Post by account_disabled on Nov 26, 2023 1:08:05 GMT -6
For those who despise my favorite authors.likes are fine, as long as he doesn't expect that to be the fantastic strong point of the story (or the papier-mâché Middle Ages made with clichés, very different from the real one): there are elves in The Daughter of the Iron Dragon by Michael Swanwick and in the video game Arcanum , and in both cases they are excellent declinations of "classic" Tolkien-style Fantasy. In the first, the fidelity to the myth and the profound knowledge that Swanwick has of it, allows us to reinterpret the fantastic in a modern key, without reducing it to aesthetic copying, in a certain sense redoing the work on the myth that Tolkien did (or in any case adopting its approach) .
In the second, the slowness, the being out of time, of certain fantasies badly inspired by Tolkien is upset by the sudden entry of progress, of evolution, of reality that changes and demands adaptations, symbolized there by the industrial revolution that breaks in and overturns everything . Elves as ferocious oligarchs and warmongering capitalists in a ruthless, wild, passionate Phone Number Data society, like the fairy world that appeared in the myths of antiquity... or elves as Indians persecuted and closed in increasingly restricted areas, while magic falters and nineteenth-century technology spreads? The “What if” in those two settings is something else entirely, not the elves or the dwarves: they are the aesthetic flavoring for the setting, they are part of the elements that support the fantastic thesis.
I even have a weakness for fairies: imagine if I have anything to say about using, as long as it's intelligent, mythological creatures that are well known to the public! I also really like Mechs and powered armour, but there is no risk of having them ad nauseam there: military science fiction novels in Italy are certainly not plentiful... There is certainly a large audience for readers of fantasy fiction who aren't looking for novelty or true fantasy ideas and just want the same reheated soup of clichés repeated for decades to the point of exhaustion (poor Tolkien's copy of the copy of the copy that curses us from 'afterlife), rejecting without appeal every shred of novelty... ... but they are not the public we are interested in satisfying.
In the second, the slowness, the being out of time, of certain fantasies badly inspired by Tolkien is upset by the sudden entry of progress, of evolution, of reality that changes and demands adaptations, symbolized there by the industrial revolution that breaks in and overturns everything . Elves as ferocious oligarchs and warmongering capitalists in a ruthless, wild, passionate Phone Number Data society, like the fairy world that appeared in the myths of antiquity... or elves as Indians persecuted and closed in increasingly restricted areas, while magic falters and nineteenth-century technology spreads? The “What if” in those two settings is something else entirely, not the elves or the dwarves: they are the aesthetic flavoring for the setting, they are part of the elements that support the fantastic thesis.
I even have a weakness for fairies: imagine if I have anything to say about using, as long as it's intelligent, mythological creatures that are well known to the public! I also really like Mechs and powered armour, but there is no risk of having them ad nauseam there: military science fiction novels in Italy are certainly not plentiful... There is certainly a large audience for readers of fantasy fiction who aren't looking for novelty or true fantasy ideas and just want the same reheated soup of clichés repeated for decades to the point of exhaustion (poor Tolkien's copy of the copy of the copy that curses us from 'afterlife), rejecting without appeal every shred of novelty... ... but they are not the public we are interested in satisfying.