouldn’t have put them on a top six or top ten list even then. I have a feeling I’d like them even less, now; not that I mind dark themes and “grittiness” or what have you, but there’s an air of the fantasy-novelist counterpart of “women in refrigerators” syndrome hanging around Donaldson’s writing that I’ve come to dislike. I really noticed it when reading the Gap books years later.

@35:

Mieville suffers from […] the author’s determination to be unpleasnt to his characters, not because they deserve it, nor either because the plot requires it, but simply because nobody deserves a happy ending until the Revolution comes.

I thought Mieville answered that criticism pretty convincingly on this self-same blog:

Of course, the problem with this strategy is that it’s a fine line to walk. Push it and you’re gratuitous. There is, it’s undoubtedly true, a cheap and spurious kudos to aesthetic sadism. This is the lie behind the tedious transgressions of much ‘brave’, ‘transgressive’ and ‘underground’ literature. Did I step over that line? I hope not. I don’t know how I could have avoided [*****] being eaten by the voracious maw of Meaningful Tragedy had I not taken her through the mill as I did. And I precisely tried to avoid the sadism by having her disappear while the nastiness was going on. Maybe it didn’t work. But that was the idea.

@46, First, I submit that the author is not the best judge here. (Famously, the guy who put the girlfriend in the refrigerator was baffled to find out he’d become a trope.)

And second, the indictment is broader than just “you’re mean to your characters”. Mieville has three books in a row where all sorts of interesting things happen, but at the end the world is pretty much the same as when it started, except that various people have been tormented and died in interesting ways, or have been very disillusioned or disappointed. And this world-being-much-the-sameness is, we are supposed to accept, part of the point.

I say it’s spinach, and to hell with it.

Doug M.

Bill, thanks for the recommend. I didn’t know he had a new one out and will immediately head for the bookstore to get it.

“the characters appeal and the story proceeds at a measured pace through a series of moments that sustain dramatic tension.”

Jim Butcher — author of the fairly successful “Dresden Files” series — posted a series of steps outlining how to do exactly this. Really, it boiled down to a scene-by-scene, almost page-by-page outline: here’s where you foreshadow the BBEG, here’s where you bring in some comic relief, now you crank up the tension, here’s where you show your protagonist petting a kitten. “Formulaic” doesn’t begin to describe it.

[shrug] chaque a son gout.

Doug M.

Tom: I understand the appearance of magic on your list, but your opposite-ness to Farren isn’t so much of a problem as…. don’t your other criteria sort of rule out a whole bunch of canonical fantasy? One of the oldest fantasy elements is presenting the fantasy’s otherworld as being just around the corner in “our world,” cf. various tales of the Arabian Nights or all those chivalric romances that inspired Tolkien. Why would doing this disqualify something from being fantasy? And why would fantasy need speaking non-human characters — doesn’t losing Gormenghast by this route (a rather eccentric judgment) also lose, say, the bulk of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur?

51:Whereas readers like myself are rarely pleased and often displeased, seeking as we do a constant stream of novelty, whether it takes the form of style, juxtaposition, subtext, theme, uniqueness of the novel’s beastiary or whatever.

C’mon, the “discerning” quasi-literary reader really demands all those things at once, done extraordinarily well, doesn’t she? It isn’t as if you would forgive an original world builder for her weak and hackneyed prose.

What I have gotten from this thread, besides many great suggestions, is how demanding we seem to be of genre writers who are mostly trying to entertain and make a living in a commercial medium. A unique, original, interesting built world every time, with the full set of literary values.

Have Haruki Murakami or Glen Cook been mentioned yet? Probably not in one sentence together.

Bob, I partially agree. Enough in combination to make one forgiving of the weak areas, perhaps. And I’d make a distinction between say, bad prose (awkward sentence construction, [i]et al[/i]) and simply vanilla prose.

Where by “of all time”, you mean “after 1980”? That’s a curious definition of “all time”. Furthermore, any list of “best fantasy novels” that doesn’t contain at least one work by Le Guin is actually a list of “best fantasy novels by men.”

There some reason Clarke (who appears on multiple lists) doesn’t qualify as a woman? Aside from the various other women mentioned throughout the thread?

I am one of those who essentially memorized LOTR as a pre-teen, but I can’t help being a little fearful that if I were to encounter the text for the first time today I would read a couple of hundred pages, go “Ugh, this is worse than Eddings” and put it aside.

I’ve never read LOTR after about 60 pages in as a teen.

Hmmm…interesting lists. Making my own, I realized the odd place fantasy novels occupy in my life (fill in your joke here). The list I started making was not of the six “best” fantasy novels, but of the six that have made me happiest over the years and that I re-read when I can. Of the fantasy novels that are really the best, ie have greatest literary merit, I’d have to include Little Big, Lord of the Rings, some of Mieville’s books (though not the excrable agitprop of Iron Council) and Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun — but only the Crowley would also get on my list of favorite novels, which would also include Bellairs’s Face in the Frost, Martha Wells’s Death of the Necromancer, Rothfuss’s Name of the Wind, Powers’s Anubis Gates (why hasn’t anyone mentioned him before?), and something by Pratchett. Mythago Wood wouldn’t quite make the cut, but nice to see so many Holdstock fans.

Count me as another vote for Clarke and Peake (even the third book, which is a mess, has its moments).

I love the Aegypt books, but have never read Little, Big. I’ve been waiting, literally for years, for the 25th Anniversary Edition that I ordered to appear. It now seems that it’s only a month or so away. I’m really looking forward to it!

As a teen I devoured the LOTR books and the first Thomas Covenant trilogy. Another trilogy I liked a lot as late teen was John Varley’s Titan trilogy, which is formally SF but has a lot of fantasy elements. I imagine that I’d find it less enthralling if I reread it today.

I probably wouldn’t count Kim Stanley Robinson’s Years of Rice and Salt as fantasy, but if it does count it deserves to be mentioned.

My defense of Tolkien runs to pages and pages, and fitting an adequate version in a blog post is a difficult process. While I’m working on it, let me recommend a book called Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart. It’s a set in the world of Chinese folklore, about which the author was either remarkably knowledgeable or a really talented faker. I doubt if it would be on many people’s Top 6 list, but it shouldn’t be missed, either. It’s a rare example of a book whose excellence is in its plot and not in the writing, which is no better than serviceable. You read along thinking it is picaresque and episodic; then when you get to the last chapter, every tiny detail falls into its place in a structure that is both unexpected and beautiful.

And by the way — Lafferty.

I would suggest Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada as a fantasy novel. And another vote for Little Big.

I can see why one might characterize LeGuin as a “smaller writer with less to say” based upon the Earthsea series

Besides which the apples-to-apples comparison of Earthsea to the Tolkien books is with The Hobbit, not LOTR. Whereupon the force of such a criticism dissipates completely.

Riddley Walker, obviously. It’s as much fantasy as (and a hell of a lot more impressive than) Canticle.

78: Except that Earthsea started as a series for teenagers, but ceased to be in its fourth iteration. Although the first book is still the best.

LHoD is for my money the best sci-fi novel ever written. But we’re talking fantasy here. (Speaking of which, I haven’t read Gene Wolfe, but I thought he was sci-fi.)

Gardner, Grendel

Substance@65 : I was referring to Henry’s original list, not to yours or any other in the comments. The comment does correctly describe Henry’s list.

“As noted above, it’s very difficult to defend her as excellent (or even particularly important) if you look at the last 35 years of her career rather than the first 15.”

Tolkien didn’t have a hell of a lot to say after LOTR, either; that doesn’t change the quality of the work he’s known for. See also: Hope Mirrlees, who wrote one fantasy novel, Lud-in-The-Mist, when she was 40, and continued to write other things thereafter. What you’re saying is, “If you take out her pivotal work, she’s less important as a writer”; of what writer is that not true?

In short, “I liked his earlier, funnier stuff” doesn’t diminish the importance of that work.

(And what Jonquil said.)

Jonquil and Doctor Slack have pretty much said everything I would say, so instead of commenting further I’ll just go with “I agree with them.”

Okay maybe one thing…
It’s kind of like saying that because Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter wasn’t as good as 1984 or Animal Farm that he had less to say and was a small writer.

For me the hard part is determining the border with science fiction. Here I am just going to do it loosely, where not caring about a back story for the things that differentiate a piece from mundane fiction edges something over into the realm of fantasy. My reasoning for this choice is that it seems more interesting: draw the line too tightly and it all Tolkien and kin. So, the list:
1. Chronicles of Tornor by Elizabeth A. Lynn – As Joanna Russ says on the back cover, fantasy for humanists and feminists.
2. The collected short fiction of R.A. Lafferty – Fantasy rooted in American tall tales not Celtic myth? Anyway, I think its the most original stuff anywhere.
3. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman – well, I’m sympathetic to the message for one thing, and contra the people who think the second & third books are weaker, I like the way the imaginary world expands with each book.
4. The Neveryon Quartet by Samuel R Delany – post-modern fantasy…bring it on!
5. The Quantum Gravity Series by Justina Robson – not your parents elves, demons, and faeries.
6. Meeting the Master by Elissa Wald – wait, wrong kind of fantasy…this is hard: There are a lot of tempting, out of genre fantastic novels, like Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell), Seventh Heaven (Alice Hoffman), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Salmon Rushdie), and The Dream Swimmer (Witi Ihimaera). It would also be tempting to nominate Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series, by way of proposing that something can be great fantasy without being particularly well written, and no doubt the wisest thing to do would be to simply add LOTR to the list by virtue, if nothing else, of being able to refer to it by its initials, but instead, I will offer this suggestion, because its good, and why, after all, is a talking barbie not fantasy:
6. A Real Doll (shorty story) by A.M. Homes. (available for free on the internet here: http://www.barcelonareview.com/eng/eng44.htm )

alright, I got antsy. Here’s my list of the 7 best science fiction novels ever written. I couldn’t narrow it to six; I had to have one more. If we were going to 10 or 15 that’d be best, but oh well.

1) Ursula K LeGuin – The Left Hand of Darkness
Winner for Best “Androgynous Species.” A book that is as much a philosophy and anthropology of gender as it is science fiction. Of all these books, Left Hand of Darkness is the one with best insight into the human condition.

2) Michael Moorcock – Behold the Man
Winner for Best “Time Travel Story.” A college student in Jungian psycho-analysis and Aramaic meets a professor who has invented a time machine and wants it tested. The student, Karl, feels sexually and religiously estranged in his life, and opts to take the machine back to witness the crucifixion of Christ. Pure genius ensues.

3) Philip K. Dick – The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Winner for Best “Schizophrenic Space Journey.” I read that John Lennon came to Dick and told him he thought the meaning of life was in this story and wanted it made into a movie. This is the only book I’ve ever read that actually made me feel like I was going crazy while I was reading it. Then again, about a week later after reading it I had swine flu, so maybe some of that was just percolating and that’s where the crazy came from.

4) Frank Herbert – Dune
Winner for Best “Empire in Space.” The level of detail in the characters, plot, intrigue, mysticism, and trade of this universe is outstanding, and upon every rereading I find new things to like. Also has a pretty good take on the whole “here’s how you organize a collective resistance in some mountains somewhere” theme. Muad’Dib might as well be hiding in a cave in Afghanistan for a while there.

5) Orson Scott Card – Ender’s Game
Winner for Best “Psychological Adolescent Science Fiction that Adults Should Read Anyway.” I think I’ve heard others talk about Ender’s Game on CrookedTimber before, so I won’t rehash what makes this book so incredible. If I were to make an unfair reduction/comparison, Ender’s Game is Harry Potter for science fiction, but grittier.

6) Walter Miller – A Canticle for Leibowitz
Winner for Best “End of the World” scenario. Everyone’s been nuked and the only bureaucracy left standing is Catholicism. Beautiful story.

7) Yevgeny Zamyatin – We
Winner for Best “Dystopian Nightmare.” The Russian book that got Orwell thinking. And better done than anything written by either Orwell or Huxley.

@93: Winner for Best “Psychological Adolescent Science Fiction that Adults Should Read Anyway.”

You misspelled “Most Excruciating Wish-Fulfillment For Everyone Who Was Bullied In Sixth Grade”.

Ender Wiggins is a genius; he never loses a single battle, even when every circumstance is stacked against him.

He is always right about everything, and is angelically, obnoxiously, inexplicably good, the moral superior of everyone else in the book. He is explicitly compared to Christ.

He is repeatedly subjected to pointless, sadistic torment. Also to bullying — but all the bullies get theirs; he gets to defeat and, in a couple of cases, brutally beat and kill them.

At the end, he saves the world! By committing genocide. The genocide turns out to be unnecessary but, we are assured, Ender remains good and loving anyway.

Afterwards he goes his lonely way, dispensing compassion for the undeserving who think him evil.

In sum, Ender gets to be perfect and good; be (deservedly!) sorry for himself; get gruesome, bloody revenge on his enemies; nonetheless remain good, noble and pure; and save the world.

It’s easy to see why this book has broad appeal. But this does not strike me as a set of useful psychological insights, unless you’re a bitter junior high school kid.

For a much more detailed and intelligent takedown of this book, see John Kessel’s awesome essay “Creating the Innocent Killer: Enders Game, Intention and Morality” — http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm.

Doug M.

@Doctor Slack and others: you are right to point out that it doesn’t matter whether LeGuin wrote a lot of mediocre stuff; the quality of her early work stands on its own. That’s fair.

Upon consideration, my knee was jerking; my bad. I have heard LeGuin praised to the skies a few too many times. Yes, The Left Hand of Darkness, yes — but nobody ever brings up that long shelf of later, crappier work, or discusses what it says about her as a writer.

“Tolkein didn’t have much to say after LOTR” — yes and, God love him, he knew it. He considered a sequel a couple of times and then — showing wisdom that few of us could match — rejected it. Let’s pause to consider the alternative: a dozen mediocre novels and disappointing short-story collections. I submit that would be much, much worse than just stopping.

“Good to see someone defending LeGuin” — Dude. LeGuin does not lack for defenders. Google her and you’ll find a dozen major pieces in the last decade, in places like The Guardian and the NYT Review of Books, talking about how influential and wonderful she is. (Again, nary a mention of those long years when everything she wrote was pretty much unreadable.) She’s got honors and accolades literally piled high.

In fact, I’d say the opposite is true — there’s a remarkable shortage of thoughtful criticism of LeGuin. Delany wrote a couple of pieces on her in the ’70s (collected in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw IMS) but they’re from the POV of a loving friend. The late Thomas Disch attacked her pretty aggressively in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, and he makes some good points, but since it’s Disch it’s admixed with a fair amount of bile. A good critical overview of her work, that includes the weaker stuff and puts it in context… well, it may exist, but I’ve kept an eye out and I haven’t seen it.

Doug M.

To bring this back (very belatedly) to the OP:

“I’ll note that this list is in many ways dull and predictable – none of these choices are likely to surprise anyone tolerably well read in the genre.”

Actually, the Park and the Harrison are pretty surprising. The Course of the Heart is interesting, but top six? Really?

“But canons can have useful social purposes – they point towards books that are central to the conversation the genre is having with itself.”

Let’s say this is true. What are the books that are “central to the conversation [fantasy] is having with itself”? Note that this is very different from what most of the commenters have been posting (which is “books I really like and want to reread”)

I’d throw out two points for starters: it takes a while for something to join canon — ten years? More? — and there’s no avoiding Tolkein. Like him, hate him, you can’t get around his central importance. It’s like drawing up a list of critical 20th century American fiction and ignoring Faulkner because you don’t like him. There are many perfectly legitimate reasons to not like Faulkner, but he was just hugely damn influential and there’s no getting around it.

Influential isn’t the only criterion, of course. (Otherwise we’d probably have to put Gary Gygax and the first edition Dungeon Masters Guide in there. Hey, 20 million WoW players can’t be wrong!) But I don’t think you can compose a canon that just ignores the single most influential fantasy work of the last century.

Doug M.

In her case: power, class, gender, race, the state, the nature of knowledge, problems of confrontation between alien cultures and worldviews. These would seem to me to be pretty large themes that can and should be revisited often; it’s telling (and an enormous knock against all this “smaller writer” business) that Tolkien thought to address not a one of them

Hrm? Tolkien never addresses confrontations between alien cultures and worldviews? Even aside the glaring glaring example of the free West vs. Mordor, there’s the Elves and humans, and, of course, the hobbits and Bombadil.

Power: half of the Lord of the Rings is about the legitimate exercise of power (Boromir, Aragorn, Denethor, Theoden, Gandalf, the Ring etc.) Class? Samwise Gamgee, who is actually quite a sophisticated character*. Gender? OK, not a lot (tho Eowyn). Race? Yeah, again, a bit of a failure here. The state? Come on, there’s the Shire, there’s the Rohirrim, there’s the Stewardry, etc.

I mean, you probably don’t agree with lots of his conclusions, but that’s not a reason to say he doesn’t look at those issues. He’s actually quite expressive about his Tory anarchism — if I hear not allowed etc.

Further, you’re a bit sharp with the list of moral platitudes: if the hobbits are well to do English burghers, what about Sam, and the Elves? Also they fail to deal with the extent to which despair and desperation are important to Tolkien — Theoden before the Pelennor Field, especially the `feasting in the White Tower’ and the `world’s ending’ speeches, vs. the actions of Denethor.

* I am utterly convinced Gamgee becomes a sharp machine politician following the events of the LOTR; he’s got that Kennedy feel to him.

Octavia Butler would have to be on any SF list, whether for Kindred or the Xenogenesis books or the Pattern books, no? So good.

Dr. Slack, I submit that Malafrena, Orsinian Tales, most of the stories in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (and, geez, just the title there) and Sea Road, Tehanu, a Ride on the Red Mare and The Beginning Place are all mediocre books. By “mediocre” I mean either lacking in ambition, or falling fall short of their ambition, and some combination of stylistically unimpressive, poorly plotted, and afflicted by cliches, overt authorial intervention, and/or deeply uninteresting characters. There’s not a single book on that list I’d willingly read again, unless it were for critical purposes.

You’ll note that these all come from a period of a dozen or so years, roughly from Buffalo Gals to Four Ways to Forgiveness — which has plenty of problems, but at least is trying to wake up and move again.

I’ll freely confess to personal bias here: as a teenager in the 1980s, I spent several happy years devouring the backlists of SF and fantasy. Then I started hanging around bookstores waiting for the new stuff. Imagine being a high school or college kid eagerly anticipating the latest from the author of The Dispossessed, plunking down your hard-earned dollar, and walking home with… Always Coming Home. Or Catwings.

That said, it’s just not true that “bad LeGuin is still better than”. Bad LeGuin is /bad/.

Doug M.

But despair isn’t a counterpoint to hope! Seriously, the Rohirrim ride from Helm’s Deep to the Pelennor Field quite explicitly without hope, without any real desire to do anything but do their duty. They don’t expect to win, and they don’t hope to win. They know that their duty is to die anyway, no matter.

Doesn’t touch on the machinery of State? There’s Bard & the Men of Dale, the various Dwarvish Kings, the interplay between Aragorn, Denethor, Boromir, and Faramir (notice how Aragorn sends the son of the Steward as far away as possible; that’s not a coincidence.) The Battle of Five Armies is possibly the only fantasy passage depicting a realistic conflict over resources. In fact, Tolkien’s pretty good at portraying self-interested actors who aren’t simply good vs evil. Yes, Tolkien doesn’t really conceive of the State as anything but a collection of Great Men, but that’s entirely consistent with the rest of his project, which is an argument for Great Men.

There’s nothing to suggest he’s less materially well off than the others. — Except for the fact he has to work for a living!

Again, the issue of Mordor. To someone living in Europe who fought in the First World War and then lived through the Second, terrible seemingly motiveless evil was quite a common thing. How could you explain the Western Front?

A lot of these arguments boil down to: I disagree with Tolkien’s politics. Which is fair enough, but that doesn’t mean that the Lord of the Rings isn’t brilliant at portraying a fully realised position. (And the English burgher thing (it isn’t burghers either (no burg), it’s the freeborn Englishman with his ancient rights and privileges) is actually quite an interesting part of his argument: the restoration of the Constitution etc, the way Tolkien moves between Gothicism and Toryism (synthesis in some ways of Whiggery/Toryism.)) It mightn’t be a position you like but that’s not the issue.

these all come from a period of a dozen or so years, roughly from Buffalo Gals to Four Ways to Forgiveness

A bit longer than that, I think.

1976 Orsinian Tales
1979 Malafrena
1980 The Beginning Place
1987 Buffalo Gals
1988 Catwings
1990 Tehanu
1991 Sea Road
1992 A Ride on the Red Mare’s Back
1994 A Fisherman of the Inland Sea
1995 Four Ways to Forgiveness

I’d say something happened between The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975) and The Compass Rose (1982). There are passages of mystery & wisdom & wonder in TCR, but there’s an awful lot of “whoo, look at all this mystery and wisdom and wonder!” (Mind you, on inspection I discover that it was TWTQ and not TCR which included “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, perhaps the most unwarrantedly complacent moral parable ever written.)

It definitely proves the quality of CT commenters that we’re >50 posts in and nobody’s said “But…Robert Jordan…”. Thank you.

It… eh… also proves I haven’t been around (though I’d have spoken up for L.E. Modesitt Jr. or William Morris, who both entertained me, instead of Robert Jordan, who irked me).

My experience with fantasy as a genre is principally from childhood but hopefully the following is interesting to folks. (I don’t mean to suggest by it that fantasy is in any way a childish genre, whatever that would mean.)

I grew up on Katherine Kerr and Madeline L’Engle and Katherine Kertz and Morgan Llywelyn and Tamora Pierce and …(slightly ashamed sigh)… yes, Anne McCaffrey. Dragons, okay? Dragons. And oh goodness, in third grade I could have told you all about Deryni, for hours, and Nywyn was like such a close friend to me…

I suppose all of the above authors write formulaic books, as these things go, and surely are undeserving of any ‘top six best’ list, but Pierce in particular did an excellent job alerting my very young self to the fact that women can, and ought, choose lives for themselves, and clarified that the structural social constraints which at times seem overwhelming and at times seem invisible or too personal. You know, the simple things about the life experience that one ‘learns’ in the sense of being attentive to those dimensions and oriented or predisposed to be attentive to them. I learned a lot of basic facts and notions about sexuality and gender from Alanna’s bindings, and her self-conception; and the book makes what Amanda Marcotte calls ‘the patriarchy’ quite visible as a social force, without being didactic. Because of this I understood the spirit behind the statement “well-behaved women rarely make history” as early as the third grade, and also doubled down on voraciousness in reading.

Since there’s no need for me to restrict my comment to the top six works and similarly no need to restrict to works adults will appreciate, I’ll go ahead and nominate Alanna: The First Adventure for the best-of list. It’s something to give your kids to read.

I also think Mindy Klasky is not terrible. And is it so horrible for me to think, privately up to this point, that female fantasy-genre authors > male fantasy-genre authors, hands down? Maybe it’s just that female authors I’ve read are more attuned-sensitive to, and therefore more responsive to, the heavily gendered social norms which inform fantasy cliches. I once argued that the Flintstones and the Jetsons were a conspiratorial plot to convince us that gendered social norms have always been with us and always will be, and insofar as there’s a grain of truth in that it carries over to the fantasy genre. The best fantasy might not be bright social commentary explicitly, but the best fantasy is definitely attentive to the structural reinforcements of identity that constitute the subject matter of bright social commentary. To borrow a line from John Holbo: you can learn from this stuff. (Especially when very young.)

The worst examples of fantasy-lit are such a space for grown-up boys to be boys, and the best examples of fantasy lit (from my very limited, childhood-oriented POV) are a space for girls to be boys, too. (Hence my recommendation of the Alanna books, which are perhaps the most explicit example of this.)

I think it would be quite funny if the narrator of Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norell met Stephen R. Donaldson face-to-face. I imagine she would just burst. out. laughing.

Does anyone else like The Devil Will Drag You Under?

@Kier
Yes, I’ve heard about Ihimaera – sad, though in some sense its always been obvious that the historical exposition mixed in with the fiction wasn’t his research (Keith Sinclair apparently says some of the stuff in the Matriarch was his). It would have been so easy to acknowledge & get permission, though I can see where he might not have wanted to disrupt the illusion that the history was part of the same voice as the narration. A complicated case, since (assuming the latest case was similar to the Matriarch) the novels depend on the quoted material and yet are clearly a separate work of art, a bit like sampling in music.

The science fiction is SO much easier than the fantasy (and I expect it would be a lot more varied). My list:
C.J Cherryh – Cyteen
Joan Vinge – Snow Queen
Samuel R. Delany – Nova
William Gibson – Neuromancer
C.S. Friedman – In Conquest Born
Frank Herbert – Dune (though it is tempting to try to make a case for Heretics)

(And as an aside, The WORST science fiction novel ever written? A however-many-way tie between all the Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson Dune prequels, sequels and in-fillings. The Butlarian Juhad books are American Psycho without the literary ambition.)

Doctor Slack at #98 was dead on.

Oops. Walter Miller got two mentions for the same book. Also, I’m drunk.

@Doug: “Card’s work—with which I am, unfortunately, tolerably familiar—is more of a piece than this suggests. He hasn’t changed that much over time. He’s just become more obviously himself.”

Well put. I agree with the rest of 106 as well.

On Le Guin:

“LeGuin thinks that using power is very dangerous, and that seeking power—over others, or over the “natural order of things”—is Bad.”

She has some pretty fundamental anarchist inclinations, true. If this constrains her work in some ways — and it does — it’s no more of a constraint than the converse power fantasies that obsess so many fantasy and SF writers. Her grounds for the responsible use of power is, it could fairly consistently be said, that it be in some degree either democratic or self-aware or wary of hubris.

Are there flaws in this? Sure, sometimes, although “positive aspects of power there are none” is just false (characters like Estraven, Ged, Rocannon, the Athsheans from the Word for World is Forest tend to disprove it), and again if you’re not seeing “ambiguity” I just don’t know which writer you’re reading, though she’s less ambiguous in treatment of her villains than of her protagonists (a failing also of Tolkien’s and of about a gajillion bajillion other writers, so I’ll cut her some slack). I don’t agree with her politics either, and there are occasions when her assumptions are groan-inducing; but let’s face it, there’s plenty of fantasy of which this is true in different ways. Tolkien’s writing is no less constrained by his politics, which in many respects aren’t especially well worked through either.

“It becomes very difficult, for instance, to depict a group of people working together—that calls for a manager, captain or boss, and in a LeGuin story that person must necessarily be misguided or wicked.”

To put it another way, management, captains and bosses frequently are misguided or wicked. Le Guin tends to focus on this in much of her work, where other writers (like our good Professor) tend to avoid it. She has different priorities. That is okay.

It’s particularly okay because LeGuin’s politics also opens up possibilities for stories of the kind we rarely get from a genre largely obsessed with military and quest fantasies and general derring-do. I don’t see why this is supposed to be “smaller,” it’s simply different. We gain from it books with much richer treatment of characters, of the subtle perversions of power (territory Tolkien can only approach in the broadest possible strokes), of the thorny process of trying to figure the other guy out, than is native to much of sci fi and certainly to much of fantasy.

I shan’t argue with you about your frustration with her back catalogue. I haunted libraries, not bookstores, so I didn’t plunk down much in the way of my hard-earned to read Four Ways to Forgiveness. Perhaps I’d be angrier with it if I had. There’s also some fundamental incommensurability of aesthetics going on, I think — I’m utterly baffled that anyone could dislike such profitable excursions outside genre fiction as Orsinian Tales and Malafrena. (I would be inclined to dismiss as an impossibility the scenario of a teenager buying Catwings without noticing it was a children’s book… except there’s something in your delivery that hints it’s not an impossibility at all. If not, my sympathies.)

@Keir: “Yes, Tolkien doesn’t really conceive of the State as anything but a collection of Great Men, but that’s entirely consistent with the rest of his project, which is an argument for Great Men.”

That’s… sort of what I meant.

“Except for the fact he has to work for a living!”

Does he? How much? Why? Would he starve if he didn’t? Who knows? The general impression we’re given is that he’s the moral equivalent of a neighbourhood kid who comes round to mow Frodo’s lawn… but whatever the case is, what’s going on here is simply not a treatment of “class.”

“To someone living in Europe who fought in the First World War and then lived through the Second, terrible seemingly motiveless evil was quite a common thing.”

Was it? All the participants in both those conflicts were generally pretty clear about their motives. The evil would only seem motiveless if you weren’t paying attention.

But you’re quite wrong, this does not at all boil down to disagreement with Tolkien’s politics. Not that I agree with his politics tout court either, but Tolkien’s a perfectly okay sort as a Tory of his age goes. That doesn’t change the fact that there are things that LoTR simply does not do, and that his writing really is not aiming to treat in depth. I have an issue with attempts to plumb LoTR to fathoms where it simply doesn’t go. It’s an action romance. It is okay for it to just be an action romance.

Doctor Slack, it’s evening here, and I must to bed. More generally, I suspect we’re approaching the limits of constructive disagreement in this particular forum. I don’t mean by this that anyone is losing their cool, but rather that there’s only so far you can go in a blog comments thread. It seems like a discussion that we could profitably continue over a stack of books and a beer, should you ever be passing through Central Europe.

A few points. My younger self was not surprised or upset that Catwings was a book for kids — that was obvious. He was surprised and upset that it was a dull and badly written book for kids.

Positive aspects of power: note that the complexity and ambiguity you cite is all from earlier works. And Ged actually uses power against man or nature very few times, and they tend to be either against direct and obvious threats (the barbarian invaders, the dragon) or, in the first book, going horribly wrong. The paragon of wizardry, we are shown, is his master — who is almost never shown doing much at all. (He wrestles down the earthquake, but that happens years earlier and off camera.)

Your third paragraph seems to be saying “she’s usually no worse than lots of other people”. Well…

(I’m not sure why you keep bringing up Tolkein as a comparandum? I haven’t said anything about him except that he’s impossible to ignore. Although since you bring it up, there’s an interesting one-chapter-a-week reading of Tolkein going on over at tor.com. They’re up to the second part of the second book, and the reading is very close. I mention it because they’re making a pretty good case that there are indeed depths there beyond ‘just an action-romance’. I don’t really have a dog in that particular fight, but if you’re interested, stroll on over and give a look.)

Captains, bosses and managers are often wicked or misguided: sure. But it’s annoying to grind up against an ingrained assumption that they /always/ are, because they always /must/ be. It’s not really correct to say this opens up different kinds of stories if the author can’t imagine telling the story any other way.

I may be doing LeGuin an injustice here, but I have a lingering suspicion that this is an artifact of her upbringing. She grew up in a comfortable upper-middle-class academic household, went to Radcliffe and Columbia, then settled down to a decade as an academic wife who did a little writing on the side. As far as I can tell, she never had to hold down a job, nor be involved with any project larger than the departmental Christmas party. Under those circumstances, sure — it’s easy to be an anarchist, and view all power relationships as foolish or corrupting. (God, that idiot department head!). But it’s not exactly Emma Goldman, or even Virginia Woolf. And holding a day job, in the broad sense, is part of the human experience. So getting lectured about human power relationships by someone who was allowed to mostly opt out of them… well, for this reader it leaves an unpleasant virgin-telling-me-how-sex-works aftertaste. YMMV.

I’d add in passing that this is probably the biggest weakness in The Dispossessed — she never does quite manage to convince the reader how that society gets anything done. Roads built, dams raised, lights kept on, all by consensual volunteers? She tries hard, so one is willing to grant WSOD, but it’s a fairly big hole.

Anyway: if you’re going to pat Tolkein on the head and say he’s a decent enough old fellow for an Edwardian Tory, then you should note in fairness that LeGuin is equally a product of her background, which was comfortable, very academic, and quite sheltered from various harsh social and economic realities.

Also, she swiped The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain — it’s the scene in the chapter “Snow”, where Hans Castorp dreams of the witches tearing the child to pieces, and so bringing wealth and peace to the town below.

Ahem. I could go on, but this is quite long enough. Let us agree to disagree for now; thank you for your interest and patience.

best regards,

Doug M.

The single wrongest thing that has been said on this thread is that Tolkien has no moral vision worth talking about. It’s not less wrong because the opinion gets expressed with some frequency — by Pratchett, among others.*

In fact, Tolkien’s particular excellence is that LotR consistently and artfully embodies throughout a remarkable and radical Catholic version of Kantian ethics.

That’s the assertion. The demonstration will follow. It will be as short as I can make it, but still probably too long for blogpost etiquette. Sorry. One or two may wish to read it.

Pratchett’s moral philosophy, as far as I can judge, is Mammyyokumism: “Good is better than evil because it’s nicer!”

sigh. next time I’ll pay attention to the preview.

Ah, someone finally mentioned The Sparrow. Seconded.

And, since I’m adding a word — this has been a great thread. Thanks to everyone for all the reading suggestions, as well as for the thoughtful analysis and commentary.

One of the articles at Tor explores LOTR ( and Silmarillon as a meta-fiction.

Essentially, Bilbo is translating ancient and partially destroyed texts, and Tolkien doing the same with Bilbo’s work. Frodo is working off memory and hobbit diaries. These sources are explicitly stated to be not entirely trustworthy for any number of reasons.

Who knows what really happened on Mount Doom?

Post-modernist fiction.

“Tolkien’s particular excellence is that LotR consistently and artfully embodies throughout a remarkable and radical Catholic version of Kantian ethics . . . ” “I think Tolkien ranks perhaps as high as any writer in the 20th century.”

… aaaand this is precisely the sort of thing I had in mind WRT over-the-top praise of the Professor. I’ve seen many-and-many an exposition on these and similar themes, and, well, no. Just no*. He was a good action novelist and worldbuilder, in terms of moral vision very much a man of his day, who has been rather ill-served IMO by persistent attempts to build him posthumously into something grander. Though it’s a bit unjust to compare Tolkien to a hack like George Lucas, I can’t help but be reminded in some respects of the one-time, pre-prequels vogue for grandiose readings of the Star Was saga through the lens of Joseph Campbell.

(* I mean, do have it, gentlemen, just understand that I’ve been at the point of agreeing to disagree with this mode of Tolkienology for a rather long time at this point, and with no little cause. We’ve been around this track before.)

Oh God, someone mentioned The Sparrow. Thanks a lot, you bastard. It took my willing suspension of belief months to get over that, and now it’s gone off to cry in a corner again. You can expect a bill from its therapist.

Oh, and I bow to no-one in my admiration for Tolkien. I was the kid who re-read LotR every year, read the books again before the movies came out and enjoyed them all over again (and thought the movies were empty spectacle that messed up most of the scenes – just like the Watchmen movie but that’s another argument). But still, there is no point looking for class analysis, sociological depth, economics, politics, or examinations of the interface of different cultures in Tolkien. They aren’t there. Not even slightly.
Which is cool. What is there is very good. It’s not that Tolkien tried and failed to put some other stuff in, he wasn’t interested in it and didn’t see the point in faking it. You don’t read Philip Roth for the made-up languages and mythical world-building, you don’t read Tolkien to learn how the environment you grow up means you can’t really avoid growing up as the kind of guy who goes around throwing magical artifacts into volcanoes.

It is clearly a temptation to seize power for selfish aims, but several characters (Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, Aragorn, etc.) resist this temptation.

“Etc.” including Sam, memorably, when he crosses over into Mordor bearing the ring.

Any list of “best fantasy novels” that doesn’t include LOTR is sorely in need of a definition of “best” or “fantasy” or “novel” that explains its counterintuitive result.

I mean, come on. It’s like “Six Best Modernist Novels” without Ulysses. You may not *like* Joyce, but the issue was “best” not “favorite.”

(Some people seem to think that “flawed” = “not best.” Everything is flawed.)

138: Yes, that was a very good scene. I’d never thought to compare it to Galadriel’s temptation before. It’s a funny image that way.

Doctor Slack has said everything I have to say about LoTR, only more eloquently than I could (esp. the connection to pre-prequel SW fandom). I have fond memories of reading the trilogy but the depth some claim is simply not in the books, but in the minds of too-worshipful readers, IMHO. JRRT did a lot of things right but among them is not a nuanced moral subtext, and certainly not anything resembling pomo playfulness.

Given that the Three are worn by Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel, I don’t see how you can say that the One controls the Three.

Of course the Three are influencing the narrative. Gandalf is wearing one of them and he is, to the extent that he can, trying to steer events.

You are underestimating the Rings, who are to some degree independent agents (corrupting the Nazgul, destroying the dwarves). To see what the Three are doing in LOTR, you must ask what the One would need them to do. As is the case with Frodo, the Ringbearers don’t always recognize or acknowledge the One’s influence on their behavior.

“In the Third Age Círdan, recognizing Gandalf’s true nature as one of the Maiar from Valinor, gave him the ring [Narya] to aid him in his labours. It is described as having the power to inspire others to resist tyranny, domination, and despair (in other words, evoking hope in others around the wielder), as well as giving resistance to the weariness of time”

The One needed Narya to inspire and support the Fellowship in Rivendell. The One needed the Fellowship to get past its single greatest danger…Saruman. Once past Saruman, the One no longer needed the Fellowship, at least as companions to Frodo.
But Saruman was still and always a danger to the One, so Saruman needed to be distracted, and Narya was put to another task.

Sauron is the Lord of the Rings.

The inscription says “One Ring to Rule Them All” If you look above to the description of Narya, it describes what Narya does, not how Gandalf uses it. There are plenty of examples of the Rings controlling Ringbearers.

I don’t ever remembering anyone asking how Sauron controls the Nazgul without the One.

See “best” vs. “favorite” above.

If you do not like them, you have a pretty good argument for why they can’t be part of your “best” list.

Damn, this is a good thread. I don’t mean to send everybody hurtling off in yet another direction (well…maybe I do…) but I’ve been reading the new Faye book on Heidegger, and I can’t help thinking (there’s nothing in Faye that I’m using to support this – it’s just my amateur gloss on some of the later Heidegger that I’ve read) that LOTR is a novel that Heidegger could have written. If memory serves me, every time “machine” or similar is used anywhere in LOTR it is referring to tools used for evil, and certainly Hobbits and Elves seem connected to their environment (their “dasein”?) in a way in which orcs aren’t. Anybody who understands Heidegger out there willing to tell me how wrong I am? (I know I’m greatly oversimplifying “The Question concerning Technology” but I don’t think i’m misreading it.)

Oh, and apropos of nothing – my father was actually taught by JRRT at Oxford in the early ’50s, and described him as a painfully boring lecturer who would just mumble through his notes, but occasionally look up and smile the most wonderful smile…

Sorry to bring it up, but I don’t want to let Doug’s comment about Le Guin go: “As far as I can tell, she never had to hold down a job, nor be involved with any project larger than the departmental Christmas party. Under those circumstances, sure—it’s easy to be an anarchist, and view all power relationships as foolish or corrupting. (God, that idiot department head!) . . . . And holding a day job, in the broad sense, is part of the human experience.”

I don’t know all the details of Le Guin’s life, but I believe she was married to an academic and was responsible for raising three children while trying to get some writing done in whatever quiet moments she could find. This seems a far cry from the life of leisure Doug paints. Serving as the chief caregiver for three children involves — indeed, is — “a project much larger than the Christmas party,” and can teach one a great deal about power relationships (among other things). And when done right, it’s a lot tougher than “holding a day job.” As to why there is such a knee-jerk denigration of the role of homemaker, or the belief that holding a paying job is what is needed to learn about how the world works, well, that’s a topic for another thread…

(But I have to admit, Catwings wasn’t very good)

For my money and reading pleasure, Evangeline Walton’s Mabinogion Tetralogy is quite superior to LOTR.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangeline_Walton, for anyone who is interested.

Start with the question: What do Tolkien’s Wise people have in common?

With few but significant exceptions, the answer is: they never interfere with the free moral choice of any other person. Examples are found throughout; to take just one, note the care with which everyone refrains from putting the slightest pressure on Frodo at the climax of the Council of Elrond.

This refusal is carried to lengths which in the real world would be utterly insane. When the Fellowship comes to Lorien, Galadriel reads each of their minds and learns that Boromir is overwhelmingly tempted to seize the ring by force. His success would mean the End of the World; she has ample power to restrain him when the others leave; and yet she doesn’t. Why?

Tolkien’s Catholicism suggests an answer: Boromir like Frodo, and by extension everyone else, is in a personal and unique relationship with the Creator who is implied but never directly manifested. Each is being set tests. To constrain anyone’s actions, by direct coercion or by persuasion, is to interfere with his or her test. (Frodo, in a nice grace note, is of course Galadriel’s test, as she recognizes.)

I said “few exceptions. The significant exception is Gollum, who is as utterly corrupt as a free rational creature can get, and whose corruption is manifested by the ugliness of his every physical aspect. When Aragorn the destined King captures Gollum, he “ma[de] him walk before me with a halter on his neck, gagged, until he was tamed by lack of food and drink . . .”

When Frodo captures Gollum, he too ties him, but “Gollum began to scream, a thin tearing sound, very horrible to hear.” (On the level of plot, the rope pains Gollum because it is an Elvish rope; which in another system of symbolism means that he is so deeply warped that the action of Grace is unbearable.) Frodo cannot let Gollum go, but he offeres him the option of binding himself with an oath. Gollum chooses to swear on the Ring and sets his final destruction in motion.

The next few chapters contain the most significant movement of the book, as Frodo, increasingly repelled by Gollum’s presence, at the same time comes to recognize their kinship. The climax comes when Frodo instructs Faramir’s men to blindfold him and Sam before doing the same to Gollum, in order to allay Gollum’s fear of imminent torture or death. Again, this echoes Aragorn’s similar action to soothe Gimli in Lothlorien — but that was an exercise of leadership, and Frodo’s is an act of sheer empathy.

The way the story plays out does not need recital. The point, spelled out explicitly enough by Tolkien, is that Frodo is the chosen Ringbearer precisely because of his ability to deal with Gollum as a person and not a thing.

I don’t know, parsi, what do “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” or “Rite of Spring” say to you?

Little darlin, it’s been a long and lonely winter

Here comes the Somme.

I am repulsed by my age’s optimism. Tolkien was a tragic author.

Within the past year, I have been entertaining the idea that the real villain of the book is Denethor. This is probably not correct…

Why does there have to be only one? ;)

But still, there is no point looking for class analysis, sociological depth, economics, politics, or examinations of the interface of different cultures in Tolkien.

But this is mad! There’s a fully worked out theory of the right exercise of Power! There’s a discussion of the right society! There’s several depictions of non-yoked anglo-saxon nations, enjoying all their rights and liberties. Seriously: as a contribution to the debate on the gothic and Toryism, the Lord of the Rings is quite brilliant.

Hell, the Battle of the Five Armies!

There’s a reading of Tolkien as basically Narnia-but-better which I quite agree is wrong and over-wrought. But that’s not the only reading, and nor is the issue of moralising the only one. I mean, there’s something about the passage from the arrival of the red arrow to the fall of the witch king that is really sublime, and in a way that very few other authors approach.

Shorter 153: Good is better than evil because it’s nicer.

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

I mean, there’s something about the passage from the arrival of the red arrow to the fall of the witch king that is really sublime, and in a way that very few other authors approach.

That highlights the difference between Denethor and Theoden.

Theoden sees a hopeless situation and figures he’d better do all that he can. Denethor gives into to despair because he cannot imagine anything important beyond himself and his realm. Denethor must have a pretty good guess at who sent Gandalf, but he lacks faith.

@153

That is a very insightful reading of LOTR that I think beautifully captures Tolkien’s ideas, as opposed to his world-building. I think there is a certain activity that is what characterizes fantasy, which is not world-building, in the sense that sf builds consistent worlds based on rules/premises different from those of our own world; what fantasy does is to materialize abstract ideas into something very corporeal, like orcs.

While I’ll certainly concede that some of the morality in The Hobbit isn’t worked out as deeply as LOTR, wouldn’t it be true that Gandalf essentially manipulates Bilbo to accompany the quest, and that this comes fairly close to “interfer(ing) with the free moral choice” of Bilbo?

I always assumed Gandalf had promised the Old Took not to let his grandsons get too soft.

@Keir: Hell, the Battle of the Five Armies!

What is with you and the Battle of Five Armies, anyway? I remember thinking it was a cool battle scene when I read the Hobbit, but it’s apparently a nexus of a whole bunch of political and economic commentary of which I was unaware.

In various of his published Letters (which all should read) Tolkien states his view that (1) Frodo was uniquely fitted from birth to be the Ringbearer, and (2) divine intervention was responsible on some level for the fact that neither Bilbo nor Frodo ever married, and thus they remained free to accept their quest and anti-quest..

Frodo’s name of course means Wise (“Wise by experience” is Tolkien’s formulation. Sam’s name means “Half-Wise.” An author who give his characters names like that shouldn’t expect to have his disclaimers of allegory taken at face value.

One more word about Frodo and Gollum. Frodo maintains throughout his belief that Gollum is capable of repentance. And he turns out to be right; but he never knows it.

Ethical inquiry can and does get a hell of a lot more involved than this in fiction, including other fantasy fiction;

Nothing makes for good fiction like somebody agonizing over ethical issues for twenty pages at a time. At a certain point, you may as well read “Atlas Shrugged” or Kant.

(“Atlas Shrugged” doesn’t qualify, no.)

Wouldn’t know. I’ve never read it. Tolkien wrote well enough to get me to read poetry, which is something that no one who couldn’t make me re-take a class has ever managed.

Ethical inquiry can and does get a hell of a lot more involved than this in fiction, including other fantasy fiction; the widespread belief that LoTR is in shallower end of that pool stems from the fact that it is.

But you are assuming that a certain form of ethical inquiry is rilly rilly important here. You are assuming that ethical inquiry must be complicated, and deep, and difficult, and so-forth. But really, the Lord of the Rings is like David’s Oath of the Horatii or the Brutus, hard pagan assertions of duty and morality.

Dunno, of course there’s not much nuance etc in the Lord of the Rings, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t morally interesting.

I remember thinking it was a cool battle scene when I read the Hobbit, but it’s apparently a nexus of a whole bunch of political and economic commentary of which I was unaware.

Because it involves several groups of people, each convinced and arguably correctly they are acting properly, who are about to start killing each other. They don’t, because luck intervenes, but, along with Beorn, it’s Tolkien writing about people who are neither Good nor Evil, even if when it comes down to it they are good.

You are assuming that ethical inquiry must be complicated, and deep, and difficult, and so-forth. But really, the Lord of the Rings is like David’s Oath of the Horatii or the Brutus, hard pagan assertions of duty and morality.

When Eomer meets Aragorn, you really get this. Eomer is asking how to decide with Aragorn claiming legendary status and asking for things contrary to Theoden’s commands. Aragorn doesn’t present a single argument, just tells him to make a decision as he always would. Eomer decides with Aragorn on a character judgment that he feels qualified to make on the basis of his own character.

You get reasoned arguments from Wormtongue and Saruman.

But you are assuming that a certain form of ethical inquiry is rilly rilly important here. You are assuming that ethical inquiry must be complicated, and deep, and difficult, and so-forth.

No, I’m assuming that if ethical complexity, depth and difficulty is going to be claimed on behalf of a work, it should actually be there, and that people should not try to pass off relatively rudimentary treatments of ethics as grand, radical, sweeping treatments of the subject. I am saying it is okay to recognize that there are things other writers do that Tolkien does not do. What is so difficult about that?

Bah, messed up the blockquote. Do I have to put a blockquote tag before every paragraph here?

Not on the Tolkien or Le Guin subthreads, but — how could I (and everyone else!) have forgotten Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire?

Do I have to put a blockquote tag before every paragraph here?

Yes, but then the line breaks will get screwy.

Because it involves several groups of people, each convinced and arguably correctly they are acting properly, who are about to start killing each other. They don’t, because luck intervenes, but, along with Beorn, it’s Tolkien writing about people who are neither Good nor Evil, even if when it comes down to it they are good.

It was a neat iteration of a fairly common plot device, but I don’t see what’s especially “morally interesting” about it or what point it’s supposed to be making about the absence of Good and Evil — it’s just a standard cranking up of tensions between various protagonists to raise the dramatic stakes prior to the advent of the bad guys. Similar devices can be found in half to two-thirds of Hollywood action movies.

Someone mentioned Aragorn’s first meeting with Eomer. I am going to seize on that incident as a third instance where Aragorn finds himself in a situation that later recurs with Frodo, but in another key.

Here is how Aragorn deals with Eomer:

“Elendil!” he cried. “I am Aragorn son of Arathorn, and am called Elessar, the Elfstone, Dunadan, the heir of Isildur Elendil’s son of Gondor. Here is the Sword that was Broken and is made again. Will you aid me or thwart me? Choose swiftly!”

* * *

Eomer stepped back and a look of awe was in his face.

When Frodo meets Faramir, the situation is precisely the same — he has to persuade him to disobey orders and avoid disaster. But Faramir is twice his size, so he tries to manipulate him — but Faramir is just as smart as Frodo and heads off every gambit.

The equivalent of Aragorn’s moment of revelation is delayed for two full chapters, and comes about through weakness not strength:

“I was going to find a way into Mordor,” he said faintly. “I was going to Gorgoroth. I must find the Mountain of Fire and cast the thing into the gulf of Doom. Gandalf said so. I do not think I shall ever get there.”

Faramir stared at him for a moment in grave astonishment. Then suddenly he caught him as he swayed . .

195: Yes. Of course, Aragorn is steadily growing kingly as he marches south and Frodo is marching to what he assumes will be his death.

is it alright to call Doctor Slack a troll yet? He’s either a troll or pompous. “My taste is more distinguished than yours. Everything you think is clever I think is trash. Here are some rudimentary reasons why.”

is it alright to call Doctor Slack a troll yet?

No.

Goddamnit, no, Moby. Being a troll is harder than that.

I am very sympathetic to many of the points that Roac has made, and grateful for the insights, but your last post focussed on a moment that I’ve always found problematic for a couple of reasons. First, the trivial one: Aragorn meets Eomer and essentially says “I’m your King” to which the only response allowed by anybody exposed to Britain of the ’70s is “But I didn’t vote for you.”

Secondly, and seriously: Clearly there is something about Aragorn which causes people (including non-humans) to just instinctively trust him. As Sam says of him way back at the Prancing Pony “a servant of the enemy would appear fairer yet seem fouler” (or something close). In fact a good test of how “good” a character is is how strongly they feel toward him. This strikes me as superficial (if it’s what Tolkien intended.) Isn’t an equally reasonable interpretation that Eomer is looking for a reason to disobey Theoden (because of his distrust for Wormtongue) and that the hobbits follow him because a) he invokes the name of Gandalf, and b) they don’t have any other good options.

Clearly there is something about Aragorn which causes people (including non-humans) to just instinctively trust him.

Yes, very clearly.

Isn’t an equally reasonable interpretation that Eomer is looking for a reason to disobey Theoden (because of his distrust for Wormtongue) and that the hobbits follow him because a) he invokes the name of Gandalf, and b) they don’t have any other good options.

Here I don’t think so. Eomer was disobeying already by being there. As for the Hobbits, they picked Aragorn before they knew that the Prancing Pony offered no protection.

Keir at 197 or thereabouts: I also think that reducing not-ethics to action etc is a bit ludicrous

I don’t think Slack has done that. Read his comment again:

I think he’s presenting a view of ethics which is simple because he’s writing adventure stories and is more focused on the action and the pacing than on writing a dissertation about ethics. So… no need to claim he’s issuing deep insights about ethics, then.

It doesn’t do anybody any favors to misread Slack’s remarks. He has not said that Tolkien is somehow doing not-ethics, which is therefore merely action. C’mon. The two of you actually sound like you’re more or less in agreement: Tolkien’s ethics are simple. And that’s FINE.

I can’t quite tell what the problem here is, aside from some generalized upset that Tolkien has been identified as not Very Complex. Well, he’s not.

204:Aragorn retains the ever diminishing Numenorean magic in his presence, tho as Strider he as learned to hide it. More than charisma, Elessar was born to rule, baby.

Psychological analysis attempts to replace the spiritual (or magical). But that isn’t Tolkien’s world, and he must be read on his terms.

Decisions and actions are possibly not ethical in LOTR, because LOTR is a book of spirituality. “Nothing Good but comes from God.” In that case Will provides the Courage to accept one’s Duty.

Duty is a word losing favor in our age of felicific calculus.

I wasn’t citing Slack at any point, that was me giving an simplified version of the arguments he’s made thus far. If you were being genuine in your posts, Slack, then I apologize for calling you a troll. But you were getting rather, erm, jackassy, with some of your comments. I don’t even really like LOTR and haven’t spoken in its defense once in this thread (so I don’t really have a dog in this game), but your “what’s so clever about that?” responses were getting irksome.

except not so much if you’re now seriously going to pretend that Tolkien essentially Solved Ethics and got rid of all that “complication” and “difficulty” that snooty intellectuals like me concern ourselves with.

Oh bugger off and go indulge your resentment somewhere else would you? I have never said anything about Tolkien solving ethics, and I really don’t see where you’re getting it from.

Oh bugger off and go indulge your resentment somewhere else would you?

I’d think that the internet is the safest way to indulge resentment. (Random bar patrons are the worst.)

Plus. Telling DS to bugger off and go elsewhere is just dumb. Guy’s one of the most interesting people on the ‘net. Sorry.

It isn’t as one dimensional as you are trying to make it.

I’m not trying to make it that way.

Somewhere along the line in this thread, DS was cast as champion of all that is complicated and deep and nuancy and too-hard and intellectual and &c., over against that other stuff, cast as simple and straightforward, and somehow represented by the ethical treatment Tolkien provides in LoTR.

Nix. Okay? Good. I will say that I believe we all generally understand those terms, those sides, but they are unhelpful, as evidenced by the quickness with which parties here zeroed in on them and became eventually, well, rather irritable.

Somewhere along the line in this thread, DS was cast as champion of all that is complicated and deep and nuancy and too-hard and intellectual and &c., over against that other stuff, cast as simple and straightforward

And yet he starts off with including Lynch’s “Lies of Locke Lamora” – a fun, well written moderately dark adventure yarn interwoven with a standard issue generic fantasy growing up tale.

Eh, that last was unnecessarily confrontational. My bad.

Still: it in no way diminishes what LeGuin did with those years to note what she didn’t. I used the virgin-lecturing-us-about-sex analogy, and I think it’s apposite. If a male author who went directly from school to seminary to monastery started writing books about love, family and sex, we’d be entitled to at least notice.

Anyone who tries to talk about, say, Virginia Woolf has to be aware of her odd upbringing and odder marriage. To bring it a bit closer, you can’t really discuss Heinlein without at least being aware of his biography — military career, early forays into political activism, yadda yadda. Yet I’ve never seen any critic discuss LeGuin’s first thirty years much beyond noting that she’s the daughter of that famous anthropologist. (Which, to be fair to LeGuin, has to be kind of annoying after a while. Yes, her father kept poor Ishi as a house guest for ten years. Must every potted biography of her start with that factoid?)

Anyway. LeGuin’s first thirty years seem a lot less dramatic than Woolf’s or Heinlein’s or even Asimov’s. But I’d suggest they’re just as influential on her later writing, and so just as worthy of examination.

Doug M.

224: You mean the “Bombadil is Ilúvatar” theory? Or the “ring a dong dillo” language?

and was/am hoping for some further insight from persons… more prepared than he or I.

That doesn’t sound like me.

Dave @ 124 points out that Farmer is not the model for Kilgore Trout. Wikipedia agrees.

Thanks for the correction; I’ve had that wrong for a very long time,
since (I think) well before Venus was published.

I guess it isn’t what you don’t know, but what you know that isn’t so.

Wikipedia says that Ted Sturgeon is the model for Trout, but I can’t see it —
Sturgeon’s writing was too good, and his premises not outlandish enough to
make Vonnegut’s descriptions of Trout’s works a plausible match.

I’ve read a lot of Farmer. Some of it is well written in one sense or another
(what do you think of “Riders of the Purple Wage” ?)
but IMHO lots of it is truly crap writing with outlandish premises.

A few comments on the moral complexity of LOTR, or its lack thereof.

While Tolkien displays a definite nostalgia for a time of great men, and while a lot of LOTR is taken up with their exploits, the ethical (and dramatic) core of the trilogy revolves around the complete and utter inadequacy of the great man. Now matter how much we enjoy the triumph of Aragorn and the Rohirrim et al against the witch king, they know that mere martial heroism will never be enough. The book is about the failure of heroes in the face of the temptations of power. The only good guys are those who never try to seize too much power (i.e., Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel refusing to take the Ring).

That’s Gandalf and Aragorn’s real appeal: their critical self-awareness. It seems to me there’s a considerable moral complexity in the way that Tolkien’s appeals to martial notions of heroism, and at the same time makes them largely superfluous to the real conflict. Someone mentioned the sublimity of the passages involving the battle of the pelennor fields. And I think it’s true: those passages are awesome. But even better is the brutal irony that Tolkien employs. We can revel in those passages, we can get caught up in their grandeur, and yet they ultimately don’t mean anything (other than the non-trivial fact that they stave off destruction for a few weeks until Frodo gets his chance to destroy the ring)

But the real complexity lies in the fact that just about everyone fails in the novel. Frodo is a sort of minor great man. He’s a hobbit, and therefore lesser, but he’s got a certain nobility that sets him over the rest of hobbits. And yet he himself fails when he reaches the Crack of Doom. It’s pure luck that sends the ring over the edge (and the compassion that kept Gollum alive in earlier parts of the story). Frodo’s claim to heroism is simply managing to carry it as long as he did – thought that is an impressive feat in of itself. But its the sort of feat that highlights how corrupt the supposed Great Men are. And even Frodo can’t really perform his task! No one actually managed to triumph in the end. Sam’s the nearest we have to a hero, in many ways, and yet he only had the ring for a few brief hours.

It’s the ironic attitude towards heroism that sets Tolkien apart, I think, though that fact is often lost because of the sheer thrill of the battle scenes.

Macklin gets it.

nalbar

@Macklin: The book is about the failure of heroes in the face of the temptations of power.

No, they fail in the face of encounters with cursed artifacts, which isn’t the same thing. The One Ring manages to corrupt all that it touches because it’s the distilled power of the Dark Lord; it’s only the sturdy, rustic goodness and relative lack of imagination of the hobbits that makes them suitable to carry it for any length of time (cf. moral superiority of the English burgher, for whom they’re stand-ins), but no-one can hold out against it permanently simply because it’s as powerfully cursed as, say, King Tut’s sarcophagus. (The palantiri, through which Sauron can directly ensnare minds, serve this same function for Denethor and Saruman.) There’s no particular “irony” about the heroism going on, for the most part — the function of Pelennor Fields is a straightforward diversionary tactic, to heroically risk life and limb to keep Sauron distracted and give the hobbits their chance at success.

It is somewhat ironic, of course, that it’s Gollum who inadvertently completes the quest. That’s a nifty touch, but in essence it’s of a piece with a long tradition in action yarns: in the penultimate act, evil has good on the ropes and all looks lost, when suddenly a past merciful act or cherished friend of the hero comes out of nowhere to bite evil in the butt. Tolkien’s craft is evident in that in the hands of a lesser writer, that scene would have been silly and cliche… whereas he did something original and memorable with it. But it’s not really essayism about the insufficiencies of Heroes… and the event makes way for Aragorn to quite unironically found his own kingdom and reign over an age of peace and prosperity, just as you’d expect at the end of many a fine fairy-tale*.

@nalbar: You’re right about Tolkien’s gift for well-crafted scenes. OTOH I think you’re 100% wrong that LOTR is “NOT an action book.” Helm’s Deep, Pelennor Fields, the flight through the Mines of Moria, Sam’s battle with Shelob, the pursuit of the orcs with Merry and Pippin, the Ents’ attack on Isengard… it’s on a par, still, as action writing with almost anything you could find in any genre. The setting of great scenes, in a well-realized setting, along with first-rate action sequences was what made LoTR great. Jackson wasn’t wrong to conceive of it as an action book… he was wrong to think he could improve on Tolkien’s action, or his setting.

( * Compare and contrast Dune, which really is engaged in essayism about the insufficiencies of Heroes, and quite explicitly so. In its climactic act, the Great Man stands apparently victorious, untrammelled, the universe stretched out at his feet… but nobody in the room with him knows that it’s a moment of failure, that his prescient superpowered sight is watching the jihad he’s spent half the book trying to avoid raging down the corridors of the future. His “victory” is actually, in an important sense, a defeat, at least from his standpoint.)

(The palantiri, through which Sauron can directly ensnare minds, serve this same function for Denethor and Saruman.)>/i>

Just in case this thread isn’t nerdy enough, I’m going to point out that Fëanor created the palantír and they are not the same as the Ring in that they are not inherently corrupt.

I see I was asked a direct question awhile back (“Any thoughts about Bombadil?”) Not to answer would be rude, but no, I don’t think about Bombadil a lot. In Letters, Tolkien discusses the character extensively, and his view is that the character is extrinsic to the story, but was left in because the author liked him. I’ll buy that. I like him too.

(One nugget I have to contribute is that Bombadil’s last appearance, when he hauls the Barrow-Wight’s hoard into the daylight, appears to be a deliberate echo of Beowulf — like Gandalf & Co.’s arrival at Edoras. I have clean forgotten who gets the credit for noticing that. It wasn’t me.)

I am the only person I have ever met who really liked Tehanu – it is a bit preachy, granted, but it undercuts the high heroic mode not only by bringing women back in, but by subordinating the high heroics to the mundane.

Tehanu is an awful, awful, awful book – as well as being preachy, plodding and predictable in its own right, it does sustained and calculated violence to Earthsea as UKL had imagined it. In the annals of creative vandalism it’s up there with Wordsworth’s 1850 Prelude and Auden’s suppression of The Orators. The moment I finished reading Tehanu I wished I could somehow unread it.

And yet, and yet. There are scenes in Tehanu which have stayed with me – there are some quiet, careful descriptions of mundane, unmagical scenes, people doing things like lighting fires, herding goats, talking in bed. The reimagined Ged still strikes me as basically a mistake, but in those scenes he’s a much more believable character than he would have been as an Archmage. (And The Other Wind is much better than _Tehanu_, for anyone who was wondering.)

1. Lord of the Rings/Hobbit Tolkien, the door to the world of fantasy for many;
2. Amber series( ZelaznyQuantum worlds turned into story; brilliant;
3. Anything by Patricia McKillip, the most under-appreciated fantasy writer out there;
4. Almost anything by Thomas deLint.
5. The Wizard of Oz, Frank L. Baum
6. The Dragonbone Chair series, Tad Williams. I also felt the “River of Time” series was terrific, right up until the he revealed the source of power for the amazing virtual world he’d created.
7. Uplift novels, David Brin

Not long ago I considered rereading The Beginning Place to see whether it was as bad as I remember. Not implausibly the book was an effective inoculation against difference feminism–not implausibly, if so, entirely against the author’s intentions. I do actually like parts of Always Coming Home, though of course the book can’t be read. (I have a memory of discovering, on rec.arts.books, back when I was a tender young thing, that it’s bad because it’s what Northrop Frye calls an anatomy IIRC, but I can’t find the post in Google Groups.)

@Doug M.

Re: Ender’s Game – “It’s easy to see why this book has broad appeal. But this does not strike me as a set of useful psychological insights, unless you’re a bitter junior high school kid.”

I am indeed painting with a broad stroke here, but will work under the idea that anyone and everyone (me included) who feels the need to weigh in on a top fantasy novel post was at one point a bitter junior high school kid.

That being said – any “greatest” conversations that do not include Ender’s Game are questionable at best in my opinion.

Bradley Stephens

Thanks to zic for seconding (if unintentionally, as my comment was 200+ back) my vote for the criminally underrated Patricia McKillip. What I find amazing about her is her ability to stay seemingly well within the genre conventions we all love to hate (dragons, mages, etc.), and still come up with something utterly original, time after time. (Once you get past the cover picture.) Zic, what’s your recommendation? I went with Atrix Wolfe and Alphabet of Thorn.

I also second the Uplift trilogy, if only for the terrific second book, Startide Rising.

BTW this thread has been great, and makes we want to pull out the Earthsea books again (but maybe not Tehanu, of which it seems all I remember are the good bits – lucky me!). Thanks to everyone for their thoughtful comments, and pbbbt! to the suggestion a few posts back that CT commenters all suck.

Doug M is a fan of insulting anyone that disagrees with his tastes, then wonders why people call him on it.

“If you disagree, tell us all why.”

Short version:
Because I was a disgruntled junior high kid when I first read it, and now it has nostalgic value.

Long version:
Because it has interesting characters with various interesting psychoses and I find any story compelling that can make you sympathize with a violent and unrelenting little bugger (pun intended) like Ender Wiggin. I think calling him Hitler goes a bit too far (especially considering that the whole point of the thing is that he thinks he’s playing a game, albeit as training for the real deal, and only finds out after the fact that he’s been committing genocide the whole time — did everyone forget that?). Information Age Caesar is probably a better comparison than Hitler – an ostensibly noble leader with great self-reflexivity and a mind for philosophy that, all these things aside, was in fact a conqueror.

You haven’t given any reason why other than “it’s juvenile,” so stop pretending like your preferences and tastes are in the position to pass the burden of proof (about a matter of opinion) onto anyone that disagrees with you.

You haven’t given any reason why other than “it’s juvenile,”

…I gave half a dozen reasons back at comment #96. Go, read.

“Because it has interesting characters”

Ender Wiggin is a super-genius super-leader who always wins and never loses and is always, always morally correct and good.

Everyone else in the book is a two-dimensional cardboard cutout designed to highlight some aspect of Ender. Peter is Bad Ender, all motiveless malice. Valentine is Kind Ender, the goodness without the violence. (Because she’s a girl, see.)

Bean is Ender Lite — smaller and weaker and not as morally perfect, but good enough to be his sidekick. The adults are all plot contrivances who exist only to set up the various intolerable situations that Ender is subjected to and/or to provide running commentary on how wonderful he is.

I just don’t find any of those to be very interesting characters. YMMV.

“stop pretending like your preferences and tastes are in the position to pass the burden of proof”

I think it’s rubbish, and I’ve said why. If you think it’s great, convince me. I don’t think that’s “passing the burden of proof”. More like, am I missing something? I don’t think I am, but I’ve had my mind changed before. Convince me, if you can.

Doug M.l

To think that I thoroughly enjoyed ‘Always Coming Home’ …

Well, my favourite six fantasies (INPO):

M. Moorcock, The Dancers At The End of Time
Gene Wolfe, Soldier of the Mist
M. John Harrison, Viriconium (esp. A Storm of Wings … that decayed Eliotic undertone …)
Giorgio de Chirico, Hebdomeros
Anna Kavan, Ice
Brian Aldiss, The Malacia Tapestry

With special mention of Alan Garner for The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Elidor and especially The Moon of Gomrath, nearly scared me to death as a child.

I’ll note that this list is in many ways dull and predictable – none of these choices are likely to surprise anyone tolerably well read in the genre.

Really, Henry? I have never heard of any of these 6 and I read fantasy voraciously from ages 11 to 18. Let’s be serious. Grossman’s list is dull and predictable (Tolkien and Lewis would appear on 90% of such lists I assume. Le Guin and Mervyn Peake on most), your list is a contrarian list carefully designed to show off your superior taste. Not that I mind – your list has given me some new writers to check out, but please don’t condescend to us.

“Frodo maintains throughout his belief that Gollum is capable of repentance. ”

I’ve being trying to convince my six-year old that real moments of heroism for Frodo, Sam and Bilbo are when they show mercy to Gollum, but he remains convinced they’re heroes because they’ve got cool magic swords.

“To make a more complete list, alongside the 1001 Nights, one should probably include a Chinese classic such as Journey to the West/The Monkey King, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or Outlaws of the Marsh. ”

The swearing is great in Outlaws in the Marsh aka the Water Margin (still trying to find a Region 1 version of the TV version of “The Water Margin” that showed on BBC2 in the ’80s).

But if Outlaws of the Marsh is fair game, so would be the Mabinogion, the Ulster Cycle (the Cattle Raid of Cooley), the Fenian Cycle (Finn McCool), and the Eddas. And while we’re at it, we’d have to throw in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homer’s Odyssey, and I guess Virgil’s Aeneid, although I’ve a prejudice against Virgil as a bit of an arselicker to Augustus.

Journey to the West gets a wee bit repetitive after the first thirty chapters (Monkey is deceived, then kicks ass with his magic cudgel), but remains quite thoroughly awesome.

Australian and British readers of a certain age may be familiar with the 1970s Japanese TV series adapting the story, which was dubbed (badly) into English and broadcast in select corners of the Anglosphere. It remains, hands down, the best low-budget fantasy TV series anywhere ever.

Doug M.

Not really my genre, so I learned a lot from the discussion. I was glad to see a few names that I know checked such as Lem, K.S. Robinson, Asimov, Clarke, Herbert, though a lot of those appeared only in passing. A name I don’t recall seeing is Ray Bradbury. Where does he now stand in fantasy circles if he’s not even name-checked in 275 comments?

“I have a bias against him [Jackson] because IMO he ruined it all. It’s not that the movies are bad, it’s just that they are wrong. He took out stuff that was needed, and added stuff that was not.”

That’s true, and there are (the silly crumbing stairs in Moria, the pointless Warg attack in Two Towers, but not including the Scourging of the Shire) but compared to the mistakes he could have made, he did good. And there were parts that he added that were better than the original (such as Aragorn and Frodo’s parting conversation at the end of the Fellowship). And recruiting Alan Lee to do part of the artistry was a win.

“Y’know, I like Zelazny and used to love him, but the treatment of female characters in Lord of Light and the first five Amber books is a bit painful in places, on rereading.”

I like Jack of Shadows better than Lord of Light, and am less fond of Amber. Jack of Shadows is appealing because the Hero becomes the Tyrant, who finds that having the Awesome All-Powerful Dingus isn’t much use when those you rule go on strike.

“Sock Puppet at 260: I hope he grasps that it’s the same sword in each case. ”

I think he does, but he’s obsessed with weapons.

Here I am thinking I’m doing the six-year old son a great favour by reading him Rosemary Sutcliffe’s version of the Iliad and Odyssey, and kid’s versions of the Cattle Raid of Cooley & Finn McCool, Beowulf, and the Norse Myths, and all he’s thinking is “Violence with swords and spears and shields, cool”.

He insisted on being read the bit in the Odyssey where Odysseus kills the hundred-odd suitors over and over again. I realized I had to cut back on the classics when he told me he was all annoyed with Zeus because he’d prayed to him for superpowers but Zeus hadn’t given him any.

Wants to learn fencing, archery and the javelin. He’s going to be pissed when I break it to him that King Leonidas isn’t recruiting Spartans anymore.

This thread goes ever on and on, down from the post where it began.

@vanya: “your list is a contrarian list carefully designed to show off your superior taste. ”

Ahem. That was my list, thank you very much. (Though I flubbed it by including The Lies of Locke Lamora in a moment of irrational exuberance.)

roac;
“One or more people upthread took the time to urge me to continue with Little, Big. Thank you, I will. I just hope we get the hell out of NYC soon and head back upstate, I like it better there. But don’t tell me!”

Well certainly get out of NY! Isn’t that about 30 pages?

It’s a good book, and certainly recommended. It did not make my list because I prefer my fantasy not quite as ‘thick’ (I don’t mean long). It’s one of the few books I read that I recommended to my wife. She did not make it out of NY either. But Robin Hobb? She made through those nine books in 5 weeks (they are not small books) and demanded more. Alas, Hobb’s latest trilogy is really not good.

nalbar

“I’m thinking of getting the Wii Sports Resort just for the fencing game. I tried it at the store and it is more like “smacking with a bat” than fencing, but I’m getting sick of being hit with a foam rubber sword wielded by a pre-schooler.”

Oh for the days of being hit by a foam sword. I made the mistake of getting him a Roman soldier costume for Halloween, and had to get a plastic gladius to finish it off. Getting smacked by that thing *hurts*.

I guess it serves me right for being a snob and wanting my kid to dress up like Scipio Africanus rather than a Power Ranger or Jedi.

I’m reading the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson atm, it is pretty good. Also the Gathering Storm by him, which is a wonderful book.

Alas, Hobb’s latest trilogy is really not good.

Emph. added. Has there ever been a writer of whom you could say “I strongly recommend X’s latest trilogy”? Tolkien had the right idea if you ask me.

(And I don’t mean Christopher.)

(And kudos to Tolkien — his embedded fictions have the genuine lustre; the ‘reluctant postmodernist’ tag almost has me convinced.)

“Emph. added. Has there ever been a writer of whom you could say “I strongly recommend X’s latest trilogy”? Tolkien had the right idea if you ask me.”

Tolkien didn’t even want the thing broken up into a trilogy; that was Allen & Unwin’s idea. On reflection, breaking it up into a trilogy has been good for publishers of fantasy, opening the market for Extruded Fantasy Product.

People say that Tolkien wasn’t good at writing anything but action. However, he could do romance, like the scene in the Silmarillion where Beren tells King Thingol, “I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!”

Thanks. I’ve been trying to make stupid jokes all day but that one just came to me.

Yes, but Sissy Spacek’s hand pops out of the grave at the end of Carrie.

(Undead Thread – now that would be a good name for a band!)

Dave Maier, I think Thorns is my least favorite of McKillip’s books; I found Kane devoid of anything except power and loyalty to the one person she loved. That the book hinged on Kane’s change of heart didn’t feel trustworthy to me; but it did provide fertile ground for a sequel. (I would have been happier if one of the librarians had found a text documenting Axis’s death in some way.)

“Ombria in Shadow” was wonderful, “Tower at Stoneywoods” and “Atrix Wolfe” great. But my favorite has to be “Bell at Sealy Head,” where McKillip’s simplified her story so well that the deeper meanings are below the surface, never slamming you on the side of the head. it functions beautifully as a fairy tale — leading you to understanding while you’re having a great time reading.

“Ombria” is wonderful.

But an older work, “Forgotten Beasts of Eld,” is a very fine read, too.

And I’d forgotten but must include Neil Gaiman’s “Stardust,” (Not the movie), a book where the magic of love is pitch-perfect. Even made my husband read it. And of course, “American Gods.” LOVED that book.

Zic, thanks for your response. I think I see what you’re saying about Kane (but I still liked the book). I’ll check out Sealey Head for sure. (And Forgotten Beasts is indeed fine.)