I thought SF had it's swashbuckling, good guys (tend) to win, despite all the changes in the wide world, faction.

Why else would Humanity win more than 50% of the time vs. the aliens?

And how to explain the large overlap among Rennisance Faire geeks and SF geeks?

As a charlies stross fan, i'd like to recommend the George R.R. Martin "Song of Ice and Fire" series from the fantasy realm. While there's a bit of magic in the books, it's mostly power politics (violence in all it many forms). A great world to visit as you read, very medieval in a way that includes starvation, gangrene and the randomness of ego driven characters.

Let me tout, if I may, an author that writes both Sci-Fi and Fantasy - Lois McMaster Bujold. Best known for writing about the genetically damaged hyperactive midget genius Miles Vorkosigan, who lives in a macho-drenched culture, she has also written two fantasy novels, The Curse of Chalion and it's sequel; I forget its name just now.

These two books feature the Bastard God, so I think she's on your side.

And, in defense of Tolkien himself, rather than the imitators...In LOTR, the regime of the elves was passing away, and the age of men, those venal, short-lived, power-grubbing monsters, was dawning. It is a very revolutionary book.

It is the power of The One Ring and its subordinate ring that makes Lothlorien what it is. So, the core of the elven paradise is something rotten. The elves have used their power to prevent change. But to destroy the evil of Sauron, they must give up that power.

It is a book about how a ruling elite that decides to destroy the very thing that gave them power, choosing their own demise. Not all of them can do it. But Galadriel passes the test, as does Faramir and Theoden. Boromir and Denethor fail, even though they are good men. And the greatest hero is one of the smallest, Frodo. It's in the small and insignificant and unexpected that power lies in this book.

The bloodlines thing bothers me more in Star Wars than it does with, say, Aragorn. He is the guy that doesn't want to be king, and that is the quality that makes him exactly well-suited to be king. And both are because of his bloodlines. He fears the curse of his blood far more than having midiclorians off the scale. The boon that is granted to him via the blood of Numenor is wisdom, not superhuman reflexes.

"There are more of us, I think, than Charlie Stross realizes. There's me. There's China Mieville. There's David Brin. There's Alexandre Dumas (who, after all, is the real hero of The Three Musketeers?). There's John Milton. And maybe there are more."

Me too, me too.... :-) -dlj.

"please introduce the parsnip to Gondor"

They may have not had parsnips, but did they have rutabagas? They must have, to make all those pasties for the miners.

Oh, I don't know...I *could* point the other way and mention Sci-Fi's Cyteen by Cherryh. It's one of my favorites and it's *all* about specialness of person and position. Then again, it feels pretty realistic about it...sorta like George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire stuff.

Also, I would like to point people towards urban fantasy...this stuff is also about the hoi poloi most of the time, and I especially love Sean Stewart's stuff.

Glen Cook in several series sets his high fantasy in a magic feudal world, but more often than not from blue-collar perspectives. Not revolutionary, kinda "damn wizards are fighting the lords again, duck and cover maties".

What Jay said about both Tolkien and Star Wars. The whole bloodlines bit at least 'fits in' in a pseudo-medieval world, but at least Tolkien did some interesting things with it. But the triumph of bloodlines in SF is more like a master-race deal than anything else.

(If Lucas had a soul, R2D2 would have been the Jedi knight that whichever of Yoda or Obi-Wan meant by "there is another," rather than Princess Leia.)

My favorite fantasy series has been that of Thomas Covenant, and a big part of the appeal is that he does different stuff with it. In his world, ordinary Stonedownors and Woodhelvinen can master the magic of stone and wood, go study at the Loresraat, and possibly become Lords. In the series' recent resumption, Linden makes an impassioned speech to the Haruchai that they have no right to choose to be the saviors of the Land, while denying the people of the Land the lore that they could use to learn to save themselves in their own way.

Hm. Well. I'm not sure how to analyze Charlie Stross's comment, because he speaks of "extruded fantasy product" in the first line and then draws the distinction between SF and nonadjectival fantasy in the next, which strikes me as a lateral arabesque. Folks in the field have been arguing about the difference between fantasy and SF for a long time, and while there are of course definable markers, none of them is "the" difference, and none of them is definitive. There are books that are by every surface indicator SF -- they take place in the future, are set on spaceships, are technofetishistic, have nothing like magic (not even "psi powers") yet are internally structured like folk tales. They may be deliberately modeled on fairy stories; "Forbidden Planet" is one obvious example, that thing with the lost-prince farmboy and his redeemable dad is another. There are books that are, by surface signs and marketing label, fantasy -- medievaloid society, magic, fuglemen and cornets -- that use SF themes and tropes, like the effects of technological change (the technology may be a rigidly worked out, craft-style magic, or something like the intrusion of gunpowder). There is a subphylum of novels in which Competent Engineers show up in the fantasyland (which has to be rather stereotypical for the joke to work) and show the unschooled bumpkins how the application of a few solid principles will increase productivity and efficiency faster than you can say Joe Schumpeter. (I am not dissing such books as such; Connecticut Yankee is an example of the form.)

A lot of fine and intelligent people don't understand that bookstore layout is not based on an agenda. Fantasy and SF are shelved together first because the audiences overlap, second because, as category publishing, the SF and fantasy books tend to arrive in the same crates from the same publishers (or divisions), and distant third, because some (not many, but some) non-category readers are put off by the presence of loud four-color covers among their Penguin Classics, even if they're hunting for Italo Calvino or Jan Potocki.

"Extruded fantasy product" exists. So do Harlequins. So do "men's adventure novels," though their numbers are much thinned in the twilight of the mass market pb. Even westerns are still out there, ridin' alone. Mass-audience programmatic fiction has always been around, in quantity; the penny dreadfuls just cost six bucks nowadays. "Tolkien clones" are one of this year's models; I should not need to explain to an economically sophisticated audience why that is.

Look, I've got my hand too deeply in the machinery to pretend to objectivity. I wrote a fat (well, it was fat for its day) fantasy novel with a Rightful King threatened by a Slightly Less Rightful King and an Evil Empire and stuff, but I don't think there was anything in there about the supremacy of monarchy, which I believe in about as much as I believe that John Galt could bring the world to a screeching halt by having Bill Gates and Richard Branson go to Club Med for a couple of months.

[For those not "inside" this conversation, he's talking about _The Dragon Waiting_: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671475525/qid=1109212519/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/102-5143805-6491332; truly excellent]

I did another fantasy novel that had nothing to do with monarchies, and the feudalism was on the neoclassical model, as exemplified in the early work of Dion O'Bannion and the Chicago School.

[Huh?? Oh! _The Last Hot Time_. Whew. To lose the allusion game on my own weblog would be embarrassing...]

I'm working on a book in which there's been a change from monarchy to a vaguely-Georgian parliament, and the dislocations only start there. None of these books may be any damn good, but they don't owe anything to Tolkien. Despite that a couple of prominent and talented fantasy writers have made pronouncments to that effect, the Professor's shadow has its limits.

The Fantasy/SF distinction does not of itself exist. "Scientific discovery" is, in the context of fiction, as fluid a trope as "magic" is; either can be put to an infinite range of purposes. It is broadly true that a dislocative scientific development drives a lot of SF stories, at least since John W. Campbell bought a serial from that Mary W. Shelley lady, but dislocations are a source of conflict, and conflict drives all stories. Plenty of those stories begin with inventions that exist only to create the conflict the author wants, and conclude with the same, er, romantic clutch and iris-out as every other category yarn.

In the end, paint's paint until a da'Vinci or a van Gogh picks up the brush.

[For those not "inside" this conversation, John M. Ford is also the author of the best 20s Flapper Fantasy novel, _The Last Hot Time_, the author of the best Star Trek Klingon novel, _The Final Reflection_, and the best Heinlein-style juvenile novel, _Growing Up Weightless_.]

I strongly recommend "The Black Company" by Glen Cook as an antidote for extruded fantasy. Fantasy written from the point of view of the common grunt.

I am sick of all the hierarchical fantasies, not just in fantasy but also in SciFi. Maybe it's worse in the movies and it's been years since I read much SF. But what do you make of the white man-messiah in Terminator2 and The Matrix? Or the overwhelming militarism and top-down control systems of Star Trek? Much of SF is about comforting conservatism as well.

McSweeney's definitively mapped out the social undercurrents of Middle Earth with their transcript of the unused audio commentary to the Fellowship of the Ring, as recorded by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.

The His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman is written from the perspective of the devil's party -- literally. It's about the Second Revolution against the Authority, aka God. The first was written in Paradise Lost, which forms the basis for Pullman's trilogy.

It's "young adult" but I highly recommend it.

These are all great suggestions, but for sheer audacity, I still have to recommend the Rhapsody trilogy by Elizabeth Haydon, which does involve people Born to Power and all that, but which handles them in a glorious way.

That said, I've always thought that a story or two about a Gondorian company in the runup to the Battle of Minas Tirith would be touching in a way that the epicness of LotR sometimes isn't.

As a rabid Cherryh fan myself, I have to object a little bit to shah8's characterization of Cyteen. It isn't just about specialness, but the price of it, particularly, "Is it worth it? Is it right? Is it really necessary?" It ends very much on an ambiguous note. And the toll it takes on the characters makes it one of the most emotionally difficult SF books I've ever read. Some of the Justin-persecution scenes make me cry.

What's more, you have to put it in the context of the whole Alliance/Union universe. The rest of the series is told from the POV of people who frightened and afraid of the Union. Cyteen is the first and only time we see the people who run the Union, their lives, plans, and ideologies, and we get, as readers, a lone opportunity to decide for ourselves who really is the good guy in all of this, if there even is one. In a sense, the book is the author positing a possible case against the rest of the universe she created.

Even further, books set in times well after Cyteen were written well BEFORE Cyteen. So we get to see the results of the experiment, and it's not at all clear whether it was meaningful at all.

So I have to say that in a sense, you have to read Cyteen the way people are reading LOTR here. It's literally about "Special" people (an official designation in the Union), and so?

My favorite sci-fi writer - by far - is Gene Wolfe - a giant among contemporary writers of any genre, yet often overlooked by sci-fi fans. His two most recent books are firmly in the fantasy/mythology camp, and are stunners that will keep you enraptured from start to finish... Volume I is "The Knight,", competed in Volume II, "The Wizard."

On another note, for a very little-known but excellent SF work, I recommend Margaret Wander Bonanno's "Other" trilogy. All else I've seen from Bonanno are Star Trek novels, but the Other trilogy is pretty original and brilliant.

Also, Joan Slonczewski's universe is excellent. Slonczewski is a professor of biology, and her works reflect a great deal of creativity with the technical details of biology that you don't see in Brin, etc. Her "Brain Plague" is a brilliant, brilliant book. The heroine is not a typical heroine, fighting a typical evil, and the story does not have a typical plot structure with climax, etc. Instead, it is a series of experiment into the question of what it would mean for human beings to be worlds inhabited by infectious microscopic civilizations. What are their rights, and those of their micropeople? How does this relationship evolve over time?

"If I was going to write extruded fantasy product, I'd have to write it from the point of view of the young lad growing up with poor but honest folks somewhere in middle earth who discovers that he's, er, destined to grow up to be the Dark Lord, overthrow the established order, and start a revolution...."

I have to admit to being surprised that Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy is becoming reality - the Merchant Princes.

If I were to write or screen play an extruded fantasy today, it would be properly classified as a non-fiction work or documentary. My subject: The History of the GOP in the 21st Centruy.

Frankly, I couldn't invent a better fantasy that would attract a larger reading audience at this time.

What a lot of comments from people who haven't thought very hard on these subjects.

"Jay" (whoever he or she is) and John M. Ford make more sense than the rest of them put together.

By the way, for sharp undercutting critiques of the Received Fantasy World: put away your Mieville, set aside your Mary Gentle, and pick up your Steven Brust.

[Indeed...]

Jay, however, forgot that Miles isn't genetically damaged, but somatically damaged. Teratogens. How many times does Miles have to make this point?

*sticks tongue out at Jay*

Middling quality, but touching on some of these topics are Paula Volsky's books - Illusion covers a hybrid of the French and Russian revolutions.

You MUST read 'Iron Dragon's Daughter', by Swanwick. This is the true Dark Fantasy.
It's about a little girl kidnapped by fairies, who put her in a Dickensian workhouse till she's old enough to breed for dragon riders who can withstand the taint of cold iron.
The first eighty seven pages are wonderfull as she goes from desperate orphan to napalming the place on the way out while riding on a renegade dragon.
But if you want social commentary, wait till the second and third parts, set in a fairy high school and college where she is hiding from the fairy government to keep them from reclaiming her as their property.

I quit reading fantasy when it became cluttered with cheesy derivatives of the Arthurian legend thirty years ago. After I had read The Once and Future King, the rest of that school seemed pale and pedestrian.

I did try to keep up with science fiction, but apart from Necromancer and maybe one other title by William Gibson, I've read nothing else. Same problem: same old space opera, again and again.

I had read some Le Carre in high school (Spy who came from the Cold, Looking Glass War) and continued with the rest of his work through Smiley's People and up to The Perfect Spy. Maybe this is why I quit reading f/sf, but the writing was more mature and far more interesting than one more epic about ray guns or wizards 'n' lizards.

Len Deighton also caught my interest, and his background as a journalist lent a tone of credibility and weltschmerz to his novels, some of which were made into film (Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin) and some of which should have been.

Other than that, I've read nothing new since 1975, when I finished Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner and Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad.

Neither book were recent at the time, I recall, but both were creative and relied on at least one leap of faith about the impact of technology on mankind.

This last requirement separates fantasy (the stuff about swords and sworcery (ha!) from science fiction: a change in technology (time travel, faster than light space travel, immortality made possible by advances in medicine, etc.) has made some impact on humankind, and the more thoroughly the author explores that theme, the better the fiction.

Asimov's I, Robot and The Foundation Trilogy were two such works. So were Clarke's 2001 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Likewise anything by Larry Niven and/or Jerry Pournelle, whose Mote in God's Eye is a magnum opus if ever there was. Ringworld--a great book and a bad movie--is also a wonderful work, and so are the various Tales of Known Space.

For fantasy, Roger Zelazny's Amber series can't be beat (if you like RZ's wry humor and cynical view of families) and anything else by this man is at times sheer poetry, touching, bittersweet, and always transcendant.

Commentary and essays by Harlan Ellison captured my attention for a while, especially The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat. His work now seems dated and almost self-consciously 'hip' but thirty years ago? Not so much.

Of course, there's always Raymond Chandler, and any number of other writers in the genre: John McDonald's Travis McGee has some great moments, and I'm sure there are plenty of other writers of detective or crime fiction who are entertaining and insightful observers of the human parade.

But contemporary fantasy or science fiction? I'm not sure I've been in a bookstore in years for more than current events and politics, which have occupied my interest more than anything else for some time.

Dear Brad,

It looks like I've just finished writing a fantasy novel that you'll be interested in. I hope this doesn't sound strange to you, but parts of it were inspired by your writing, particularly, "Slouching Towards Utopia." It'll be months and months before it's published however. I'll let you know when it's out.

Yours sincerely,

Ronald Brakels

Probably everyone who has gotten this far through the comments knows this, but just in case... Stross's 'Singularity Sky' & 'Iron Sunrise' are worth the time.

The heredity thing is kind of violated, but Clive Barker's Imagica definitly qualifies as dark fantasy for its own reasons.

Now, here's the topic...an extruded product that turns onto different wheels in the manner of what the topic post desired. However, it's actually fairly hard to do this well (and to sell well--a big part of what fantasy is all about the vicarious feel of specialness). I mean, Chris Brunch did something like normal people in a special world with The Seer King and The Demon King. Check what those amazon reviews say. He compensated with other sh*t. If you want something like that, then I dare you, try and write it out like that. You will wind up with something that is pretty much dang period fiction (as with Volsky). And if I want something like period fiction, I can d*mn well read good period fiction...saaaay something by AS Byatt.

To try for another angle on this use of nonspecialness, take a look at the tube for Joan of Arcadia. They keep trying to make this show about a girl who talks to God with the girl relently written as a mediocrity, with nothing special about her in inheritance or talent. God is never shown talking to anyone else, and we the audience has no clue about why he would talk to Joan so directly, and the question is never addressed by the show and all of its fans are slowly going buggy with the internal contradictions working to the surface.

It's alot easier to simply say that guy was the son of that guy who was a brilliant warrior than to, maybe...you know, *develop* a character with no special talents to thrive in a fantasy world where there are special talents.

Think about it, why is the dominant character Batman instead of a roughly equivalent character like Rorshach despite similar psychoses? A wealthy man like Bruce Wayne has, by inherent nature, more backstory that writes itself out and draws itself as well. He also gets to be "cool". John Walter Kovacs, however, is a nobody. He has to have literally pages of text in a graphic novel to flesh the character out. It's a heckuva lot more rewarding once you're done, reading or producing-wise, but it's alot of work. In the end, for poor Mr Kovacs, his struggle as a man against the machine ends because as intellegent and determined as he was, he was still outmoded in an era when real superhumans are about. And the drama was better for it.

In general, certain comic books seems to have most of some people are asking for here. I mean, besides laughing so hard you lose control of your bowels, Transmetropolitan has most of that social commentary and normal but talented and deeply flawed man taking on the Beast. There are several comic books that has a strong strain of Milton in a fantasy setting (more than I can remember from books aside from certain existential horror novels).

And hell, I can't go wrong to conclude with...Phillip K. Dick--The Man Who Japed is a sci-fi sorta in this topic that deserves to be read...

"If I was going to write extruded fantasy product, I'd have to write it from the point of view of the young lad growing up with poor but honest folks somewhere in middle earth who discovers that he's, er, destined to grow up to be the Dark Lord, overthrow the established order, and start a revolution.... "

Mr. Stross need not bother. If he just goes to the History section he will find exactly the extruded fantasy product he describes. It is called World War II.

No, No, No MTC, he shouldn't do that. Mr. Stross should go to the fiction again and pick out Harry Turtledove's fantasy serious based on WWII.

Same diff, right?

?;~)

No, it will not do.

Fantasy is rooted in loss and regret—a golden age of noble rule, the termination of that age in an usurpation by a popular leader, a long era of rule through violence and fear, and finally, a vain attempt to recreate a part of what was lost.

J.R.R. Tolkien and many of the other authors of the Ur texts of fantasy were men educated in classical Greek and Latin. For these men the greatest intellectual challenge was the reconciliation of democracy and justice. According to their view, the great democratic cultural experiments of the ancient world, the Athenian demos and the Roman Republic, both failed when the people became too powerful. Medievalist faith in a nobility of the blood was a balance for rule of the common folk.

As for SF, it is a very much an American genre. In most science fiction writing the values assigned to "humans" are essentially the values of Americans (Brin's Uplift series, for example, is basically an allegory on the American experience in the era of European imperialism—or a schematic for what the neo-cons are trying to achieve in Iraq). The faith in or embrace of change is American positivism projected out where it can do no harm, in galaxies far, far away or times beyond us. When Europeans or Asians invade this American enclave, however, they bring tales of dread (Akira) or of the absurdity of believing in the possibility of change (La Jetee).

All genres of literature can be bent this way and that to be seen as "conservative" or "progressive" depending on the author or point of view. The traditional detective stories (that is until the like of Chandler and Hammet) were "extreme right" conceptually (somebody breaks the law, get caught by clever police/detective, spends life in jail), no social commentary or anything, just bad guys breaking the social order and being punished for it. The early sci-fi similarly reflects the "we good, they bad" spirit of the old western movies were the indians (they were not native americans then) are baddies and the 7th cavalry comes to the rescue, all horns balzing.
Alternatively it was the "colonising" trend, a la' Star Trek, exploring and colonising foreign worlds.
Fantasy suffered from similar fate but let's not accuse Tolkien of it, he built a v. realistic world based on medieval lores and tradition. It was not JRRT fault that medielal world WAS actually pretty classist and elitist.
The problem lies in a lot of poor JRRT clones which just slapped adventure yarns in world where some people have pointy ears, romanticising a medieval class system.
But, as in western movies or modern sci-fi (look at the works of Brown, Heinlein, Hellison's wonderful "Stop Arlequin, said the Tick-Tock man"), the best modern fantasy are often grim and fairly accurate reflections of a medieval world. Try reading Guy Gavriel Kay "Sarantium", or the wonderful work of George RR Martin, or Robin Hobb (especially the liveship trilogy, if you are interested in "mercantile" and burgeois fantasy) and you will find a mature look at medieval-like fantasy rather that pointy ears half-men in tights blabbering about bloodlines and divine right to rule.

Quick comments

John M Ford ? The actual author of "Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues" ? An heir of Petronius and Juvenal is amongst us ...

Len Deighton ... SS-GB was superb science fiction, at least as much as 'The Man in thhe High Castle' was.

Gondor ... river traffic. Where is all the damn river traffic. Isnt there a merchant in the whole of middle-earth ? Shouldnt, like, boats full of sheep and stuff be going up and down that darned highway to Gondor ?

Star Trek ... sometime between OS and Next Gen there was a proletatian revolution. OS - credits/moneyt important, security wears red shirts and gets killed a lot. NG - credits/money unimportant, command wears red shirts. The Revolution Happened :)

Bujold ... umm, guys, Mr Vorkosigan worked for, like, the Secret Police, in a, like, police state. They are the *bad guys*

Culture ... deals with a post-scarcity society pretty well.

Ian Whitchurch

Isn't this just a version of the dialogue between Michael Palin's peasant and Graham Chapman's King Arthur in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"?

You may enjoy Peter David's "Sir Apropos of Nothing" and its sequel, "The Woad to Wuin". And in a different vein, you should read everything by Tim Powers.

On Tolkien:

Elves are not good or moral in any straightforward sense. They are an image of more than human beauty. The old stories of the elves show plenty of greed, pride, anger, etc. The vision of surpassing beauty (but not goodness) is perhaps more important than any social doctrines that can be derived from Tolkien's premodern world.

Brad's insight was caught many years ago by H.G. Wells. Remember the Eloi and Morlocks?

[comment spam]

As long as literature has existed, (Gilgamesh, Homer, Beowulf), it has had protagonists of heroic proportion: greater-than-attainable wisdom, beauty, strength, courage, virility, what have you. Also, villains of impossible cruelty, cleverness, ugliness, greed, etc. Stories are exaggerations (or distillations, perhaps) of reality; if they weren't,
no one would read or listen to them. Reality is boring.

I suspect that Brad's preferred brand of heroic protagonist would merely posess exaggerated virtues of the kind that he himself feels more kinship with (maybe forethought, ingenuity, efficiency; you know, good dwarvish virtues : O ),
rather than actually being a real person who has normal, average experiences.

Heroic Fantasy is the progenitor of all other genres; you can dislike it, but to dismiss it is ignorance. It has been greatly overdone, a lot of it mere hackwork. But the core concepts obviously resonate with many, many people. To observe heroism and virtue is to be temporarily elevated and inspired. Everybody wants that.

As to the seamy underbelly of medieval life; of course it would suck. But so does the real modern shantytown or ghetto. People have fun on earth, they just avert their gaze from the less fortunate. Exactly the same thing; you can't not enjoy a symphony because you are too aware of the wretches staving and freezing outside; or else there would be no art. To have light, there must be dark.

Finally, I have to say that in fantasy as in life, you pick your poisons. You want a dark satanic mill, plenty of people write about that. Postmodernists love that shite. I am an ent-sympathizer, myself, and say "tear that nasty abomination down; people who consume the earth in order to support their ever-increasing population are in service of the Dark Lord."

There's Alexandre Dumas (who, after all, is the real hero of The Three Musketeers?).

Brad, I assume you mean D'Artangnian, but you should read the last three books before you assume Dumas is anything but Conservative. D'Artangnian rises from low roots, but Dumas is clear that it's his inherent nobility and fidelity to the old values of France that are responsible.

[No. The real hero of _The Three Musketeers_ is Armand Jean de Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu. Think about it.]

"But what do you make of the white man-messiah in Terminator2 and The Matrix?"

The messiah in Terminator2 was the machine, who chose crucifixion in the molten steel to redeem us from our sins. And the Matrix was an allegory of Gnosticism, albeit probably by accident, so not exactly the messiah you are thinking of. Furthermore, Keanu Reeves notably displays the physical beauty of hybrid vigor (he's 25% each Hawaiian and Chinese).

Many of the comments here reveal more about today's readers' prejudices and expectations towards light fiction than they do about the actuality of today's fiction. Things seem to be complicated by "extruded fantasy product" which exists because of the economic benefit of producing booklike objects that exactly mirror these prejudices, but informed persons should be able to tell the difference and ignore these.

In other words: what Patrick Neilsen Hayden said. (And apologies for the formatting: for some reason I can't enter carriage returns or html tags here.)

"J.R.R. Tolkien and many of the other authors of the Ur texts of fantasy were men educated in classical Greek and Latin. For these men the greatest intellectual challenge was the reconciliation of democracy and justice. According to their view, the great democratic cultural experiments of the ancient world, the Athenian demos and the Roman Republic, both failed when the people became too powerful."

JRRT was saturated with pre-Christian Saxon, Finnish and Norse. For those societies the greatest intellectual challenge was to gain and hold power while maintaining honor: without power the people were lost; without honor the individual was lost.

To assume that LOTR engages the intellectual concerns of a classical Greek and Roman world -- one that itself is imagined through the lens of post-socialist liberal Christianity -- is to ask for confusion.

Contemporary writers who wish to imaginatively reconcile democracy and justice, which is a great thing to try, and also wish to build on JRRT's foundations, which in itself is another great idea, keep producing one archetypal train wreck after another.

How did we get this far with no mention of Terry Pratchett?

If The Family Trade was 'SF', Charlie would be contractually obligated to sell it to Ace, which would park it on the shelf until it was good and ready to publish it, probably 2006. Since it is 'fantasy', he was able to sell it to Tor, which published it in 2004. More money for him, more books for us.

Nothing to do with the content, as sideways-in-time stories have been around in 'SF' for a very long time, but rather some careful parsing around contract terms. Making the narrator's world-walking ability inborn instead of gadget-based makes it Magic rather than Technologic. Magic=fantasy=legal sale.

whitchurch
Vorkosigin was GRU, not KGB.
Ramsdell
Pratchett's 'The Carpet People' was a parody of Tolkein that didn't take off.
Pratchett's 'Diskworld' was a takeoff of Niven that was outstandingly successful for reasons no one understands, except maybe because it's much funnier? The protagonists in Diskworld bitch about the class structure but don't do anything about it.
Mcmanus
Same deal on Glen Cook's magnificant 'Sweet Silver Blues' and the rest of that (getting kind of repetitive) series. Why he doesn't have Glory Mooncalled lead the revolution in Tun Faire and let us look at the 1917 Russian Revolution and then the Bolshevik takeover from a fantasy city's point of view I don't know. His 'White Rose' series is too 'grunt's eye view' of the situation in a revolutionary and counterrevolutionary kind of way. There is no economics at all.

I view comments like pierre's with a certain level of disdain. What was said about Tolkien, I already know. I think many people here reading know this. Yeah, MTC might have it...misshapened, but I view the The Lord of the Rings and the accompanying books as some of the most overrated books around. They are books geeks could love, drenched in the minutae. I mean, fine, I read extruded fantasy products like David Drake's Lord of the Isles stuff. The largest aim of fantasy is distraction, after all.

One should not take all fantasy by the same measure. And one should not take all fiction by the same measure as well. Who're you talking light fiction compared to what's *real* fiction? Some of that stuff is mush? Okay, I grant that the bestsellers like DaVinci Code is for all the cows who don't know their christian history. But The Corrections? Girl? There is a lot of just plain bad fiction that have their toasts. Hmmm, I did here good things about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. That might be something.

I just wish more of the people who talk about the low quality of conversation in the thread would get off their stool and explain more of what they are talking about.

Mostly off-topic, but I was just thinking about the 2 kinds of fantasy:

One is sword and sorcery, which is pretty realistic, with sort of mechanistic magic. The other is symbolic and surreal, more like poetry then a novel. I'm thinking of Peter Beagle and Patricia McKillip (just finished Alphabet of Thorns).

You can get this second type in SF, too, like Lem or Jonathan Carroll. Even hardboiled fiction, like Lethem or Murakami.

My point? No point really.

Oh yeah, Glen Cook is the BEST.

What was the life expectancy past early childhood of peasant working a three field system vs one of the tall, blonde, etc nobility off fighting wars all the time?

I'm thinking of the fantasy book "The Children of Llyr," where most of the fighters got killed, and the seven left take occasional rest at the hospitality of peasants, whose lives don't seem to change very much.

Having read sf and fantasy for over 25 years, my favorite is still Zelazny's Lord of Light. Now that has a true conflict set within "magical realms" of the individual versus the state and progress versus stasis. Conflict between conservative and liberal has been a staple of civilization for as long as we have had civilization. Reading Collapse from J.D. just brings home the point. Now after the rapture occurs can we find some agreement about progress. Hyperion was a fantastic sf novel with a whole different viewpoint, as were the early riverworld series.

"What was said about Tolkien, I already know. I think many people here reading know this."

Ah, but if you *really* knew, you wouldn't lump Tolkien in automatically with people who write about elves and magic and have characters with names that contain apostrophes between consonants for no good reason.

That doesn't mean Tolkien's automatically better, just utterly *different* for the purposes of discussing the relationship between art and life in Prof. DeLong's forum. Remarks that can ultimately be reduced to the form "who's tougher, Gandalf or Batman?" have their place in human life but seem like kind of a waste of this particular opportunity.

And I might very well not put Dante or Shelley as sci-fi or whatever.

Categories are pliable. Why *shouldn't* we lump the sucka in despite the fit?

For that matter, we don't have any real discussion of what it means to be a clone of Tolkien. There is too much stuff that is fantasy which has very little to do with Tolkien...and more to do with Lewis Carrol, for instance.

We can talk smarmy about elves and princes and medieval stuff. However much we can beat up on the likes of Robert Jordan and David Eddings, we tend to make the argument that have little to do with Tolkien but still saying that it's generic. Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana bears very little relation to Tolkien even though it has some elements in common. But it's just not a big deal. However different the purposes of Tolkien or Kay, the mechanics of the storytelling is much the same despite the lack of derivation.

I had hoped that Glen Cook's "BlackCompany" series would be the gritty, dark series that Brad is looking for. And, at times, it is. And it is certainly grunt/military fiction placed in a fantasy realm. But, for the most part, by the end it's the same old thing.

My interest was piqued during Lady's running of the Black Company. I so admired her ruthless pragmatism.

A fantasy writer could just as well pick up a few techno-libertarian triumphalist sf books, and slam sf as a whole on the basis of those. I get the point here, but it seems unfair to ignore the counterexamples. (And in any case, it's not like we haven't, as a community, had this discussion before. Brin's website is full of essays on the topic.)

Moment of shocked fanboy silence while I register the presence of John Ford.

Adding to the list of recommendations for fantasy that actually suggests that maybe the hereditary lords aren't the good guys:

I don't think I've seen Tad Williams' War of the Flowers mentioned.

Somebody did mention Mary Gentle, but not a particular book; I'm assuming they were thinking about Grunts.

And as I understand it, Jacqueline Carey is working on a book in this vein.

Oh, also, I'll plug Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana. While it does revolve around folks with hereditary power, it makes the point that none of them necessarily has any moral right to the power they wield, and the "villain" may be a just and kind man.

It also occurs to me that I'd be very happy to see something like William Barton's "Acts of Conscience" in a fantasy setting.

Let's note that in Tolkien as a whole, hereditary rank is a very poor predictor of good rule; Ar-Pharazon being the prime example, followed closely by Aragorn's ancestors and cousins at some remove who reduced Arnor to a handful of squabbling fiefdoms. Tolkien's a genuine conservative, but he's at least as happy with the largely anarchist Shire (not quite, but the whole "police" force is minimal, and the Mayor and Thain are largely ceremonial positions until the end of the War of the Ring) as he is with the hierarchical and monarchical Gondor/Arnor. Sam is a major hero-figure for Tolkien...

Is there any evidence that Gondor doesn't have turnips? What do we know about crops in Middle-Earth?

Norman Spinrad did a pretty brutal sendup of Science Fiction that embraced the tall, blond, noble, graceful, born-to-command ect, ect, in his book The Iron Dream. I think he was taking direct aim at some favorites of my teenage years, E.E. Smith's Lensman Series, but I'm not sure. Anyway the sub-genre exists in both SF and Fantasy.

As to why both kinds of books are plopped in the same place in the bookstores...I've always assumed that was more to do with a kind of lumping together of the fans, rather then the material. "Oh...thats that social misfit geek stuff..." But its true that some writers are hard to place in either camp. I know where Arthur Clarke fits, but where, for instance, does Ray Bradbury? Or Harlen Ellison for that matter. Heinlein's "Job - A Comedy Of Justice" is a fantasy novel. But Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is SF.

"As for SF, it is a very much an American genre"

Umm, no. American SF is an American genre.
I really don't know much about many of the authors mentioned above - except the big ones - because when I think of SF the first name that pops into my head is Lem. Who used to start some of his SF stories (those written in the 50's) with sentences like

"Far off in the glorious future, once socialism was everywhere triumphant and shackles of capitalist oppression thrown off by all...."

but The Cyberiad should be required reading (though a lot is missed in translation).

"Is there any evidence that Gondor doesn't have turnips?"

Yes. The psychological nature of the aristocratic horsemen in charge is not compatible with any society based on turnip agriculture.

Grow turnips and the peasants can feed more livestock through the winter. If the peasants can feed more livestock through the winter, they'll have bigger families, and towns will spring up. If towns spring up, there will be merchants, and commerce. If there is commerce, half the king's retainers will be concerned with finance. But as we see clearly from LOTR, it is not the case that half the king's retainers in Gondor are concerned with finance. They are, every one of them, hard-bitten stoic cavalrymen.

Therefore we conclude there are no turnips in Gondor.

Tolkien's grounding in the traditional literature let him successfully portray the king's retainers as good men. Tolkien's later imitators attempt to portray king's retainers, but cannot communicate the quality of their stoicism. The reader of these later imitators then finds the reasonable suspicion creeping up on him that this batch of retainers must be raking off turnip-related surplus value from somewhere. And if that's the case, maybe the orcs should be unionized.

Paul Anderson's www.sfwa.org/writing/thud.htm On Thud and Blunder seems relevant.
No support for www.barbarahambly.com/index.htm Barbara Hambly's fantasy?
Nice to be able to cut from and paste into my local library's catalog. Unlike China Mieville's Iron Council www.crookedtimber.org/archives/cat_mieville_seminar.html seminar at Crooked Timber, people are recommending books that are there.

Turnips mean pigs. You can herd your sheep, cows, horses, goats, etc, into the city to wait out a siege by salting them down, but pigs can't as easily be herded. If you have pigs you have to defend your land and fields and barns.
So Gondor was a sheep/cow culture, and not a pig/turnip culture.

Turnips and pigs: Taran, Assistant Pig-Keeper.

Lloyd Alexander, The Prydain Chronicles.

I haven't read Alexander (starting with The Book of Three) in a long time. The series is technically YA literature. But he is clearly pushing back, in a satirical manner, at Tolkien and at the epidemic of Celtic / Cymric HF that was becoming apparent.

Goats: Ged starts as a goatherd in LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea.. LeGuin went on to push back at her own trilogy in three more books the best of which is The Other Wind, for writing, but I warn you that she gets so much into Earthsea "RL" that readers expecting sword & sorcery will be disappointed -- though there is magic, death, and dragons.

"Paul Anderson?" Didn't he write Finnegan's Wake?

Ian Whitechurch writes: Bujold ... umm, guys, Mr Vorkosigan worked for, like, the Secret Police, in a, like, police state. They are the *bad guys*

Really? Compared to the Cetagandans?

Brad if you only knew. Here in Italy the biggest fans of Tolkein are the neofascists. I really think that part of the fascination of Tolkein is the guilty pleasure of extreme political incorrectitude.

Now for F meets SF and an ambivilant view of natural aristocrats have you looked into Darkover (by Marion Zimmer Bradley).

The weird thing is that all of the faux middle ages fantasy tells teh story from the point of view of lords and ladies. The Bagginses, who are 18th century squires are about as, close to commoners as it gets.