The Three-Body Problem might have had some interesting cultural narrative differences, but inexcusable infodump bore-fest sf transcends cultures.
I haven't read Three-Body Problem, but I really enjoyed The Wandering Earth (short stories.)
List of major characters in The Three-Body Problem:
Ye Zhetai - Physicist, professor at Tsinghua University
Shao Lin - Physicist, Ye Zhetai's wife
Ye Wenjie - Astrophysicist, daughter of Ye Zhetai
Ye Wenxue - Ye Wenjie's sister, a Red Guard Red Coast Base
Lei Zhicheng - Political commissar at Red Coast Base
Yang Weining - Chief engineer at Red Coast Base, once a student of Ye Zhetai
Yang Dong - String theorist and daughter of Ye Wenjie and Yang Weining
Ding Yi - Theoretical physicist, Yang Dong's boyfriend
Wang Miao - Nanomaterials researcher
Shi Qiang - Police detective, nicknamed Da Shi
Chang Weisi - Major-general of the People's Liberation Army
Shen Yufei - Japanese physicist and member of the Frontiers of Science
Wei Cheng - Math prodigy and recluse, Shen Yufei's husband
Pan Han - Biologist, friend/acquaintance of Shen Yufei and Wei Cheng, and member of the Frontiers of Science
Sha Ruishan - Astronomer, one of Ye Wenjie's students
Mike Evans - Scion of an oil magnate
Well done, Mike. You're the diversity.
The Inuit have 100 words for "infodump."
Oh, sure, you put one (probably) white man in a story and he gets all the credit for diversity. Typical.
How come there are no black people in the Nintendo universe? I can't think of any in the Super Mario Brothers canon, or in Super Smash Brothers.
I mean honestly. Even Heinlein or Asimov would have managed better than that.
I have diversity in my video games because I play Civ V. The stupid Russians keep nuking everybody. Last game I played, they nuked my one city that they could reach five turns in a row. This game, I haven't fought a war with them yet, but will have to soon because they are way ahead of me, spaceship-wise. They've been nuking the Iroquois.
I liked The Three-Body Problem a lot and was glad it won.
I did enjoy the Three Body Problem. I wonder how much of the inline historical explanation (say, about the various factions of Red Guards) was added by the translator as essential context for generalist non-Chinese readers.
I suspect that some of the info-dump feeling was an artifact of the translator, who did an excellent job in providing immediate context for what the meaning of the various orders, alliances and groups was. If they'd just mentioned the factions of red guards without context (as I suspect you could do for native speakers who get that from classes and family exposure), I'd have been lost.
Based on the plot summary at Wikipedia, I could go either way on The Three Body Problem.
Just skimmed through the article
So how far do we go to get more accurate representations of actual historical diversity? Should 10% of our mounted French knights in our game of "Agincourt" be women, Moors, and Aztecs, or 20% 50% or all of them?
You think I'm joking, I watch (actually I don't) anime that represent warring-states Sengoku Japan with nothing but middle-school-age girls playing the roles of Oda Nobunaga, Date Masamune, Ieyasu, Mushashi. There were no males allowed to play "Tanks" in Girls und Panzers. But...the teams were the usual, and they failed to accurately include the great Congolese and Brazilian tank corps.
Of course, the problem with seeking diversity here is that a given audience (included and excluded) wants battles and fighting. I did watch an anime representation of the Hundred Years War that had plenty of strong female characters, even dominant in screen time: witches, camp-followers, peasants, nuns.
2) "be able to conceive of a person radically different than themselves?"
Assumes that the male white Pole next door is the "same," I guess all such Poles are generic and only women and minorities are allowed to be subjects.
I enjoyed TTBP. I still have to read the second (translated) part of the trilogy, The Dark Forest.
I think the article's conclusion is right -- people who are anxious to insist that they can't do ANYTHING about the racism/sex/violence in their fantasy world because that's how the real world was don't know what they're talking about -- I'm skeptical of the argument tying it to poor knowledge of the diversity of the past.
The racism in Tolkien isn't defensible, but it's worth pointing out that the Lord of the Rings seems to be a weird amalgam of pre-1000 sagas and 19th century rural Britain. According to the article, pre-1000 Europe was comparatively homogeneous, so what I think we're seeing is that fantasy has been dominated by the spectre of Tolkien. White dudes + elves + made-up language.
The other question I have is how different ethnic groups would have been perceived by ye olde rural peasant. It doesn't do much for the guy's argument if YORP has had contact with foreigners, but views them either as savage invaders with weird customs, or the weird people that cousin YORP trades with. The Westerosi in ASOFAI aren't ignorant of the East, and there's lots of trade, but not a whole lot of cultural exchange beyond trade and politics.
So how far do we go to get more accurate representations of actual historical diversity?
I think the article's answer to that is the concluding sentences:
[I]t's okay to draw from history, but history does not wholeheartedly support any one of these fictional depictions. These come from creators making choices. And the choices they make have consequences.
Assumes that the male white Pole next door is the "same,"
Again, to quote the article:
But I would say in general that homogeneity is a myth. In any society there are people who appear more physically similar to each other than not. But within that society you have gender diversity, sexual diversity, [and] religious diversity. . . . I would remind them that any community that's more than two people, there's gonna be diversity within that community.
I don't know about peasants, but there were communities of people of African origin living in London permanently at least as early as Liz I.
Asian and Black History in Britain, 1500-1850
I don't think we can take the influence of Tolkien on others in this regard as accidental/contingent. Tolkien was hugely influential of course, but even within that sphere there have been many different directions taken (example: the routinization of magic). I think the persistence of color-homogeneity as a less-challenged trope is more down to it conveniently matching creators' preferences.
The Westerosi in ASOFAI aren't ignorant of the East, and there's lots of trade, but not a whole lot of cultural exchange beyond trade and politics.
And religion. I mean, a central plotline in the whole story is the spread of a new religion from the East, which is adopted by (among others) one of the rival kings. (Almost everyone else follows a different Eastern religion imported earlier.)
And all the characters are really very aware of their country's history of being colonised and conquered by successive waves of peoples from the East, including the previous ruling dynasty.
And one of the most powerful figures at court is an immigrant from the East.
And... well, best not to go on.
There is, actually, a huge amount of cultural exchange, emigration, immigration etc between west and east in the books.
GURPS YORP: coming soon to a game shop near you.
. . . not a whole lot of cultural exchange beyond trade and politics.
I don't know the answer, I'm not a history geek, but I recently read the "Very Short Introduction To The Silk Road" and it emphasized that there was a fair amount of cultural exchange -- I don't know how quickly that happened, but the two examples I remember are stringed instruments traveling from the Middle East (I think) to both Europe and China and the other was talking about contact between rural and nomadic tribes in Western China and that there was intermarriage and cultural exchange between them.
"Very Short Introduction To The Silk Road"
Just like I-376, very short merge lanes.
communities of people of African origin living in London permanently at least as early as Liz I.
That's why Dr. Who could have Martha Jones hook up with William Shakespeare, with nobody batting an eye, and it was totes historically accurate.
10 makes an interesting point, since really the only complaint I had about the Three Body Problem was how much infodump there was, especially in the early bits of the novel. Once it settled down into a story I enjoyed it a lot. Then I was frustrated because I hadn't realized going in that it was a tightly linked trilogy and that the rest of the books hadn't already been translated.
Also I thought this bit from the interview was kind of bizarrely unfair:
And all it takes a white woman to come in and say "Slavery is bad, justice is good!" And that was a huge part of Season 5 of Game of Thrones, a white person telling the brown people "Slavery is bad, justice is good!" and that's all that needs to happen. Daenerys' character arc is all about this.I mean, come on dude. She comes in and says that (and enforces it initially with a big army and stuff, not moral suasion), and then almost immediately everything goes to shit because societies are complicated and just showing up and upending them based on your own cultural beliefs is only going to create mass chaos. She spends almost the entirety of that part of the story trying to figure out how to make things (her vision of) better while everyone else around her desperately tries to figure out what exactly her idea of 'better' is on a social level and how to keep their culture intact (and struggle for personal advantage) at the same time. Then everything collapses and the mass violence that results is bad enough that being grabbed by an enormous flying lizard and carried off to some random field somewhere is her best option. There's a character arc there, sure, but it's definitely not that one.
Based on the plot summary at Wikipedia, I could go either way on The Three Body Problem.
Too many moving parts?
...and it was totes historically accurate.
"Possible" I might grant, but likely or probable? And the gap between the possible and the probable is what history, materiality, and contingency is about.
ObsWings had a good thread a while back about Rebecca in Ivanhoe, and whether Scott intended her to be the more attractive. His audience at the time certainly were Rebecca-fans, and were disappointed that I & R didn't end up together. But Scott made it known that it was exactly his purpose and point to show Rebecca as the superior, yet the relationship to be at the least improbable.
Diversity, when counter-factual, falls exactly into old classic liberal Horatio-Alger fantasies, deliberately trying to remove individuals from their concrete surroundings and real constraints and limitations, and make relationships and outcomes matters of character rather than socially determined.
When did Horatio-Alger fantasies become liberal?
"Even the liberal Weekly Standard...."
Yes, but when were classic liberals at all worried about diversity?
I wonder if there's a less interesting lens to think about ethnic diversity in medieval Europe than "how does this impact fantasy and sci-fi novels." Maybe, "how does it impact the 2016 Republican party primary"?
Sorry, it's misanthropy Wednesday over here.
Wait, EDIME impacts the 2016 Republican primary?! How? This sounds fascinating!
Spoilerific Three Body Problem speculation:
I was a bit surprised that 3BP was allowed to win the Galaxy award, given its portrayal of the Cultural Revolution and its politics. However, I then considered another jarring element: one of the protagonists asking for an alien invasion immediately after first contact, on the basis that Earth can't get its shit together. This position is popular, but not universally so, and that's the motivating conflict for the book. WTF? Why would anyone, much less many someones, ever think this would be a good idea?
This makes much more sense if you think of China in the throes of the Cultural Revolution as not being able to get its shit together, and the West/capitalism as the aliens being foolishly summoned by a persecuted intellectual after first contact/Nixon.
after first contact/Nixon
Idea for a scifi novel: humankind ventures beyond the solar system and makes first contact with what is initially thought to be an alien species but turns out to be a race of Richard Nixon clones.
The 2016 GOP Primaries: It's actually about ethnic diversity in medieval Europe.
"We clearly can't manage this ourselves maybe they'll do better they seem more functional anyway" doesn't seem like a super bizarre feeling to me, especially when the 'they' in question has the kind of advanced technology that really might help. I mean, you'd have to be not very bright/a bit of a fantasist with a strong ability to delude yourself about how things often turn out/in a fuck-it-burn-shit-down mood, but none of those things are hard to imagine. We definitely see plenty of people embodying at least two of those three traits running around all the time, and often the first one is the one that doesn't apply.
14.last: With few, if any, exceptions, YORP isn't the POV character for fantasy fiction/games. S/he might be for historical fiction, and you'd want to have a realistic answer for that, and insofar as YORP appears in your fantasy world, his/her interactions with your POC characters should be realistic-ish, but YORP's precise opinion doesn't matter that much in fantasy.
Once you've established that YORP wouldn't totally freak out at the sight of a POC (because it would have been not unprecedented IRL), you can use POC characters in your medieval world without them being obvious insertions*.
*funnily, I was going to finish that sentence with "like having a Mayan would be", but of course nobody in medieval Europe would have understood that a Mayan shouldn't be there, and I'm not even sure it would be possible to effectively explain just how ahistorical it would be. Sort of a funny notion.
37: yeah, but humans get xenophobic about slightly different humans; the xenophobia towards aliens seems like it would be off the charts. I mean, you'd certainly have a segment of the populace who'd basically treat such an alien race as saviors, but I'd expect that to be a pretty small sliver (essentially cultists, but the non-paranoid kind).
We get xenophobic in practice when the strange thing is around us, but if it's far away enough that we can project our anthropomorphic angels fantasies on it we're way, way less likely to do that. I mean, think about how Americans think about really seriously venomous snakes, or large apex predators or something compared to the way people who live near to them do.* As soon as they're far away we think of them as basically adorable, impressive dogs or characters in a Disney movie rather than what they are, which is really dangerous wild animals.
I know more than a few (very) urban people who seem almost incapable of recognizing** that there is such a thing as a dangerous animal, or that there's any way you could relate to an animal other than the way you'd relate to a pet without that amounting to some kind of psychological dysfunction.***
*In my experience the difference is around the level of the difference between "They're such majestic wonderful things and I wish I could have one to cuddle with and I think in a past life I may have been one of them" and "KILL IT KILL KILL KILL".
**On an intuitive or emotional level - they're not idiots.
***Not a hypothetical description I have heard this.
Or in other words I think that once they arrived, sure, there's be a lot of District 9 level stuff happening, but right up until the situation settled down there would be an awful lot of people - potentially even a majority - excited to meet our special new outer-space friends.
41: Like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind?
"We're going to need a bigger board with lights."
24 gets it right. It's such an obvious strawman, that it made me pretty skeptical of the rest of what this person is saying.
31
Link: "These are all things that tell us a lot more about ourselves than about the Middle Ages."
The question, as he says, isn't about accuracy, but how we (? some subset thereof) are currently using history, imaginary history, or counter-factual history to legitimate what forms of narrative or meta-narrative, current preferences and fashions.
Obvious classic examples include Connecticut Yankee, Howard's quasi-fascism, Jack Finney's nostalgia, L Sprague de Camp's obvious post-war developmental imperialism in Lest Darkness Fall. Willis's Doomsday Book may actually be anti-liberal.
So what is the agenda in say, showing a time-traveled modern woman finding or creating feminists in medieval Scotland?
I would contend it is about saying that back then too, individuals had all the options and agency, and being sexists or racists or militarists was about individual choices, then as now, and not determined by social structures or institutions or historical inertia.
That widespread social ills or problems (successes and accomplishments and general well-being) are mostly caused by individual micro-social behaviors, and will be solved by the application of will and the turning from vice to virtue, perhaps nudged with incentives. And if this looks like the "rational agent" of neo-classical economics, that is because it is. It's all (neo-) liberalism.
34: In the history of various kinds of "first contact" between one group of humans and another, an invitation to the "aliens" to invade as a way of helping out one side in a local war is very common. E.g. the Canary Islanders believed that all of humanity was limited to their small group of islands. Europeans arrived in the fourteenth century as a genuine alien invasion. Some locals wanted the advanced technology and assistance in a local war and invited the Spaniards in, ultimately leading to the complete annihilation of the local civilization.
The pattern repeats with variants several times in North and South American history.
Oh, and (spoiler) this plea is delivered in response to an explicit warning from an alien that the rest of his race are evil invaders. Don't get me wrong, I liked the book, I just don't think that bit worked.
That still sounds parallel to a lot of the Europeans-show-up stuff. "Evil?! Sweet! Then they won't have any qualms at all against eviling those guys over there!" sounds to me like a pretty recognizable human reaction in a lot of contexts, large and small.
That or just "beautiful fantasy that makes me feel good about myself and is supported by all sorts of utopian fiction" versus "this one guy warned me behind everyone elses' back" is one of those conflicts where it's pretty easy to predict where most people will go.
30: Classical liberals talked a blue streak about universals, as in all men created equal, and meant it, within the limiting to white men, unless otherwise economically profitable. It was always laden with contradictions and struggles, as in the long time it took to extend the franchise to all white men.
The argument between universal ideals and concrete particulars and contingency continues to this day, as in why can't a Jew or high-school dropout become President?
One dialectical American narrative goes back to Honest Abe, as in "Even a farmboy can become President" against "But wasn't Lincoln so very special?"
This of course goes to Obama, in which Obama's personal character and qualities prevailed, rather than an entire social system running in high gear to get this particular man, rather than others, into the White House. I mean, anybody at all coulda done Harvard Law Revue.
And it's your own damn fault you're poor or in prison!
49: I thought that starting out with parts about how living through something like the Cultural Revolution would break people in varying ways made that choice more understandable than it would have been in a vacuum, I thought. It still seemed awfully flippant as a choice, but it also made me think about how hollowed that character had become while passing as functional and how understandable that was. I had a harder time with the video game aspect.
Obviously a Jew can become president. They just have to believe in Jesus.
However, I then considered another jarring element: one of the protagonists asking for an alien invasion immediately after first contact, on the basis that Earth can't get its shit together. This position is popular, but not universally so, and that's the motivating conflict for the book. WTF?
I remember Ronald Reagan riffing on this to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Not to speak Internet, but Arthur Chu is still a thing?
I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
53: Yeah, the one traumatized character doing that I could buy. An international movement coalescing around that position I have a problem with. But it's a pretty good book and a)I have my theory and b)it's just a book; I should really just relax.
58: Yeah, the large secret movement was what I meant by "the video game part" more than the video game itself, but I'm assuming it's going somewhere in the later books.
56: My understanding is that the Blue Fairy waved her wand at him and turned him into a person.
I think the thing about Tolkien isn't that everybody is white, and everything is all homogenous. There are dark-skinned people, they are just all evil, or at least in league with evil.
Even if the people in the organization generally are told that the coming invasion isn't necessarily benign and friendly but actually a real invasion/colonization somewhere in the initial recruiting period I'm totally willing to believe people join the group, especially since, from what I can remember, the die is cast really early on so they're mostly just collaborators, not actively bringing the aliens there. And people do that all the time - at least as often as they would try to resist the aliens. I'm guessing that something like "and then they'll destroy the earth and kill all of us!" is probably left out until a little later on, though. And since they won't be showing up for ages and the organization right now comes with benefits it doesn't seem strange to me that people who go with it ("ah, by that time we'll have figured out a way to deal with it anyway" is something I remember hearing from people about climate change as recently as the very late 90s, even though "by that time" was pretty much that exact moment.)
61 - Hey, there were those short hirsute ones with long beards and hair that had been dispossessed and scattered throughout middle earth living partially assimilated with local cultures but still speaking an accented version of the local language due to their own secret language they kept alive through scholarship that Tolkein says he based partly on Hebrew and that still maintained a longing to return to the homeland through songs about eventually returning there and other cultural forces (but who, despite that, were still kind of ambivalent about leaving where they actually lived to reclaim it) and who faced hostility from other groups partially due to their obsessive greed for gold which is what had eventually led to their downfall in the first place. Those guys were ok.
TTBP seemed like it was written just for me, what with the 20th century Chinese history, math problem, instructive video game puzzle, plain old sci fi, and what have you. I loved it, but it could be dry and did infodump. I would have voted for Goblin Emperor or the Ancillary book for Hugo, both of which were also great but more approachable. I'm looking forward to reading the next two books in the trilogy, but I can't imagine how they could maintain the same feel.
47: This is true even in purely European contexts--that's how the English got into Ireland 800 years ago. Oops.
All of these sound more exciting than Lord Jim at the moment. I'm getting sick of the narrator.
63: That's why dubs of Israeli movies are usually done with Scottish voice actors.
47: John Kessel's "Invaders" doesn't seem to be online, but it's a fun story that was anthologized in his _Meeting in Infinity_, so I'll recommend it to people whose library has a decent selection of early-90s SF.
I'm working my way through the Fred Vargas policiers. They are really strange, but I'm enjoying their weird ways, usually gruesome beginning then not much happens for next 100-150 pages except intra-flic noodling then suddenly everything kicks into really bizarre high gear. My favorite so far is when they used the cat to track down the kidnapped policewoman, by attaching some kind of GPS emitter to the cat and setting it loose in central Paris then the cat intrepidly and (sorry!) doggedly went like 20 km including across the péripherique straight to Nell tied on the train tracks. No mention of like who approved the helicopter that just suddenly was available or wait this cat did what? Awesome books.
68: !!!
I read one of those about ten years ago and forgot the title, the author, and the names of all the characters shortly thereafter.
Finally you have let me know what web searches for and questions to internet forums ("I read a book that looked like a mystery, but it wasn't actually a mystery, it was mostly about this woman who knew how to repair cars, and how all these guys kept annoying her, and they were also sort of investigating a werewolf, in a small town somewhere in a really hot region of France") never did.
Ha! So happy to oblige!
Adamsberg, Danglard, Forestier, etcetera...
Arthur Chu pretty reliably posts feminist stuff on Twitter. He's writing for a couple of places now -- maybe Salon? I can't keep track.
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Moby, I thought of you! Walking through LOVE Park tonight and got stopped by five lovely Nebraskans who wanted me to take their photo. They were pretty adorable. Some of them weren't even from a city ("western Nebraska," whatever that means.)
(They are pilgrims, naturally -- the city has 17,000 guests here for the World Meeting of Families in advance of the Pope's visit.)
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If they don't show up on film, it means they were really Iowans.
Western Nebraska is where Carhenge is.
||Just in case any of you, like me until just now, haven't seen this yet:
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Mackenzie Wark ...reads Hiroki Azuma. I like read him years ago. Just kidding. Good site just discovered.
"the narrative is only a surplus item" ...Azuma
Only? ONLY??
The narrative, personal narratives are the literal surplus value created in post-consumption, prosumption societies of database animals sharing selected bits and pieces of commodified media:shipping, slash, yaoi, doujinshi...but much much more than that, the social media and sites that we use to narrativize and socialize our databases of experience and consumption.
Our identifying discourses about history and games, sexism and hegemony, are the profitable product in a circulation of commodified affect.
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I need to figure out what to read to my 9 year old next. We just finished The Martian, and before that it was the Magic 2.0 series which is cheap on Kindle, and before that it was Ready Player One. I also tried Hitchhikers's Guid to the Galaxy, which he thought was pretty dumb. That one may need to wait a few years. So, recommendations?
The Hero's Guide to Saving the Castle isn't bad.
Biggest myth about the European Middle ages and pre-industrial history in general must be that there's little cultural change, everyone lives the same life as their grandparents. Reflected in fantasy; every fictional history is 5000 years with 150 years worth of historical developments.
Middle ages (or gets less space
Gah.
Middle ages (or precolumbian history or whatever) gets less space in history books than the last 200 years so people assume not much happened somehow.
76: You could try Mission: Earth (published in separate volumes but one novel, basically).
AHIMSUB, YORP (PBUH), INAL, OSTMWHYB
There's a tremendous amount of Robert Howard in Game of Thrones, I think. Unacknowledged. But Howard's much better.
I think Game of Thrones is rife with racism, moreso than Tolkien. Tolkien has racist atmospheriqs, plus the pretty indefensible orchs. On a very nerdy note, I think some of the hobbits are said to be dark-skinned.
There's a tremendous amount of Robert Howard where it counts.
Martin more "rife than racism" than Tolkien? Nope.
Say what you will about Tolkein, but I think The Rapture is a damn fine movie!
Lord knows I'm not qualified to comment on this, but I always assumed that Tolkein's political project, if there was one, was to take back the Norse/Germanic/Anglo-Saxon heroic ethos and mythology, in which he was a world class expert, from Nazis and other race nutters. If that's true (big if) then it seems pretty unlikely that the books would be more than incidentally racist, except insofar as they were the product of a white Englishman in the 40s. But I read the books once 30 years ago and thought they were just OK. The Peter Jackson movies had some pretty explicit anti-Muslim stuff which was obvious at the time, I thought, but that seemed different.
And I assume that a quick internet search will reveal 10 billion pieces of writing I could read on this topic.
Yeah, I don't have time to read a bunch of stuff either, but wasn't there some interview where JRRT was asked about that topic, and he said that, if the political situation in Europe had influenced him at all, it was only on an unconscious level? Something like that anyhow.
76: _the homeward bounders_ or _dogsbody_? Or _howls moving castle_ if it's not too confusing that it isn't exactly the movie.
85: Yeah, okay. They're both objectionable, but in very different ways. I'm hesitant to say Game of Thrones is worse, but racism is at least more rife in the sense that a larger share of the books is devoted to offensive stuff.
76: Shouldn't we just have some kind of super-meta thread for YA recommendations? All the DWJ suggestions are good. Also what about Rosemary Sutcliff or Peter Dickinson books? Lloyd Alexander? Earthsea? Poe?
Gillian Bradshaw! Maybe a little old for 9, but maybe not if being read aloud.
At that age we were rereading Arthur Ransome books for the 92nd bazillionth time. Proceed with caution.
76: Keep with the theme of books that are current motion pictures and go with Into Thin Air. (yeah, I know technically the current movie is supposedly not based on that book but the other accounts but the other accounts are largely shit)
The fuck? I'm not even that drunk yet.
87: Race nutters love Tolkien, so if that was his project it failed. He presented a world divided between white good guys (be they elf, dwarf, hobbit or human they were all white good guys) and dark, oriental or outright bestial evil guys. Even his setting equivalent of the Welsh were universally evil (the "Wildlings"); the relatively benign Woses were basically primordial precursors of whiteness, something like Neanderthals. His appropriation of the chivalric romance evacuated it of its partially-redeeming ability to conceive of a Noble Enemy or believe in any lability between the sides of Good and Evil. No Saracen heroes such as are to be found in Orlando Furioso or noble Muslims per the legend of Saladin would cut it in Middle-Earth. White supremacists notice this stuff and they absolutely fucking cream over it.
There are huge problems with Martin's "Essos" -- unlike "Westeros" it's a rather inchoate melange of grotesqueries which is revealing of a lack of care in its conception -- but Daenerys' "white saviour" narrative is not un-problematic in ASOIAF, quite the reverse; most of her story goes on after the initial flush of her first victories to illustrate how she's a destabilizing and not necessarily beneficial force and how her ascendance is very far from guaranteed. The Dothraki are not just simplistic savage stereotypes, nor really (and this is true to the spirit of ASOIAF) is anyone from Essos, even the worst of them. ASOIAF centers on Westeros but is plentifully supplied with non-white characters who are actual characters and not avatars of an abstract evil.
Martin has his problems, but comparing the two of them is absurd.
(Some of the above is probably less apparent in Game of Thrones as a TV show. I personally was pretty revolted by the portrayal of the Dothraki on the show and the decision to turn Daenerys' consensual sex with Khal Drogo into an act of rape. Martin is certainly liable for having been willing to sign off on some of those decisions, and that reflects poorly on him; but the books which are the actual source matter are nevertheless quite different.)
L Sprague de Camp's obvious post-war developmental imperialism in Lest Darkness Fall.
Impressive, considering this was actually written in the late thirties and in fact has its main character transported back in time from Mussolini's Rome.
98: there are no "wildlings" in Tolkien. There are also a substantial number of white villains.
Yeah, well, whether it was Tolkein or Martin, they definitely represent the Welsh.
No, the Orcs (squat, bowlegged, ugly, malicious, speaking an incomprehensible guttural tongue) are clearly the Welsh.
101, 98 Tolkien also calls the Woses the Wild Men of Dunland. So close enough analog to the Wildlings?
103 The Black Speech of Mordor has always seemed to me to be modeled most closely on Turkish, IIRC it even has infixes.
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Eid Mubarak! I'm going on a road trip to some old abandoned historic site today. A dangerous trip for me considering some rather disturbing intestinal developments that have plagued me of late. Will report in detail! Just kidding. Will upload some pics to the Flickr pool soon. Of the site, of course.
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It's a reasonable assumption that Tolkien was racist, because 1892-1973, but equally it's ridiculous to suggest that his Middle Earth mythos was principally about race rather than European politics. "The Hobbit" was not even that, merely a limited exercise in world building for fun, using Beowulf as a jumping off place. Nevertheless, it would be harder to find fiction written by white people before about 1980 that did not include racist assumptions than that did; and that also goes for writers who were self consciously anti-racist.
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Why has Unfogged decided to render at about 8pt in Chrome? All other sites are normal.
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His appropriation of the chivalric romance evacuated it of its partially-redeeming ability to conceive of a Noble Enemy or believe in any lability between the sides of Good and Evil.
Er, Gollum? Denethor? Frodo? Saruman? The entire plot of the book is about that issue.
But it is the most venerable of Internet Traditions that people will troll others by posting ignorant crap about Tolkien, so I shouldn't really fall for it.
re: 103
In the films, the Orcs are clearly from east London or Essex, which, you know, fair enough.
Tolkien created a simplistic good-versus-evil framework, which he then proceeded to undermine. It's not surprising that the question of racism in Tolkien is a contested one, since both aspects are his creation.
I stand fully behind both 109 and 103 as interpretations of the Orcs.
I would rather have enjoyed a US-accented Lord of the Rings film in which the Orcs were rednecks.
100: Huh. I honestly did check the Wiki page, but the number "1949" of the reprint was all I saw. Funny how that works. Doesn't feel like Unknown material, the Incompleat Enchanter Series more in line.
I pretty much stand by my position on De Camp's wrong kind of technological determinism. Somehow had a strong dislike for the guy since the 60s, he was on the wrong side of Vietnam and was even a more classic Campbellian than Heinlein. Smells like fascism.
Having just finished William's Country and City I should have something to say about Tolkien, but I don't care.
If you remembered the book better, you would have recalled the hero referring to Mussolini as "Benny the Moose".
114. "de Camp's obvious post-war developmental imperialism" is instead more like "The Martian" with time travel. The protagonist is stranded in 6th century Italy, which was falling apart politically and about to be invaded by the Eastern Roman Empire, which invasion led to decades of war and pestilence.
So the guy is trying to save his own life, and he figures out that the way to do it is to "science the shit out of it."
Really the best bit is at the very end where he actually does get into some imperialism by advising Justinian to conquer Arabia, because a heretical religion is going to arise there in a few decades and he should be on top of it.
What, by the way, is the right kind of technological determinism?
I'm not sure what science I would know that would both seem useful to a 6th century Italian and that I could do without materials I could reasonably obtain as an interloper in 6th century Italy.
Proper treatment of drinking water, sterile techniques during surgery, horse collars, stirrups, buttons.
I think the first two might not produce immediately obvious benefits. I'm also not sure I could make or direct the making of a passable horse collar. I'll go with stirrups and buttons.
What Padway starts with is teaching Arabic numerals and bookkeeping, which seemed plausibly convincingly useful.
And then goes to printing and distillation. I doubt I could design a still without years of work, but a printing press seems as if it couldn't be that hard.
If you could get them to give you artisans to work with you, neither seems very hard. But I think you'd have to impress them with something flashy (and immediately useful) before you'd get that kind of help.
I guess that's why you should always carry a gun.
118. That's the whole driver of the story, really.
121. Then the printing press, paper, brandy, and telescopes for signal towers, IIRC. To show he's not an engineering god, de Camp has him repeatedly fail to make a working pendulum clock.
120. I think he might have made a horse collar, too.
And maybe a couple of anti-personnel mines. Which reminds me of what I saw a Facebook the other day. Some asshole draped a Timex over the top of a Claymore mine and captioned it "I made a clock. When do I get to met the president?"
There's a story by Poul Anderson, "The Man Who Came Early," about a US airman stationed in Iceland who gets thrown back to the 11th century. It's the opposite of de Camp's optimism. The guy can't make or do anything and eventually dies.
(Which reminds me, Padway is successful initially because he knows Latin and Italian, so he can learn the semi-Latin that 6th century Italians spoke very quickly.)
I don't know if a Ponzi scheme counts as technology, but that might be a good thing to try.
128: Are they sure Italians were speaking quickly as far back as the 6th century?
I doubt I could design a still without years of work, but a printing press seems as if it couldn't be that hard.
The ink in particular is not easy, if I remember Lewis Dartnell's "The Knowledge" (which read). But a still is really simple. Boiling vessel, cap, cooling tube, water jacket, collection vessel. People build them in prisons, after all. The tricky bit might be getting the temperature just right. You'd need a thermometer - but that too is not difficult. (Mercury or alcohol, plus a bit of elementary glassblowing.)
Ryan North's Poster to Keep in Your Time Machine is exactly what you guys need.
Oh, sure, the glassblowing sounds elementary to you. Some of us went to American schools that didn't have fancy glassblowing classes.
133: I got Newt the t-shirt of that a couple of years back.
You wouldn't need them - the Romans were good with glass. You could just find a glassblower and tell him what you needed. (Thin-walled narrow tube with a bulb at one end.) All you're supplying is the concepts.
I suppose that they had ink too, so you could just have got an inkmaker to experiment with thick sticky varieties of ink until you found one good enough for your printing press.
Printing press might be a bad idea for another reason, though. You know what the Romans didn't have? Paper.
Brandy doesn't require as much of an infrastructure to be effective.
What, by the way, is the right kind of technological determinism?
The autonomist Marxian, but anti-Brenner thesis kind, of course.
(Social ramifications of technology is an interest of mine. As in (Meiji) the crowd around the accelerationists and their enemies, see the Mackenzie Wark link way above. Current reading, Toscano Cartographies of the Absolute. Last book got, Nick Dyer-Witheford (wow, that' so British), Cyber-Proletariat, Global Labour in the Digital Vortex)
Here are the famous Galaxy Ads. I hold a grudge for a long time.
Apparently De Camp has a lot of fans. I always thought he was way too interested in Howard and Lovecraft. The subtle way LSDC is right wing is a pretty good place to look at post-modern liberalism, and as I said Connie Willis is a good counter.
Another one is Harlan Ellison
And if you have wine and distilling, you only need to find caffeine (hint: look in Ethiopia) and you can make Buckfast.
Distillation isn't hard if you don't mind wasting a bunch of alcohol. You need a boiler and a cool surface. It's optimizing the process that requires effort, and even that can be done empirically with no thermometer in sight.
I think gunpowder would be the kind of thing that's get you real power in the 6th century. All the ingredients were known at the time, IIRC. It's a matter of messing with proportions until you get the right mix.
And, for that matter, Kahlua.
That might be a good second step - invest your money in trading voyages (equipped with the compass and sextant you have carefully invented) to bring promising trade goods like coffee to Europe, centuries ahead of when they actually arrived.
If you're willing to chance it on a long ocean voyage I bet you could sell chocolate for it's weight in gold in 6th century Italy.
And there's no way I'm inventing a sextant unless I brought the plans with me.
Anyway, they already had the astrolabe. How big of an improvement is a sextant? Sailing the Atlantic in a galley seems like a bad idea regardless of how good you are at navigating. Maybe making a longboat would work.
Well, a backstaff then. Surely any child can remember how to design a backstaff from his Celestial Navigation classes in primary school.
114, 116: I've long had a, perhaps unfair, disdain for the time traveler alternate history genre. It seemed to me to be crowded with "What if General Lee had had a division of Sherman tanks at Gettysburg? That would have been totally cool!" type wankery.
Google says that the mariner's astrolabe is a different thing and much later than the astrolabe itself, which you couldn't really use at sea.
All I'd probably be able to do is point at the whatever style of loom was in local use and say, "You won't fucking believe where that's going to lead to someday."
Or pace 141, go front spear and kill a wyld boar.
148: Army of Darkness was really good.
Germ theory of disease and penicillin ftw.
I guess I've never seen Army of Darkness all the way through. I just kept catching parts of it on cable.
154: You just build a platform on gimbals for the guy using the astrolabe.
Seems like that time-traveling poster would be a great way to fuck up the timeline to make it so you never existed, creating a paradox, and thereby blowing up the universe. Better advice if you go back in time would be to lay low, keep away from history, and try not to kill anything.
89: Tolkein had an interesting view of the relationship of his work to Europe.
First, he insists that the relevant parts of the trilogy had already been conceived before WWII, and he rejects any kind of allegorical reading of his work.
From the forward of LOTR:
I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history - true or feigned- with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author."
Specifically regarding WWII:
"The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dur would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves."
Surely that's a bleak and radical enough reading of WWII and its outcome to satisfy even bob.
Takes a bit to get going, but the "Twentieth Voyage of Tijon Tichy" (Lem) is nice history/time romp. (And surprisingly, an online reading.)
OT: FFS. Does it really even help his client to say that loud? (If the answer is yes, don't tell me.)
101: "Wild Men" not "wildlings."
108: But I see you're as programmatically dense a motherfucker as ever, since painfully obviously I was talking about that issue as it pertains to non white characters. Now do stop banging your pots, Ruprecht. If you keep banging your pots, you won't have any pots to bang.
Depressingly, I think there's a pretty fair chance that it does.
Ruprecht isn't here man. Or he's lurking if he is. (If so, "Hi.")
165: Oh, there is an actual poster with that handle, isn't there? *bows humbly in their imagined direction*
163.1: nope, still wrong. Definitely not portrayed as universally evil, but (partly justifiably) aggrieved, dispossessed and misled. (And, ultimately, redeemed; they come to terms with the people of Rohan.)
What if General Lee had had a division of Sherman tanks at Gettysburg?
That's just no fun. "What if I had had a division of Sherman tanks at Gettysburg?" is where the money is. (Presumably I'd be establishing my own Central Pennsylvanian banana republic.) Or even more so what we're discussing: Who doesn't love the idea of exploitative time traveling mercantile colonialism? Go back in time, impress the primitives with shiny baubles that are a century or two out of date, and come back with all the gold you can fit in your time machine.
And if your time travel logic lets what you do in the past affect the future, 1) your changed present time will possibly be more advanced due to having had the industrial revolution in the 600s or whenever, and 2) gold will be even more valuable due to your harvesting of the past. Oh, sure, you will have changed society in irrevocable ways and you probably won't even be able to understand anyone else, but whatevs.
Bananas won't grow in Central Pennsylvania.
There's some growing in Pittsburgh.
167: Yes, the odd paragraph of infodump here and there is totally the same thing as having complex non white characters in a book, isn't it, you fucking prat.
You have really not evolved at all from the good old days of calling LeGuin the Real Racist. And that was almost ten years ago. It's a bit sad.
The Wild Men aren't non-white. They're darker-haired than the fair-haired men of Rohan (whom they call, IIRC, the "Strawheads") but as far as I remember they aren't described as dark-skinned. They're pretty clearly inspired by the Britons, given that they get displaced by the (very Anglo-Saxonish) men of Rohan.
Rohan is a far more horse-based society than the Anglo-Saxons were.
I am kind of impressed that you're carefully logging blog comments from 2006, but it would be good if you devoted that sort of attention to detail to your actual arguments.
Tolkien's narrative is racist in the direct sense that it imagines a world of racial hierarchy. Elves really are better than humans, who are in turn better than orcs. If that setup for a story is inherently racist, then one can't argue that Tolkien isn't racist.
I think it's reasonable to protest, however, that an allegorical connection of orcs to Africans is plainly not part of Tolkein's intent. Orcs are monsters, and are always and everywhere clearly differentiated from humans.
When you get to the Haradrim, on the other hand, it's a bit trickier. Tolkien is pretty clearly invoking some kind of human racial distinction. The Haradrim aren't given distinct character attributes; they are anonymous enemies, and maybe it's inherently racist to cast other ethnic groups as being on the other side of your virtuous heroes. But I don't see it that way.
Tolkien clearly doesn't regard the Haradrim as inherently inferior - either morally or intellectually or whatever. Men are Men. Here, Sam is confronted with a Haradrim corpse:
"It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil at heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace."
Re: Tolkien, I always found his treatment of the "swarthy men" of the east and south to be the more obvious example of racism than "OMG, orcs are totally racist because they obviously stand for [Africans, Asians, whatever]!" It's true that the easterners/southerners aren't necessarily evil, but they are weak and easily dominated by Sauron, in contrast to the noble blond haired blue eyed (except Aragorn) Numenorians.
Someone needs to start writing alternate Middle Earth history. What if the dwarves had had a division of Sherman tanks at the Battle of Five Armies?
Tolkien's narrative is racist in the direct sense that it imagines a world of racial hierarchy
Well, but does it? Elves aren't just a race of Men in the way that Dunlendings or Haradrim are - they're unquestionably a separate species. They are, in fact, a separate creation. Dwarves too, for that matter. The narrative is speciesist, if anything - and a narrative about an encounter between humans and a superintelligent (or even supermoral) nonhuman species, I don't think that's necessarily a racist narrative, unless it's obviously being used as an allegory for an encounter between different human races. (And not even always then. "The War of the Worlds" is an allegory for the encounter between European and African humans; I don't think you'd get far arguing that it's a racist narrative just because it portrays the Europeans/Martians as far more intelligent than the Africans/humans.)
"Racist" is complicated. I mean, staying within the vast universe of white people, Tolkien clearly sees a racial? ethnic? but fundamentally important distinction between Numenoreans and everyone else -- the people of Rohan may be awfully good with horses, but you wouldn't expect them to run anything bigger than a ranch. So I don't think there's any way to say the Lord of the Rings isn't racist in the sense of having ethnic differences between groups of (a) sentient beings and (b) humans be fundamentally important.
OTOH, I think he's at least trying not to be racially hostile, as evidenced by the sort of stuff noted in 175. So, yes racist, maybe not all that terrible a person, but that doesn't make him not racist.
they're unquestionably a separate species.
I can question it. Elves and men can reproduce and the offspring is viable and able to reproduce. That's kind of central to the story.
It's true that the easterners/southerners aren't necessarily evil, but they are weak and easily dominated by Sauron, in contrast to the noble blond haired blue eyed (except Aragorn) Numenorians.
But the Numenoreans were also weak and easily dominated by Sauron. He managed to con them into trying to invade and occupy Valinor ("the Eldar will welcome us with flowers and chocolate!") as a result of which they all got killed and their country got wiped out.
180: but that's the wrong definition to use. Tolkien's universe is a Creationist one and Men and Elves were separately created. Therefore separate species.
But Dwarves and men/elves can't reproduce. Or nobody tried.
I liked the concept of the Asimov story where someone badly wishes it had been classical civilization that developed the Industrial Revolution, and so sends back in time a bunch of scrolls with carefully-translated technical information for their consumption, but it turns out that this communication was exactly why there was the mini-flourishing of ephemera like the Hero steam engine, it simply failed to thrive in the cultural and economic environment.
(Although the story's execution was pretty just-so-ish.)
Well, but does it? Elves aren't just a race of Men in the way that Dunlendings or Haradrim are - they're unquestionably a separate species.
Tell that to Elrond.
If we're going to invoke the scientific concept of species here (which, of course, Tolkein doesn't) then we need to talk about scientific racism in the real world.
Scientific racists regard race and species as matters of degree. Africans are inherently inferior, the theory goes, because of their genetic makeup, which is different, but not quite sufficiently different to make Africans a separate species.
181: Sauron seduces them by appealing to their eventually overweening sense of pride (and desire to live forever like the elves), which is a bit different than just dominating through intimidation and fear, as he does with the other groups of men. He's so overawed by the Numenorian army that lands in Middle Earth that he allows himself to be carried off the Numenor as a prisoner rather than fight them openly, after all. AFAIK it is never suggested that he had resort to wiles when dealing with men other than the Numenorians.
This may be the nerdiest series of comments I've ever made at unfogged.
The paper-bag test: hold a corner of the bag against one ear to check for pointiness.
189: They had a division of Sherman tanks.
Beyond race or species, bloodlines are of central importance in Tolkein's world. I'm fond of it, but it's reactionary.
But the Numenoreans were also weak and easily dominated by Sauron.
Not weak, and I don't know about easily. They were able to challenge the demigods. It's a story of hubris and overreach, to explain the fallen state of the world.
Time-travel mercantilism is the underlying premise of Charles Stross' series called The Merchants' War (or whatever title it carries now that it has been consolidated from six slender books to three hefty ones). Or maybe timeline arbitrage. But it's the same general idea.
Also, the original article is sorta off on 14th-century Poland. It really was a very white place, though the territory ruled by the Kings of Poland and the Grand Dukes of Lithuania (one and the same, in personal union since, I think, 1256) was often much larger than contemporary Poland.
189: Yes, the Easterlings and the Haradrim are indeed portrayed as formidable fighters to a point but morally weak, easily deceived and generally inferior. The sort of people who only understand fear and force, basically, which of course was the British colonialists' view of "wogs" going way back, which of course was a very explicitly and literally racist view.
(Derailment-thy-name-is-ajay will probably immediately attempt a false equivalence with some random villain from a Western context, likely Wormtongue, but Men not-of-the-West are get that treatment consistently and virtually without differentiation as whole peoples throughout Tolkien's work. Being seduced by the Dark was an episode for Numenoreans; it's a basic trait of Easterlings. Trying to tap-dance around this being racism is just folly.)
As for the orcs, I don't think they're meant as an insult to any specific race, they're more like a mash-up of everything Tolkien found most repugnant: "The Orcs are stated to be corruption of the human form seen in Elves an Men. They are squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes;in fact, degraded and repulsive versions of the least lovely Mongol types." (The infamous quote from Letter 210.) People who say they can't be racist because they're monsters seem to miss the point that a major part of the purpose of racism is to demonize the racial other as subhuman and demonic, worthy only of destruction or subjugation... which is precisely and probably not by chance what the orcs are and why they look the way they look.
Derailment-thy-name-is-ajay
Really? I thought my name was Ruprecht.
195.1 and .2 are just factually wrong, btw, but it's pretty clear that Castock is referring to some imaginary text inside his head (with black Welsh Wildlings or some such) so that's not a huge surprise.
(Interesting fact: why, according to Tolkien, are the Haradrim so opposed to the Westerners - to the point of allying with absolutely anyone against them? Not because they are inherently weak or evil, but because the evil Westerners occupied their country, ruled it as a colony and sold them as slaves.)
103, 109 gave the guys a good laugh this morning.
I was puzzling last night why I'm pretty totally uninterested in sci fi /fantasy but happily down vast swathes of de Troyes, Marie de France, etc, and love love love eg Penelope Fitzgerald, Townsend Warner and Mantel not to mention the utterly lunatic F Vargas, so far fetched imaginings are clearly not what puts me off sci fi/fantasy. The direction this thread has gone in might give a bit of a clue tho.
I believe they had stirrups in Europe by the sixth century AD. Since I haven't checked, you can use this as a test of my pure knowledge.
Ruprecht is a German variant of Robert (which is a Norse name, not a Saxon one, in Spanish as Roberto) so what are we doing with my name here!
I believe I may be one of like ten people in the world who is into Anglo Saxon England and Old Norse but doesn't care much about LOTR, one way or the other. Anyhow the whole concept of race seems to me modern and inextricable from African chattel slavery, medieval people and the pre-medieval texts on which Tolkein was basing (in a way in which I don't really know, because haven't read the books in 30 years) were certainly conscious of different peoples but weren't "racist" in any modern sense. I think its a mistake to eg confuse being anti-Heathen (including Viking) or Saracen or whatever with being "racist."
Thus ends this pointless, probably non-responsive comment.
Also here's a proposition: The Guru is smack in the middle of the Austen & Pym tradition. You can stream it from one of the usual suspects and it is absolutely wonderful.
Also, I only recently learned the derivation of "Halford" -- from the OE Hlaford or "Lord," which in turn derives from "hlaf-weard" or "Loaf Ward" i.e. "Protector of the Bread." So I unconsciously named myself for years as the defender of my worst enemy. Also supports the theory of grain agriculture as the source of social hierarchy and evil.
Roberto-Ruprecht if you haven't done yet I super duper recommend that you seize any opportunity to see Benjamin Bagby perform Beowulf. There's a video recording which is great BUT his live performance is fanfuckingtastic. So good. Would possibly be even better slightly stoned.
Once you/he are sufficiently into it there are long stretches when the sound and texture of the language is so close to English and yet deliciously incomprehensible and yet still through the performance you understand. Sadly the Zellerbach Playhouse was devoid of smoke, fleas, slathering hounds and mangy furs but i suppose the fire marshall would've objected.
197: Ah, I see we went with Lame Dodge instead. Stick with the classics.
197: Ah, I see we went with Lame Dodge instead. Stick with the classics.
202: "The Halfordrim were a fierce and warlike people from the west. With injunctions and court orders did they fight, and all but the bravest IP holders fled before them."
Fruther to 197: Oh, and BTW -- the notion that Tolkien portrayed Western colonialism over Harad as an evil about which they were justifiably upset is a distortion, of course. But that's no surprise from you, is it?
Coming to Cleveland, Ohio, in November, apparently: http://bagbybeowulf.com/
So close RT and you could test the stoned hypothesis!
It's true that the easterners/southerners aren't necessarily evil, but they are weak and easily dominated by Sauron, in contrast to the noble blond haired blue eyed (except Aragorn) Numenorians.
To be also nerdy, the Dunedain seem to mainly have had dark hair, pale skin and grey eyes (I think this was not the case on Númenór but the survivors/faithful were from the part of the island mostly populated by descendants of the House of Beor). In the Third Age, the Rohirrim were the blond and blue-eyed ones, and they are presented as less superior - the Rohirrim are basically Saxons with horses, and the Dunedain are uplifted presumably by their ancestors having lived closer to the Valar as well as the teeny tiny admixture of Elven blood in the ruling house.
199: Tolkien is a Christianized medieval fantasy, where the devil is real and some individuals, nations, or entire species are in league with him. (Maybe it's really a Zorastrianized medieval fantasy.) The orcs are literally an entire species that was either created or corrupted by the devil, and are in league with him with no hope of salvation. The human nations that work for the devil, while capable of free will, have a kind of Turks at the gates of Vienna vibe. The big break between Tolkien and actual medieval epics is that it's not just us-versus-them-and-of-course-we-are-for-us, but a Manichean struggle of good-versus-evil, where certain species and ethnic groups have opted for evil. It's hard to imagine the book coming out of any milieu other than the one that created scientific racism.
207: I can't recall that enough, but the Dunlendings are portrayed that way, at least at moments.
213: Of the houses of men that made up the Numenorians, the house of Hador were the blond haired blue eyed ones, and they made up the large majority. The house of Beor were the dark haired green eyed ones. They were the most badass and also the ones that were never corrupted by Sauron, but there were fewer of them, because most died in the battles of the First Age.
I out-nerd you thus!
Will totally go to see Beowulf guy if he comes to LA. Would be fun for me and epically (literally!) annoy my wife.
214 -- can't argue about LOTR, but pretty much all early medieval fantasy/epic that we have is already Christianized, with the arguable exception of some but not all stuff from Iceland, and of course this is even more true of later stuff. Eg the Battle of Maldon is pretty explicitly both a heroic tale in the old tradition AND conceived as an epic struggle between Christianity and viking heathens.
If you want to go earlier, Irish myths and legends are mostly not Christianised, with the exception of St. Patrick meeting Oisín after the latter's return from Tír na nÓg.
I can highly recommend Nicola Griffith's Hild to anyone interested in Saxon England. It really convinces on day to day details and particularly the amount of sheer labour involved in producing cloth. The eponymous heroine doesn't seem much of a Christian so far, not to to mind a saint, but presumably this will develop in the later book(s).
Sheer cloth probably belongs in the other thread.
218: Yeah, I can't really explain the difference, unless it was because the Christianization was more shallow. At least in Icelandic stuff the Christianization comes across as very shallow (like how the escalating cycle of revenge in Njal's saga is briefly interrupted for everyone to convert to Christianity.) Maybe absolute-good-versus-absolute-evil is in reaction to WW2, despite what Tolkein says.
Supposedly Tolkien was greatly influenced by pre-Christian Finnish myths. This is complicated by the fact that said myths were only written down well after Christianity was established and that they are just about unreadably dull in translation to English so I can't actually tell if I can see a link.
219 -- yes, I should have said something more like the "Germanic/Norse/Anglo-Saxon tradition from which (I presume, because this is what he knew) Tolkein was drawing from." Epic struggles between good and evil -- not presented in racial terms, exactly, but there are surely struggles between different ethnic groups with some on the side of darkness and others on the sode of light, but in a way very different from post-1500 "racism."
I don't really know the Irish stuff at all, or the Welsh for that matter.
FWIW, I have some small involvement with the Tolkien archives, which are definitely interesting. Lots of super-nerdy things, like Time Crossword puzzles that he's doodled around in elvish, and the like.
I will say that the Peter Jackson LOTR movies struck me at the time as pretty dang explicitly racist. Though this was exacerbated by the tendency for the contemporaneous "Warbloggers" to seize on the movies as touchstones for their valiant stands against the Islamofascist hordes.
The behind the scenes library story told here is hilarious and delicious: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/bodleian-shakespeare-treasure-lost-and-regained
194.2: the stubbornly pagan Lithuanians? The ones who might have been Sarmatian? (" and more and better besides"). Practically Haradrim right there.
While krill-feeding through Project Gutenberg I have found several early Victorian popular novels - say, 1840s, sometimes set earlier - that assumed racist values in India and England but defined the races differently: aristocrats from anywhere were superior, and intermarried successfully, whereas the lower classes' weak blood would Always Tell. Admiring references to the rich dusky skin of a half-Indian Hon heroine, too. Unfortunately they were all fairly awful novels and I've probably lost the titles.
Continuing vaguely from 226 with some more incoherent ramblings, I wonder if there's something specific about post-9/11 in which any depiction of a Manichean struggle between nations codes as racist, unless I guess there's a very explicit effort to avoid the problem. You know that some asshole on the internet is always going to read the battle between the good nation and badguys/monsters as a metaphor-justification for the battle against Islamosocialism, unless the work tries really hard to make clear that it can't be read that way. Since I don't actually read modern fantasy/sci-fi books about epic manichean struggles or even watch most action movies outside of the Fast and Furious franchise, so this is just a speculative theory, not a developed argument. But it seems to me that if Walt's description of LOTR is right it reads very differently in 2015 than in 1945.
Action Movie Political Theory can also chew on what we did during the Cold War, what with Russians tending to be pale and blond.
Yeah, also 230.*
*I feel like Putin looks exactly like stock character "Russian Villain" from a 1950-1985 film, though I can't think of any actor exactly.
219: Seconding Hild. It is a great read and helps flesh out the ethnic melting pot of the early (600s) Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, particularly along the margins with the remaining Brythonic people in England. It does suffer ever so slightly from Neal Stephenson syndrome--she did her research and she wants you to know. (I read it at the same time as The Inheritance of Rome, also mentioned here, and it hit a lot of the same points as the Britain/Ireland chapters in that.) Also, it tends towards longer sentences and paragraphs and hence slower reading, but that's more than made up for the engaging portrait of that world. It's a convincing narrative of how a woman could survive at a political level in such times. I'm looking forward to the sequel, and I intend to check out her other work.
128: The guy's downfall comes when he shoots a man in self-defense, and is outlawed for being unable to come up with the weregild the dead man's kin demands. Anderson's point, I think, is that being somewhat familiar with and having access to a bit of advanced technology doesn't help much if you don't understand enough about the local culture and mores to fit in. It makes a nice counterpoint to the super-competent time-traveller stories going back at least to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
The best-preserved bits of Irish myth are the Ulster Cycle (featuring Cú Chulainn) and the Fenian Cycle (featuring Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Fianna). The Ulster Cycle is older and IMO more interesting. I'd recommend a copy of Thomas Kinsella's translation of The Táin - there are reasonably priced paperbacks available but make sure it has the Le Brocquy illustrations (https://www.google.ie/search?q=t%C3%A1in+le+brocquy&espv=2&biw=1600&bih=775&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0CDoQsARqFQoTCPW0puCwkMgCFSQW2wodhf8Pxw&dpr=1) - sorry about horrible link format
Jesus, that's worse than I thought, it's not even a working link.
Okay try this
139. I had always remembered those ads as being in F&SF. By "holding a grudge" do you mean you are a signer or just that grudges were and are held due to who signed which ad?
230. We can also chew on WW2, where the main enemies were racist white people and racist Asians.
233. I had forgotten that (important) detail.
Certainly Martin Padway fits into early Middle Ages Italy with a rather hard-to-believe ease, but by then we've already swallowed time travel, after all.
In my understanding the Numenoreans were modeled on ancient Rome, and the tall/pale/dark-haired/gray-eyed people were drawing on that.
I would say the existence of a mythical world with various forms of gods, demigods, mortals, and monsters is not in itself inherently racist, and I would believe that Tolkien did not see himself as a racist, but his constructions of the various groups (lame word but I can't think of a better synonym that avoids connotations I don't want) were problematic and very likely influenced by racial attitudes of the times. Across the groups, while there are exceptions, the more superior people tend to be taller and blonder, and decline is marked physically by getting shorter and darker. I doubt it's entirely coincidental that Tolkien's imaginary hierarchies mapped on pretty closely to the racial hierarchies of his time, even if he would (and did!) explicitly reject these racial ideologies.
And yes, I too found the Jackson movies a bit shocking in their pretty straightforward of the most racially problematic parts of LOTR, even though he took liberties with much of Tolkien's world.
I hated the movies. The Hobbit movie I saw (the last one) was worse.
On the general topic of real world inspirations for LoTR, I wonder to what extent the siege of Minas Tirith was consciously modeled on the 1683 siege of Vienna? The ride of the Rohirrim that turns the tide is suspiciously similar to the charge of the Polish Hussars.
That would explain why everybody in the Houses of Healing after the battle is eating bagels.
So, reading about the Siege of Vienna, why would the Ottomans declare war 15 months before actually invading? I'm not totally up on the nuances of early modern warfare, but doesn't that just seem foolish? "Hey guys, we're going to attack you in over a year. Just sit tight and whatever you do don't form any alliances or beef up your defenses or anything."
I think they declared ahead of time in support of Hungarian allies/vassals/whatever they were.
244: I'm no early modern war expert either. I'm guessing some combination of what Moby said plus the fact that the preparations took so long and were on such a large scale (repairing roads, establishing forward supply depots & etc.) that they figured their intentions would be obvious anyway.
244: Based on my extensive knowledge of human nature there are 2 plausible reasons
1) Hoped that the mere declaration of war would be so terrifying that other side would surrender
2) Hoped someone would talk them out of it.
See also Ex Urbe's galloping summary of the War of the League of Cambrai .
231: Putin is disturbingly similar to Vladek Sheybal, who played chess grandmaster and SMERSH/ SPECTRE planner Kronsteen in "From Russia With Love". Look:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladek_Sheybal
Sorry, it's misanthropy Wednesday over here.
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Since this is the cranky thread (though surprisingly on-topic), let me complain about two recent articles from the Atlantic that I made the mistake of reading: How David Hume Helped Me Solve My Midlife Crisis and Why I Put My Wife's Career First.
Both seemed like interesting topics, and both could potentially have been good stories, but I couldn't contain my eye-rolling at how committed both authors were to foregrounding their own status and privilege as the most important element of otherwise difficult life experiences/choices.
Is their something wrong with the editors at the Atlantic? Should this be a sign of who remains as the target audience for the magazine?
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194 Also, the original article is sorta off on 14th-century Poland. It really was a very white place
That was when the Lipka Tatars arrived in Poland and Lithuania, ergo, not so white (and Islam has been present in Poland for around 600 years). Charles Bronson was a Lipka Tatar and there was a mosque in Brooklyn founded in the late 19th century/early 20th century that served the Lipka Tatar community.
Also just poor timing. They declared war towards the end of August 1682 by which time it was too late to go to war before winter.
Charles Bronson was a Lipka Tatar
Henry Louis Gates found Tatar ancestry in Martha Stewart on his PBS show.
I'm gaping at the nerdiness here. I read LOTR 17 times. When I was 11 or 12 I joined the Mythopoeic Society, dedicated to the study of Tolikien and the other Inklings, including a subscription to Parma Eldalamberon, the Book of the Elvish Tongues, a journal they put out dedicated to studying Tolkien's constructed languages. But it's been decades and I've forgotten so much that there's no way I can meaningfully participate in this discussion, except to say I am in awe of the nerdiness demonstrated here. And I hereby award nerd laurels to AcademicLurker.
I am in awe of the nerdiness demonstrated here. And I hereby award nerd laurels to AcademicLurker.
Seconded.
I read LOTR 17 times
Wow! Once seemed like plenty to me.
I think more than the siege of Vienna Tolkien was (vaguely) inspired between the wars between the Caliphate and the Byzantine empire. I don't think he thought the real Medieval world had clear "good guys", though.
At one point the Arabs managed to occupy Anatolia (IE most of the remaining empire) and reached Constantinople and on the European side the Avars occupied Thrace and also reached Constantinople. The Arabs also had a massive fleet. The siege lasted for several years, but the Byzantines held them off (partly due to Greek fire) and regained all the territory they had lost.
Buttercup,s 240 is really spot on.
254.1 And evidently I can't freakin' spell Tolkien. Ah well.
256 It would have remained at 16 but my second year in Morocco I came across it and it had been about 10 years since I'd read them. It hit the spot. Don't think I'll ever read them again though. I haven't read any of those lost tales the keep pumping out.
233, 238: Also, they don't take him seriously as a person, because he makes the mistake of telling them he's not a landowner (he lives in an apartment in, IIRC, Chicago) and has never worked on a farm, and his gunsmith skills aren't useful in repairing any of the Viking metalwork, and his perfectly useful suggestions about how to make rudders for longships and improve sails don't work, because they'll make the draft too deep to land the ships on the shore.
254,255: I'm honored. Actually, I was traveling and passed time in the airport rereading The Silmarillion, which I finished about 2 days ago. I'm not ordinarily a walking Tolkien encyclopedia.
Although I suppose I get major nerd points for the fact that I prefer rereading The Silmarillion to rereading the LoTR trilogy.
I feel like I should be chiming in on the Poles saving Europe thing, but I have a book request instead. Can you guys recommend a good mystery series for me? Authors I have read all or most of, and liked, include: Rex Stout, JD Robb, Laurie R King, Louise Penney, PL Gaus, and Dick Francis.
You could read the old Spenser for Hire Robert Parker books, stopping whenever he gets the stupid dog.
I think I only read the Silmarillion 4 or 5 times but that was like over 25 years ago or more.
263: should I start at the beginning, or can I dive in wherever?
250: yeah, I wasn't quite rolling my eyes, but something about the second article really felt off, and I think you might have put your finger on it. Which, as you say, is a shame; important topic etc.
Don't bother with Lord Jim. It's not really a mystery even though it takes forever to learn what happened.
Come to think of it, I have no idea if 242's siege of Vienna theory is on to something or not. Sorry.
Anthony Price. Somewhere in there the Poles probably save Europe again.
On Innes, whenever. There are two repeated detectives (who live in the same world and overlap in one book?) and one of them has a perceptible life history from book to book, but it's generally not important to the book, they're standalones. And lots of them are complete standalones with no repeated characters.
262: Sue Grafton is a classicist.
Stuart Kaminsky has/had 3-4 different series going, all good, all different. The Russian series excels.
James Lee Burke.
Cray, Pronzini, Greenleaf is probably out of print.
I have them all boxed up, but I have thousands. I didn't consider it reading. And a lot of the fun was visiting used bookstores in small towns to fill out a collection of Pbs.
Sayers, like Moby says, and those you should probably read in order except that the first is the least good.
Ngaio Marsh, also with the repeated detective with a life-history, but you don't need to care about it too much and can treat them as standalones.
Josephine Tey -- also repeated detective in some of them, also sequence unimportant.
Margery Allingham -- these are maybe not as good as the others? But strange? Try one and you might like it?
V.i. Warshawski? I think I got sick of those after the first five or six, and I don't remember them clearly, but they're not bad.
Lawrence Block? The Matt Scudder books aren't bad -- those you do need to read in order, because lots of what's interesting is the life history: drunk to recovering in AA, and various developing relationships with other characters. Not if being disturbed by vividly described sadism is a problem, though -- the author loves his psychotic killers.
If Rex Stout, then I would say excellent archaic writers Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett.
For contemporary books, maybe Donna Leon's Brunetti books.
I liked Rex Stout, after I got used to Archie. I can't remember which one I tried to read of Chandler or Hammett, but I decided the movie was better there.
Thanks, everyone! Looking at my "to be read" shelf on Goodreads, it appears that I also have a handful of Rex Stout and Tony Hillerman books left that I had forgotten about, so those plus your recs should tide me over for a while.
Yes Ross McDonald, also the different but equally sundappled noir John D McDonald.
JDM gets more cynical and philosophical as he ages, I like the later books better.
Chandler is better for his prose style than his stories, IMO that's enough.
Earlier Walter Mosley, those are contemporary and fantastic, 6 stars out of a possible five.
Maybe Pelecanos.
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Yes, but how many words do the Inuit have for attacking someone with a knife?
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From 283:
"Weather has been a vital part of people's lives in Scotland for centuries," said Susan Rennie, a Glasgow University lecturer.Has it now.
Seriously, Ross Thomas unjustly forgotten and so good.
They're crime novels, not mysteries, but George Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Trust are as good as everyone says. And the Parker books by Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake books! So good, and there's a couple dozen. Lately, I've been reading Rex Stout again; William DeAndrea's Nicolo Benedetti books are basically a Rex Stout cover band, with two loyal henchmen (a man and a woman) rather than just Archie.
And F Vargas! Although I don't know what's been translated or how good the translations are, but if you like them they are certainly unique.
262: Plenty of people enjoy Laura Lippman, but I may be biased, cuz Baltimore.
287. I think The Digger's Game and Cogan's Trade are better than Trust (which is pretty damn good). I've read the George V. Higgins oeuvre more often than LotR, which is saying something.
They are shorter, though.
J, Robot, you should try The Laughing Policeman (and the other works) by Swedish authors Mai Sjowall and Per Wahloo. The Marxism gets a little thick towards the end of the series but they are excellent.
re: 283/284
I found the longer list very unconvincing. A lot of them are just phrases, rather than distinct words, and a lot of them I've never heard of. And 'skelf' has a different, and distinct meaning, and used about snow, I think is more of a metaphorical/figurative use. I'm not saying I would have heard of most of them, but I'm from a Scots speaking part of the country, more or less, and studied Scots [a bit] at university, so my Scots vocab isn't terrible.
287. I think The Digger's Game and Cogan's Trade are better than Trust (which is pretty damn good). I've read the George V. Higgins oeuvre more often than LotR, which is saying something.
Ooh, I've never read Cogan's Trade.
Big parts of Tolkien are grubbed from She which was super racist in the full, justify-colonial-african-atrocities sense. Doesn't mean Tolkien's writing is, but.
Huh, this thread got interesting after I stopped paying attention.
That might have happened to lots of threads and you wouldn't know.
And the Parker books by Donald "Richard Stark" Westlake books! So good, and there's a couple dozen.
Hey, let's double-cross Parker. Even if he notices, he won't mind. He's very easy-going.
So, partly inspired by all the Tolkien on this thread, but mostly because I'd been planning to at some point anyway, tonight I tried reading The Hobbit to the 9 year old. We got through maybe a third of the first chapter; he said it was boring.
I think he may have had a point. The book opens with a lengthy discussion of the Hobbit's floorplan and interior decorating aesthetic. Then it gets into genealogy... perhaps not the most enticing hook.
I guess I'll try Moby's suggestion with the Heros and the Castle or whatever. Either that or one of the Travis McGee books.
Hey, let's double-cross Parker. Even if he notices, he won't mind. He's very easy-going.
It's not one of the best books in the series, but I love Flashfire for this very reason. They legitimately intend to pay him back! Their plan would even work!
297: Stuff happens fairly quickly and there's a horse named Papa Scoots Junior.
One forced marriage in the sequel but it isn't consummated.
That's an important lesson for nine-year-olds to learn.
Oral counts, but not for marriage consummation. It's probably in the parts of the Bible I never read. Leviticus or something.
262: Jim Thompson only did stand-alones, but many of them are similar without being formulaic. Kinda depressing of course.
I like Barry Eisler's works, as a light diversion. And definitely the Martin Beck (Sjowal/Wahloo) books are essential.
304: The Gospel of Biggus Dickus -- it's in the Apocrypha.
Here to drop in my obligatory plug for the cop procedurals of James McClure. Not only is the apartheid South Africa setting fascinating, the writing is brilliant. I usually skip the paragraphs that describe the sky and what buildings look like and what kind of a hot day it was, if the paragraphs are more than five lines long, but not with James McClure. He's great.
Hi, I'm James McClure. You may recognize me as the author of such seminal Kramer and Zondi novels as The Steam Pig and The Artful Egg. While you're enjoying our Hall of Wonders, your car will be unfortunately be subject to repeated break-ins... [fades out]
Sjöwall-Wahlöö are maybe more interesting as historical docuyments of a certain sort of leftiness today, though they still make me nostalgic.
If you like Scandi crime, Johan Theorin and Åsa Larsson are both good and unusual. Raymond Chandler if you've not read him, obviously. Nicolas Freeling's Van der Valk novels. Donna Leon seconded. Both these last distinguished by excellent female characters.
Scottish writers that are worth reading:
Ian Rankin -- very well known, so probably no need to mention him.
Christopher Brookmyre -- largely blackly comic crime thrillers. For me, a bit patchy in quality, although the best ones are absolutely hilarious, and occasionally quite touching. His recent series starring a young female private investigator are much less glib than some of the rest.
Stuart MacBride -- police procedurals/crime thrillers set in Aberdeen. Can be very funny. Also quite dark in places.
John Sandford is archetypal summer reading, but it's pretty good for that genre - there are always a few around in second-hand book shops, etc.
237/249. Putin looks disturbingly like David McCullum (sp?) as Ilya Kuryakin in the original TV series of The Man from UNCLE.
largely blackly comic crime thrillers.
Also a couple of off the wall SF novels which are remarkably good.
312: he also shares a name with the smug political officer aboard "Red October" who gets killed by Sean Connery at the start of the film.
re: 313
His book, A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil is absolutely uncanny as an evocation of exactly the high school era I grew up in. It's pitch perfect on the smallest detail of changes in fashion, slang, music, and everything else. He's 4 years older than me, and grew up 20 miles away, but it's still uncanny.
Agreed (though being from further east, the religion thing didn't loom as large for me).
315. I hope there are more survivors from your class.
re: 316
I think the religion thing is actually verging on annoying, now, as a theme in Broomyre's books. I grew up of Catholic descent* in a Protestant area, complete with Orange marches round my street most weekends. But religion looms as a vanishingly small part of my experience by comparison to the role it plays in Brookmyre's books. He has a real bee in his bonnet about Celtic, too.
* albeit not actually practicing Catholic, as my parents are anarchist atheist hippies, although I had friends and neighbours who were.
Crime novels recommendations: I like Nevada Barr's series set in National Parks, Margaret Frazer's Sister Frevisse series and even more so the linked Player Joliffe series, Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series.
In the older British vein, apart from a few already mentioned I like Edmund Crispin.
297 So, partly inspired by all the Tolkien on this thread, but mostly because I'd been planning to at some point anyway, tonight I tried reading The Hobbit to the 9 year old. We got through maybe a third of the first chapter; he said it was boring.
A few years ago when my youngest nephew was 7-8 years old he asked me to tell him a bedtime story rather than reading one to him so I told him the story of The Hobbit from memory. He was riveted. And he was beyond thrilled when I told him there was a book, which I then spent the next few years reading to him whenever they came up to NY for family vacations. Of course this also meant I was roped into taking him and his older brother to those dreadful Peter Jackson movies so YMMV.