Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 16 Dec 2011, 17:30 · from 2011-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 09:30:34 -0800
Subject: (urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?
In-Reply-To: <4EEB7DFF.3070202 at verizon.net>
References: <SNT123-W50ECAE6E13A6F40B0B1A23CFA00 at phx.gbl>
	<1324043220.50356.YahooMailNeo at web121005.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
	<CAGB0RZ5XhR9RnkxeNJiMwDTiFJjAQGG_PGjMhz5X2ZN+9Y=cdA at mail.gmail.com>
	<1324049526.56006.YahooMailNeo at web121005.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>
	<4EEB7DFF.3070202 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <CAJ8=rtjKd2Mp0edLinXvsUJarpbNOp+Y260hSApgCycNm=i2GA at mail.gmail.com>

My good friend David Bratman, who is one of the world's leading
experts on Tolkien (he writes the annual review of the JRRT secondary
literature), posits that a primary difference between "high" fantasy
and S/S is that "high" fantasy is "about" the milieu, where S/S is
"about" the character.

I don't know if I accept this distinction, but I notice it in
marketing -- high fantasy series tend to be called by the name of
their world (even crappy high fantasy like "the Shannara series") or
something about it ("the Wheel of Time"), while S/S series tend to be
called by the name of their main character (the Conan series, the
Fafhrd-and-the-Grey-Mouser series, etc.)

At any rate, if real, it suggests that Wolfe's character-centric
science fantasy definitely owes summat to S/S.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net