3 posts tagged “fantasy”

View other items tagged “fantasy:” Photos, Audio, Videos, Books or Links. View “fantasy” on Vox.

I Am Officially Weirded Out

May 26, 2009
Post a comment

Apparently, the ghost of Jon Postel is leading a pack of superheroes determined to defend the Internet from Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. Promote The Internet Way with Team ARIN!

Welcome to the world of Team ARIN! We hope you find these publications educational and entertaining. Team ARIN is a fictionalized view of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), its processes, and the whole concept of Internet governance. Though our heroes are fictional, the issues they face are very real.

Team ARIN is a group of superheroes that represent four of the principles by which the Internet is operated and governed...

"Nar, Hippies!"

Feb 20, 2009
1 comment

Richard K. Morgan slags on Tolkein in a pretty good essay here.

“I tell you, it’s no game serving down in the city”

- Gorbag - forgotten orc captain from Minas Morgul

[...]

That little twist of urban angst quoted above is one such trace. It comes at the end of The Two Towers and is part of an on-going set of dialogues between two orc captains at the tower of Cirith Ungol. And for a while - until Tolkien remembers these are Bad Guys and sends the wearyingly Good and Wholesome Sam up against them - we get a fascinating insight into life for the rank and file in Mordor. [...]

Go read the rest of it. He's pointing out what, for me, is one of the little joys of reading The Lord of the Rings, the stories of the little guys who aren't destined to be king of the world, who have their own motivations that keep them plodding forward so that somebody else can get all the glory when the battles are over. Like Morgan, I wish there more of that and less of the incessant elvish singing, but Tolkein is an acquired taste. I get that.

Morgan continues.

[...]

The great shame is, of course, that Tolkien was not able (or inclined) to mine this vein of experience for what it was really worth - in fact he seemed to be in full, panic-stricken flight from it. [...]

I'm a bit more forgiving of Tolkein than Morgan admits, on the grounds that I'm sympathetic to writers who suffer from what we now lovingly call Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. (Tolkein probably would have called it Shell Shock, I'm guessing.) Here's Morgan walking himself back a bit:

[...] I suppose it's partially understandable - the generation who fought in the First World War got to watch every archetypal idea they had about Good and Evil collapse in reeking bloody ruin around them. It takes a lot of strength to endure something like that and survive, and then to re-draw your understanding of things to fit the uncomfortable reality you've seen. Far easier to retreat into simplistic nostalgia for the faded or forgotten values you used to believe in. [...]

Yeah. I'm okay with Tolkein not wanting to go there. The man earned a nice, quiet retirement by writing those books, so I'm completely fine with him leaving to posterity the process of figuring out how Good and Evil work in a world where nation-states resolve conflicts by turning their entire societies into industrial corpse manufacturing systems.

That said, I did note this: Mr. Morgan has apparently written a fantasy novel. I suppose I should read it.