If Tolkien wrote this millenium, would he be as famous?

Paul said:

Therein lies one big aspect.

I recently re-read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

There's not a chance that novel would make it past the first hurdle if sent out to agents today. not a chance.

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Maybe you just didn't understaaaaand it.

scarletpeaches said:

As opposed to the patronise-35-year-old-women generation?

Look, I didn't like the book. Deal with it. Maybe in a slightly less condescending tone next time, mmmkay?

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Everyone's entitled to like or dislike anything they read.

You are more than entitled to be condescending toward any book you think is terrible. And I'm entitled to draw certain conclusions about your critical acumen, based on not only this book, but on other books you've trashed over the years.

scarletpeaches said:

Maybe you just didn't understaaaaand it.

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he he. yeah, most likely.

that first chapter is outrageously bad. all over the shop. if edited it would become two lines at most. shocking.

around chap 5 or 6 the kernel is given. then he gets drunk/ silly, then sober, then drunk and then, well exhaustingly obvious.

still, and i suppose this is interesting, the IDEA was excellent.


guess it's all about the idea. ?

get a room you two!

Paul said:

he he. yeah, most likely.

that first chapter is outrageously bad. all over the shop. if edited it would become two lines at most. shocking.

around chap 5 or 6 the kernel is given. then he gets drunk/ silly, then sober, then drunk and then, well exhaustingly obvious.

still, and i suppose this is interesting, the IDEA was excellent.


guess it's all about the idea. ?

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I found the writing really inconsistent in DADoES. Though good, it's like two different people took turns writing it. I always attributed it to Dick going in and out of an inebriated state, though I could be wrong...

Like other people have said, he wouldn't be writing the same things today. Although I don't doubt he'd be just as wordy still, if Martin is anything to go by. Epic fantasy is lengthy.

But I can always hope that if it [LotR] came out today, it would be less in the way of "and we're walking...and we're walking...and we're walking...". I did so much skimming with Fellowship it's not even funny, whereas from what I've read of Game of Thrones so far, it may have been just as long but it was a lot more interesting. No offense to Tolkien fans...just not my cup of tea.

MJNL said:

I found the writing really inconsistent in DADoES. Though good, it's like two different people took turns writing it. I always attributed it to Dick going in and out of an inebriated state, though I could be wrong...

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well either that or reaching different poles at different times.

dont know much about his personal life but I def pick up depression as an underlying theme in some of his work.

Edit. just did a wiki check, mentions anxiety and other bits. yeah, a troubled man be the look of it

Yeah. I suggest trying A Scanner Darkly next, if you're interested in reading more of him. He wrote it after he got off drugs, and it's a real eye-opener for someone who's always been straight-laced like me.

yeah, must do. he work did give rise to some of my most fav movies after all.

MJNL said:

Yeah. I suggest trying A Scanner Darkly next, if you're interested in reading more of him. He wrote it after he got off drugs, and it's a real eye-opener for someone who's always been straight-laced like me.

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My personal favorites are A Maze of Death,
The Three Sigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and especially,
Ubik.

These are all books about the nature of reality, death, and how "things fall apart" in a constantly devolving universe..

Not everyone's cup of tea, certainly; dense, occasionally confusing, and way out there. But there's no one quite like him.

rugcat said:

My personal favorites are A Maze of Death,
The Three Sigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and especially,
Ubik.

These are all books about the nature of reality, death, and how "things fall apart" in a constantly devolving universe..

Not everyone's cup of tea, certainly; dense, occasionally confusing, and way out there. But there's no one quite like him.

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interesting. i'm trying to get back into SF (as i'm writing in that area now) but Sheep was tough work.

Tell me RC, did you finf Sheep tough, or is the rest of his work the same approach, i mean it that just his way. I read a short story (variety something) which wasnt so bad.(bleak, but not cluttered/ verbiage)

Yeah, good stuff. There's just something very genuine and personal about his works, yet they're simultaneously flippant. Interesting combination, for sure.

Paul said:

interesting. i'm trying to get back into SF (as i'm writing in that area now) but Sheep was tough work.

Tell me RC, did you finf Sheep tough, or is the rest of his work the same approach, i mean it that just his way. I read a short story (variety something) which wasnt so bad.(bleak, but not cluttered/ verbiage)

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Not particularly. If you found Sheep tough going, you probably will find the ones I mentioned even tougher.

If you're looking to read something else of his, You might enjoy Counter Clock World more.

rugcat said:

Not particularly. If you found Sheep tough going, you probably will find the ones I mentioned even tougher.

If you're looking to read something else of his, You might enjoy Counter Clock World more.

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thanks.

now, let me say, by tough i mean tough to get through the self indulgent, erratic/ cluttered and scatter-gun/ highly subjective sort of thing.

No such prob with Asimov or Vonnegut

Paul said:

thanks.

now, let me say, by tough i mean tough to get through the self indulgent, erratic/ cluttered and scatter-gun/ highly subjective sort of thing.

No such prob with Asimov or Vonnegut

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No, I get you.

I don't see his writing that way, although his style was always less important to him than the ideas, I'd say, so I wouldn't call him as fine writer, in that sense.

But the books I mentioned are not that different than Sheep in style, so I'd guess you wouldn't care for them.

Counter Clock World is more plot and character oriented, although still focused on concepts. (As I remember.) More coherent, in a way.

's cool.

yeah, cant do the cluttered thing at the mo. need more winter/ brandy/ fireside for that.

in short, a few weeks time...

Rugcat, Scarlet, behave or Pthom will lock yetanothertolkienthread.

Just for the record, I think Tolkien's notes on Ancrene Wisse are somewhat lacking.

So there.

Medievalist said:

Rugcat, Scarlet, behave or Pthom will lock yetanothertolkienthread.

Just for the record, I think Tolkien's notes on Ancrene Wisse are somewhat lacking.

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But was the movie better than the book?

Amadan said:

But was the movie better than the book?

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interesting.

as a rule of thumb, ive gone with the premise if 'the film is better the book is crap'

but Lotr is prob an exception to that rule.

scarletpeaches said:

Or if they were like me, they would grizzle about wasting two weeks ploughing through 180 pages of LotR and wondering when the bloody story starts. I've read shopping lists that are more interesting than that book. Nothing. Happens.

Well, apart from a bunch of creatures diddling around the countryside, singing occasionally and stopping for a meal here and there.

Fascinating.

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...which is why my 14 YO son watched the movies and I didn't feel a bit of guilt about it.

Amadan said:

But was the movie better than the book?

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They left out Slurry the cook's boy.

To steer back on-topic...

It would be fascinating to see Tolkien transferred to today. He was the sort of genius scholar who, given all our modern media access, would have been nerd-fans' dreams. George R.R. Martin recently confessed about how little of his fictional language he had worked out, to the disappointment of some fans. Meanwhile, Tolkien? My God. And then there would be all the political conflicts.

But like MJNL and Amadan already said, if J.R.R. Tolkien the human being was born later and emerged today, he'd have a different life, experiences, tastes and style. And then there's the market he'd enter. Did his works exist and form much of the foundation of modern Fantasy? Is he influenced by his own stuff?

I can't even fathom how the Fantasy market would have gone. We'd still get Mervyn Peake and C.S. Lewis, but I don't think Gormenghast and Narnia alone jumpstart things. The pulps would still run for a long time, though they'd probably still have their meager influence on modern prose. Without Tolkien's brilliance and connections, I don't know if the incredibly detailed world that opened up a lot of Fantasy writers could have come into the market, setting so much of the precedent and desire for others. You might not get D&D, it depends if you believe they were influenced by him, and that would be just as big a blow to the current sphere. But what fills that vacuum? I have no idea.

Even my speculation feels flimsy. It'd be neat to hear wider-researched Fantasy historians play around with this idea.

Related, I wrote a humor post once on the question of whether James Joyce could succeed in today's market. It's the same paradox: http://johnwiswell.blogspot.com/2010/11/bathroom-monologue-could-james-joyce.html

Of course, there's always the possibility that environment and coincidence makes more of a difference than we think and Tolkien writing today would have produced millions of words of Transformers fanfiction.

Rachel Udin said:

He'd not have CS Lewis to kick him around too. He used to have Best Friend envy from what I heard.

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Maybe our hypothetical author shift could just grab all the Inklings. I couldn't predict what Lewis today would be like, faced with a very different religious environment... but this is drifting from the topic.

rugcat said:

Yes, Tolkein can be difficult for the video game generation.

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I'm not sure that's a valuable label. There are many people who grew up before video games who didn't like LotR for the same reasons. Likewise, LotR continues to be read by readers in the current generation.

I think it's too easy to criticize "kids these days" like every generation before us. I suspect these impressions come because we're dealing with different sample sizes: the modern fantasy genre has a larger number of readers than it did a few generations ago, much less in Tolkien's time. And video games are played by an even larger group of people. If games/otherfantasy/etc were gone there might be more people reading Tolkien, but I don't think that would be because of a substantial change in them.

So I think a current Tolkien could find an audience for wordy work. My question is if he would still write that way after growing up in a world with different concepts of literature.

Medievalist said:

Just for the record, I think Tolkien's notes on Ancrene Wisse are somewhat lacking.

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Ah, but do you think they would be improved if he'd written them from this millennium?

Arianna Sterling said:

I did so much skimming with Fellowship it's not even funny, whereas from what I've read of Game of Thrones so far, it may have been just as long but it was a lot more interesting. No offense to Tolkien fans...just not my cup of tea.

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Until you get to Feast.