LotR Rewritten From a Mordor Perspective 583
Hugh Pickens writes writes "It's been said that history is written by the winners but Laura Miller writes in Salon about a counterexample as she reviews a new version of Lord of the Rings. The Last Ring-bearer was published to acclaim in Russia by Kirill Yeskov, a paleontologist whose job is reconstructing long-extinct organisms and their way of life. Yeskov performs essentially the same feat in his book. The Last Ring-bearer is set during and after the end of the War of the Ring and told from the perspective of the losers. In Yeskov's retelling, available in translation as a free download, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science 'destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men' and Aragorn is depicted by Yeskov as a ruthless Machiavellian schemer who is ultimately the puppet of his wife, the elf Arwen. Sauron's citadel Barad-dur is, by contrast, described as 'that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.'"
Banewreaker (Score:5, Interesting)
If y'all are interested in this kind of fiction, Jacqueline Carey did a really good duology on it in her Banewreaker series.
She's mostly known for steamy fantasy/romance novels (the Kushiel series), but she does a very good take on a LOTR-analogue world in which the Sauron equivalent is shown as the good guys. Or not good guys, precisely, but as more or less a guy wanting to be left alone, with the Gandalf-equivalent instigating the "good" races to destroy him in his Mordorish fortress. You really end up hating the good guys by the end of the series. =)
I highly recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/Banewreaker-Sundering-Book-Jacqueline-Carey/dp/0765305216 [amazon.com]
Re:Great book (Score:5, Interesting)
Copyright is needed, but it's currently far too long.
Tolkien has been dead and buried for 38 years now. His estate is preventing the translation from being published for what reason exactly? Where's the benefit to society from that?
Interesting usenet:rec.arts.sf.written analysis (Score:3, Interesting)
Available here:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/msg/697476f4e92d2483?dmode=source&output=gplain [google.com]
>Seriously though, I have read Yeskov's novel some ten years ago, when it was
>officially published in Poland. It caused a great turmoil among die-hard
>Tolkien's fans, who considered it "blasphemous" - not because of the
>copyright issue, but because the good and the evil were so thoroughly
>reverted there. Those who remember Gaiman's "Snow, Glass, Apples" should
>understand what I mean. Personally, I liked the book, but this reversal of
>well-established stereotypes is its main merit. Without any references to
>Middle-Earth it would have been just a second-rate spy story/political
>thriller, like the many clones of Frederick Forsyth.
For my part, I'd rather read a first-rate spy story / political thriller, irregardless of the trappings or lack thereof.
Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and the Oz Wicked Witch (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was a young child decades ago, Fred Rogers had the woman who played the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz on his program. She explained how they did the scene where she melted. But she also tried to get kids to think about what things looked like from the Wicked Witch's perspective. Her sister was killed. The one keepsake was stolen. Her home was invaded. Finally, she is attacked just for defending herself and trying to get back her sister's property. And so on. It really shocked me in a good way, to think that things looked different from her point of view.
Here is a FOSS project (Rakontu) my wife developed (I helped a small bit) to help people see situations from multiple perspectives.
http://www.rakontu.org/ [rakontu.org]
Re:Great book (Score:2, Interesting)
Fuck the idea of "due compensation". Should a mason be paid in perpetuum for the work he did on a store front? The architect that designed a building, should he or she also be paid for an arbitrarily long time while the building is used? The people you mention are performers and they should make their living by performing, not by being paid whenever a single recording of a song is played.
I tried to read it (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried to read this a while back. I was really excited because I always was more interested in the lives of the Orcs than reading about the hicks of the Shire. My favorite scene in LotR is the two orcs talking to each other and expressing a desire to stuff this Mordor stuff and get lost in the world somewhere distant, where they can waylay passing travelers. It's the closest thing the Orcs get to being treated as characters. I was really disappointed with The Last Ringbearer. It really didn't make any sense, maybe because it was translated? I skipped ahead several times before just giving up. I had really wanted to like this book but it just didn't work.
Of course, the whole thing ignores the fact that Sauron was evil, and he committed many evil acts in his thousands of years of existence prior to the events of LotR. Sauron was a total sociopath control freak. If he were alive today he'd be in charge of a corporation poisoning the public for profit. The entire point of his forging of The One Ring was slavery. Sauron crossed the moral event horizon and went full-on evil when he helped Morgoth destroy the land of Almaren, and that was in the First Age. Honestly, this review tells us a lot more about the reviewer that it does anything. Sample quote: "The novelist Michael Moorcock has attacked Middle-earth as a childishly rose-tinted vision of the Merrie Olde England that never was, as well as willfully blind to the hardships and injustice of preindustrial and feudal societies." WTF? It's a fantasy novel, people. It's something you read when you're not reading real books. Oh. I see. The reviewer has an axe to grind. "So I was horrified to discover that the Chronicles of Narnia, the joy of my childhood and the cornerstone of my imaginative life, were really just the doctrines of the Church in disguise." Yeah, surprise surprise, lady. No wonder she sees racial demonization, it's what she's looking for. Yet another writer who can't write anything original and instead can only parody others. That's the greatest failing of The Last Ringbearer. If the author had something to say, great! Say it. But jeez it's pathetic when the only thing you can do is attach another author's name to your work while criticizing the shit out of it. Am I the only one who is utterly sick to death of sequels, rewrites, spinoffs, and reimaginings? I suppose so if that's what everyone is buying. Can't argue with the market.
Re:Great book (Score:5, Interesting)
And, in the case of Hamlet, the earliest edition is widely believed to be an unauthorized copy -- basically the 17th-century equivalent of a camcorder. There is no record whatsoever of anyone ever being sued or punished for that.
Re:Great book (Score:3, Interesting)
1 year = free.
2 years = $10
3 years = $20
4 years = $40
5 years = $80
6 years = 160
etc, etc.
At 19 years it costs over a million dollars a year. If you are making over a million dollars a year from the work society still considers it valuable in its original from. If you have not been able to make a profit in this time, then the work is clearly not profitable, and should be released to the public domain for others to improve upon.
Unless a company is making an exponentially increasing profit such a system will put a soft cap on the length of copyright. That length will be determined by the value of the work to the creator. Furthermore, since the fees increase so much for long-held works there is a strong incentive to create many new works, rather than attempt to keep old works protected.
I'd also like to see a GPL-like or CC-by-SA type option for a period, which would waive the fee.