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.'"
Great book (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a great book, I've read it ten years ago, in the Polish translation.
Quoting Wikipedia: "fear of the vigilant and litigious Tolkien estate has heretofore prevented its publication in English". Tell me again, how exactly copyright encourages creation of new works?
Re:Great book (Score:4, Insightful)
This said, if they decide to go after this book after all then they should be hanged by their testicles...
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Actually, hanged.
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Well, one of the rights that comprises copyright is the right to prohibit others from preparing a derivative work, which the novel discussed here would qualify as. So it probably is a copyright issue. Whatever trademarks are involved, they'd really only derive their power, in this context, from the copyright to begin with, as trademarks are not allowed to function as a substitute for copyrights.
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Quoting Wikipedia: "fear of the vigilant and litigious Tolkien estate has heretofore prevented its publication in English". Tell me again, how exactly copyright encourages creation of new works?
It enables authors to profit, by actually having a market, which encourages publishers to pay authors and authors to write books, without banning any technology -- especially now; without copyright, there'd be not enough profit in publishing books.
After limited times, meaning a short amount of time, the durat
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After limited times, meaning a short amount of time, the duration of the copyright expires, and new works can be made based on the old work. This is how copyright avoids stifling new works -- old works' copyright expires. This promotes progress in the arts and sciences because there is now not much (if any) profit in rehashing old works.
Is that fantasy or sci-fi?
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Re:Great book (Score:5, Insightful)
exactly! Without copyright nothing of any quality would ever be written. It would all just be the cheap amateurish crap like shakespear and mozart. Thank god for copyright so we can enjoy good culture like die hard 4 and Britney Spears.
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PS: And author's attribution right, is nothing a sensible thing. While copy right is rather stifling....
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No, but it is a form of DRM, state-of-the-art at the time.
Re:Great book (Score:5, Informative)
Shakespear was published under a regime of perpetual copyright.
Which is why Hamlet and King Lear, among other plays, are thought to be reworkings of older plays.
At the time England didn't have copyright laws. They did have the Stationer's Company, which was the printers' guild. In theory once a printer entered a work into the Stationer's Company Register, other printers weren't able to print a copy of that work. In practice, this wasn't well enforced, and publishers often printed works registered to other printers. The first actual copyright law didn't come until the 18th century.
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Not to mention all the historical plays, such as Anthony and Cleopatra, which are obviously copied from ancient Roman/Greek/Egyptian descriptions.
But I guess that's still acceptable - as we can see in The King's Speech. But as soon as one of the big industry become the owner of a story, it's theirs to keep ;)
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:5, Informative)
>Shakespear was published under a regime of perpetual copyright.
Well, I'm no expert, but this guy from Duke says Shakespeare was written before the "Statute of Anne [wikipedia.org]" or any other copyright law:
http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/2011/02/18/shakespeare-and-copyright/ [duke.edu]
Re:Great book (Score:4, Insightful)
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Given that the Statute of Ann begins:
Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken
the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Print-ed, Reprinted, and Published Books,and other Writings, without the Con- sent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings
here [copyrighthistory.com]
It does not sound like there was copyright before then.
There was a monopoly on printing, which arose out of government efforts to censor what was printed by restricting control of the printing presses. Sounds familiar.
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Score: -1, Factually incorrect.
The first English copyright law was the Statute of Anne [wikimedia.org]
The Statute of Anne, short title Copyright Act 1709 8 Anne c.19; long title An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned, was the first copyright statute in the Kingdom of Great Britain (thus the United Kingdom, see copyright law of the United Kingdom). It was enacted in 1709 and entered into force on 10 April 1710. It is generally considered to be the first fully-fledged copyright statute. It is named after Anne, Queen of Great Britain, during whose reign it was enacted.
The Statute of Anne is now seen as the origin of copyright law.[1]
Since Will died almost a century prior to the origin of copyright law, you're not just wrong, you're egregiously wrong.
With apologies, whoever marked this 'Informative' should be shot.
Pug
Re:Great book (Score:4, Informative)
England is a common-law regime. Most laws at that time were just writing down what the accepted common law (tradition) was, not creating new legal concepts. "Law" preceeds "statute" in just about every culture.
There was effectively perpetual copyright in common law, but enforced IIRC through the printer's guild. That was only true copyright, however: the right to print a copy. It wasn't performance rights, derivative works, or other modern concepts under the copyright umbrella.
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If somebody came along and recorded a bunch of Britney Spears songs, as bad as they are, that's still not fair to the original artist (I use the term loosely). Copyright doesn't ensure quality, it ensures due compensation.
Re:Great book (Score:5, Insightful)
You have made a moral argument for copyright, which I reject. I don't pay the workmen who built my house each year that I live in it; General Motors didn't get a cut when I bought my used Jeep Liberty vehicle; I don't pay the Ginsu company a royalty every time I cut meat with its knives -- and I reject a moral argument that I "should" do so in any of those cases. For intellectual works, I feel similarly. I get up every morning and make my money by performing my craft, which is software programming, which is just like almost everybody makes their money, for performances.
The arguments in favor of copyright which I accept are practical arguments. I want the best ongoing media creation I can have, and I support whatever laws help me get it. Some intellectual property doesn't lend itself to performance-style income, such as long-term-use-with-no-support software, or literary novels, or blockbuster movies. Because I like software, novels and movies, I support laws that help me get those things.
The question, then, is not what do we "owe" the authors (answer: nothing) but rather what system do we need to encourage them. Do we need copyrights that last longer than two human lifetimes? I don't think we do. Do we need copyrights that preclude derivative works? I don't think we do. How about preventing collage and sampling? I don't think so. I think we can have all the benefits of copyright, and much less of the drawbacks, if we change the balances in the copyright system.
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Fuck the idea of "due compensation". Should a mason be paid in perpetuum for the work he did on a store front?
Does the mason get paid a living wage on building the wall? Yes. Can the mason proceed to build an arbitrary number of walls? Yes. So the mason gets £x, €y or $z per hour, and can work hour after hour.
Now, what's the going rate for a songwriter's work? Pennies per unit. What's the going rate for a novellist's work? About £1, €1 or $1 per unit, if you're lucky.
So to compare copyright to manual labour, you're going to have to explain to me who on Earth is going to spend £5,0
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Now, what's the going rate for a songwriter's work? Pennies per unit. What's the going rate for a novellist's work? About £1, €1 or $1 per unit, if you're lucky.
So, what you're saying is that everyone should be paid a living wage for their time, regardless of the actual value? I think the name for that is "welfare".
Basically, by your logic, if I toss some paint at a canvas, I should expect to be able to feed my family.
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There are architects who have license that result in them getting a cut of each sale of a property, forever, because it was in their original contract that that payment clause would be in the contract for all future sales.
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Because it's not like Shakespeare or Mozart profited (almost exclusively) from their works during their lifetimes, is it? There were immitators, sure - but their works were completely theirs under the protection of laws at the time.
(Shakespeare was the writer of his day's "Friends" and "Three's Company". Sure, it was witty, and I'm glad people can "get it" after learning all the cultural colloquialisms. It's still just shlock.)
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?
Re:Great book (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great book (Score:4, Insightful)
I would have to agree that the copyright and patent systems could be better. But abolishing them altogether could be disastrous. They do serve a purpose.
Perhaps the car analogy is that thousands are killed by cars every year, but abolishing cars could be a disaster. Just because you can think of a disadvantage of something doesn't mean it's all bad and should be abolished. Too many times what I say is reduced to "X is all good" or "X is all bad". There are tradeoffs. Life isn't black and white.
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I wouldn't want to abolish it, but I'd like to make it much shorter.
My idea is that copyright is supposed to serve society's interests. For that it should aim to maximize the incentive to produce works. And that means it can't be too long. It can't be too short either, as there must be time to make some money. Copyright must allow authors to make money from their work, but avoid providing a perpetual money supply.
I think that the very maximum length of copyright should be 30 years. The number is based on th
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Well, why make time the only parameter? If you're interested in new works related to something existing, how about you just say "when you've made 5M bucks off your book, it's off copyright"? That way hot topics can be written about in soon after they break, and many different authors might benefit in a short period of time. At the same time, people who've written niche stuff can continue to collect royalties for many years.
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It seems to me that it's easier to figure out a good time limit than a monetary one.
Say, the $5M. Why precisely that number? How do you adapt to the economy? $5M in 10 years might be $1M today. Also some works are expensive. That would make big movies go out of copyright right in the first week.
Re:Great book (Score:4, Insightful)
just say "when you've made 5M bucks off your book, it's off copyright"?
I don't know about books, but for movies that would equate to perpetual copyright [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Great book (Score:4, Insightful)
How about just making it annual up to some maximum?
If a copyright holder is only interested in copyright for, say, 3 years, and is so uninterested after that point that he can't even summon up the energy to deliberately release the work to the public domain (but wouldn't care if it did enter), you're still giving him 7-12 years for no good reason.
Given that most of the economic value (and copyright is about nothing other than economic value) is realized very quickly upon publication in any given medium, most works don't need long copyrights. (E.g. a daily newspaper is fishwrap by the end of the day, a book has maybe 18 months, there being nowhere to go after a release in paperback, and movies are little more than movies of the week after 10, maybe 15 years.)
It's really rare to have a work of long-lasting value, and we may as well design the system around the majority of works, rather than the rare, successful outliers. And the guys with the long-lived works can surely afford the more frequent renewal schedule.
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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
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Well, I do want all countries to offer national treatment, without any minimum standards.
Well that would require further treaties, which would be against your "unilateral" change.
National registration would be ridiculously onerous as there are almost 200 countries in the world. Consider the case of a photographer that on uploading 50 new snaps to his website would have to fill out ten thousand forms if he wanted to avoid them being used by unscrupulous advertising agencies. National registration only worked because of local trade, local communication and local interest. In an era of global t
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Re:Great book (Score:5, Funny)
I wouldn't want to abolish it, but I'd like to make it much shorter.
I totally agree.
Oh, sorry, you were talking about copyright. I thought you meant Lord of the Rings.
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In nature there's also no right to not get eaten by bears, or murdered by you neighbor....
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there is, however, the right to defend yourself from bears and murderous neighbors.
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In nature there's no right to keep your idea to yourself
Of course there's nothing forcing you to give your ideas to other people either, so rights or not, many people are keeping their ideas to themself. I think you mean that in nature, nothing can stop someone copying your idea if they find out about it.
Re:Great book (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should they be? My idea is simply reducing the length. It would be simply the question of planning to make a profit within 14-30 years. And if you can't make a profit in 14 years they'll probably never make it, anyway.
No, because having copyright expire on death would provide a perverse incentive for murdering authors of famous works, like George Lucas for instance.
Copyright should be much shorter, but it should last the same whether the creator lives or dies.
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No, because having copyright expire on death would provide a perverse incentive for murdering authors of famous works, like George Lucas for instance.
I'm sorry, but why is this a bad thing?
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Re:Great book (Score:4, Insightful)
No.
Which is not to say that copyright should be based around the life of the author. It should be a term of years from publication or some other fixed point in time. This makes it predictable, which is good for everyone.
But copyright isn't intended to benefit authors or people who made deals with authors. It is intended to benefit the public. The value to authors is just a means to an end; we give them a monopoly in order to encourage them to create things that will enter the public domain, and if the work is popular, the monopoly is worth something for them to exploit.
Ideally then, we should grant the bare minimum copyright necessary in order to get works created. Less would not be as beneficial as possible to the public, more would be superfluous and wasteful. This may not be possible on a work-by-work basis, but we can probably work out some good average numbers.
That the work is still popular by the time the copyright runs out is no justification for granting a longer term. And why should the public only get to enjoy worthless works freely anyway?
Re:Great book (Score:4, Insightful)
Whenever someone says that without copyright, nothing of value would be created anymore, I just have to think back to Pablo Picasso and all the riches he amassed through his art. After all, without copyright, everyone could have copied him and thus taken away his well deserved reward without which he would never have painted in the first place.
Oh wait...
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How do you copy original works of art?
Pretty easily, now that we have photography. It can be done by hand, too, though (sometimes openly, sometimes secretly, as in the case of art forgers). The only thing you can't copy is the provenance, but copyright has nothing to do with that; the Mona Lisa painted by Da Vinci is in the public domain and it's still worth more than an exact duplicate by someone else.
I said there would be fewer things of value produced if works could be copied freely without the people who did the work getting paid.
That's not necessarily true, though. Increased copyright does not necessarily mean increased numbers of works created. If you were to graph the
Millions of copies at a dollar each (Score:3)
You let me know when copies of Picasso sell for millions of dollars.
Millions of copies at a dollar each sell for millions of dollars.
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I've never understood why slashdotters use car analogies so much. Surely most of us trolling in the comments here don't have cars, or we'd be off doing fun things like getting to work.
Well, you see, a car analogy is like a Ford. It works and gets you from point A to point B, but it tends to break down a lot and needs to be fixed often. A good comment is like a BMW or a Volvo. It does the job it is meant to do, does it well, and rarely (if ever) needs to be repaired. A troll comment is like a Pinto. If left to sit alone, everything is fine. But, ding it slightly, and the gas tank tears, spewing fire into the passenger compartment, and burning everyone to death.
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Where's the benefit to society from that?
Benefit : you get this new work for free.
Another way to fight against copyright : let greed go to increased and increased madness, let them copyright ideas, let them copyright words. Then new works will be impossible to copyright, they will have to be released anonymous and for free. Let the world without copyright come from the greed of right holders (or grand-grand-children of copyright holders)
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Demanding everything be free, especially when the owner doesn't want you to have it for free, indeed does make one a free-loader. Especially when the free-loader takes that which wasn't free and then jumps on /. and declares that information wants to be free.
Re:Great book (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954 and 1955. According to current copyright law (assuming no extensions are passed, which is a huge assumption), the copyright will end in 2049/2050. It's been under copyright for about 56 years already and still has about 39 to go. I know the Tolkien estate profits off of Lord of the Rings, but I don't see how that encourages new works. Yes, we got the LoTR movies, but those could have been made if LoTR passed into the public domain. The only people who would lose out would be the children/grandchildren of JRR Tolkien.
Of course, even worse is Gone With The Wind. It was published in 1936 and is still considered to be under copyright protection 75 years later. We need to wait until 2031 until it enters the Public Domain. Meanwhile, the author, Margaret Mitchell, has been dead for 62 years. Her children (if she had any, I can't find any reference to kids) would be grown up by now with grandkids of their own. Copyright was not intended to be a paycheck for your great-grandkids.
A fair copyright term would be 20 years plus a one time 20 year renewal. (And I'm being generous as I think the ideal would be 14/14.) Under this, Lord of the Rings would have passed into the public domain in 1994/1995. In fact, under this copyright term length, anything published before 1971 would be in the public domain. How many works published prior to 1971 create substantial income for their authors (or their estates)? How many languish in obscurity because no publishing house wants to re-release them and small presses can't secure the rights to print them? How many derivative works could be made from stories that are over 40 years old (thus bringing the originals back into the public light)?
Re:Great book (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>If there was no copyright, then everyone could simply copy the works of authors and they may not end up being paid for their work.
They aren't paid now.
Numerous authors have to sue RIAA or MPAA-affiliated companies, just to get paid. Example: The corporation that made Lord of the Rings claimed "we made no profit" and paid the director, scriptwriter, actors, and Tolkien's family nothing. Ditto Titanic and Avatar and Forrest Gump and.....
So explain again how copyright is "good"? These authors would be better off sticking a Paypal button in their books & asking for donations - they'd make more money than the lying asshat corporations pay them.
Tolkein is dead (Score:4, Insightful)
He can't write any more. No amount of compensation will convince Tolkein to do anymore work.
So why should the copyright still exist on his work?
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Re:Great book (Score:5, Insightful)
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For example, I really like Iain Bank's work, especially his Culture stuff. Let him set up an account- I'll pay $20 for the next book and when the account gets fat enough he releases it. If you use either electronic distribution, virtually all of this goes directly to him (and his editor) so you don't need to sell all that many copies- with on
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One thing that might be workable to some extent would be a multi-user patronage system. Rather than relying on one wealthy person, get a few thousand regular joes.
This was commonly done historically -- it's often known as a subscription system. Today, we associate that idea with magazines, where it continues to work the same way -- a certain number of people sign up ahead of time and are guaranteed to receive a copy of the magazine. These subscribers guarantee that a publisher can at least make up the cost of the publication, even if newsstand sales aren't that great.
But historically this was often done with books, musical scores, etc. as well. Often it involved
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I didn't know it was the government's job to ensure people are getting paid for their work,
You aren't paying attention then:
Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA)
Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA)
Federal Employee Compensation Act (FECA)
Occupational Safety and Health Administration Act (OSHA)
Unemployment Compensation
Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act
That's just a few for starters.
Re:Parent - Not A Troll (Score:4, Insightful)
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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]
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Re:Banewreaker (Score:5, Insightful)
>>The WW2 allies were hardly virtuous, what with fire-bombing of innocent civilians
It's not that simple.
Hamburg, for example, was partly in retaliation for Coventry earlier in the war. But Hitler only took the gloves off and started targeting civilians after the RAF started dropping bombs on German civilians. Why did the RAF target civilians, when the (evil) Nazis were refraining? Because the Luftwaffe had radar navigation, but the RAF thought they had the skill to astronavigate accurately enough to put bombs onto military targets. They didn't.
Then you could get into the whole Battle of the Beams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams), and whether it was ethical to redirect German bombers onto English farmhouses...
>>throwing minority Americans into death camps for the crime of having german/japanese grandparents
I don't think you know what the words "death camps" actually mean.
Re:Banewreaker (Score:5, Informative)
You're about to be modded troll for this bit:
throwing minority Americans into death camps for the crime of having german/japanese grandparents.
It's untrue as it is offensive. My grandfather, an off the boat German immigrant from the early 30's, joined the US Marines and fought during the war. His family was not rounded up into camps.
And death camps? Seriously? While the Japanese internment camps were indeed an atrocious violation of basic civil rights, they were limited to the West coast, and had living conditions a fair sight better than some other contemporary 'death' camps.
I get your point, soldiers on both sides did some pretty horrible things. But implying that we were not better than governments engaged in active genocide is inflammatory. And as an American, incredibly offensive.
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Glen Cook is another (Score:2)
where good and evil can sometimes swap places in the minds of the reader if not the populace in the story. Many of his books were recently reprinted in large paper back format making the stories accessible to many. His The Black Company series is a great story where the mercenaries start working for the bad guys but eventually end up for working for the good guys and even team up again with the bad guys. A nice back and forth. The one good point throughout is that being the good guys doesn't mean your n
Re:Banewreaker (Score:4, Informative)
Also, don't forget to check out Mary Gentle's Grunts, which is told from the point of view of the orcs... and who are definitely the bad guys. Oh yes.
Hilarious and in incredibly bad taste.
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.
Life imitates art (Score:5, Funny)
If that is not the best practical "in soviet russia..." joke, i don't know what is.
Re:Life imitates art (Score:4, Funny)
I've always thought... (Score:2)
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Meh (Score:2)
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]
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.
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It would have been nice to see a skillful representation of the Mordor viewpoint from within the constraints of the cannon.
Sadly, to my disappointment it isn't as the summary first stated,"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." But (as we discover reading further into the summary and the article) is instead a different satirical setting bearing many similarities to Tolkein's world.
So in the end it's another author doing a pol
But that is actually the point (Score:3)
The premise is NOT that Sauron was not evil but that history is written by the victor. IF Sauron had won, what would history have recorded of him?
Only in movies do the evil guys proclaim their evil. Hitler (oh come on, this is a thread about evil) never ever made a speech proclaiming that he was this evil creature who just wanted to see the world burn to create from its ashes a hellish world in which he himself would be the first in the gas chambers (diseased, crippled and non-arian)
So, if you take that his
Mordor Perspective... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sounds about right (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the classical fantasy/SF duality.
Quick-n-dirty how-to distinguish fantasy from science-fiction: It's not about elves vs spaceships. It's about conservatism vs progressivism.
A fantasy book is about preserving/restoring/keeping the old order. Calamity befalls, and it's up to the heroes to repair the world. The tyrant has obtained absolute power, and your task is to topple it and restore the rightful ruler(s). The gods are angry because the people have strayed from the "path" and things go suddendly to hell.
The sci-fi book is transformative. Change happens, and the world progresses. The old ways are discarded, the new ways begins (with their usual lot of gut-wrenching change) and life is transformed.
(and then, you have modern hi-tech thrillers, in which big change happens, except it has no lasting consequences whatsoever. But that's a different topic)
So, intrinsically, the Ring War in which Frodo and his merry band wins is fantasy. The Ring War in which Mordor wins would have been sci-fi.
Re: (Score:3)
And the Star War in which a desert planet dirt farmer saves the galaxy is also fantasy.
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Quick-n-dirty how-to distinguish fantasy from science-fiction: It's not about elves vs spaceships. It's about conservatism vs progressivism.
A fantasy book is about preserving/restoring/keeping the old order.
I'd think that's a bit of generalisation about fantasy and sci fi both. The literature is a lot more complex than that, I mean look at one of the founding pillars of modern fantasy, Michael Moorcock's Elric series, a hero sets forth specifically to change and modernise the old order. Set against that on the sci-fi side, Star Wars fits perfectly into your description of fantasy. Its much too simple to take broad general view of a vastly wide and varied body of works.
Re:Sounds about right (Score:5, Insightful)
Set against that on the sci-fi side, Star Wars fits perfectly into your description of fantasy.
A lot of people think (me included) that Star Wars is fantasy.
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Thats only one example though, neither sci fi nor fantasy can generally be considered "progressive" or "conservative", since there exists a full spectrum of ideologies and themes in both genres. Sci fi and fantasy are just the medium through which the themes are expressed, there's nothing intrinsically conservative about fantasy.
Re:Sounds about right (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong. The difference between SF and Fantasy is that SF *could* happen - its setting high tech. Fantasy *can't* happen - its setting requires magic of some sort.
Why do some people have to inject their politics into everything?
Re:Sounds about right (Score:4, Insightful)
That's actually an even worse criterion (Score:3)
That's actually IMHO an even worse criterion.
For a start, SF routinely relies on technologies that are very likely impossible. E.g., the quantum entanglement faster-than-light communication in Mass Effect 2 is flat out getting it wrong what "entanglement" means and does. It can't work that way. E.g., the lightsabers as a laser beam that somehow loops on itself and somehow bounces on other laser beams, is very much bogus.
Second, in fantasy the "magic" is routinely subject to rules and even calculations. In a
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If you've been on the Internet longer than five minutes, politics is fucking tiresome, mainly because of the zealots who insist on seeing everything through the lens of their politics.
Russian fantasy is different! (Score:3)
Russian fantasy is actually quite different. The motif of 'restoring the balance' is present in a lot of works, but quite a lot of fantasy books focus on _transformations_ of society or about factions vying to transform society. Lukjanenko's 'Night Watch' (which is available in English) is a typical example.
I particularly like Loginov's "The Many-handed God of Dalayn", though I'm not sure it's translated.
This might be a reflection of recent turbulent history in Russia.
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Sometimes a book makes a much more effective argument. Orwell comes to mind.
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But Orwell is also an example of how a book can be misinterpreted -- Animal Farm is commonly misread as a critique of communism.
HAL.
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You know, Tolkien never discussed the politics of his original set of books and said they are not meant to reflect contemporary politics.
The author of the 'response' says just about the same thing at the end, telling people to find something better to do if they don't like it.
In either case, your outrage is misplaced. Each author explicitly disavows any political statement. Authors who do inject politics into every single sentence and phrase tend to be outspoken, since they are trying to achieve poltiical c