Archive for June, 2007
- Revisiting Middle Earth: “Unfinished Tales” • June 28, 2007
There's something both satisfying and frustrating about "Unfinished Tales," a posthumous collection of J.R.R. Tolkien fetishism. You get JRRT at his most didactic, listing chronologies of imaginary kingships as if he were tracing the lineage of Jesus. You get Christopher Tolkien at his most pompous, pointing out all of the petty differences between versions of his father's stories in lots of dry footnotes.
- Introductory Science Fiction Books for Literary Readers • June 26, 2007
In my post a while back about bad Infoquake reviews, I mentioned how I’ve given William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Frank Herbert’s Dune to a few friends as a way to introduce them to quality science fiction, only to hear later that these friends didn’t care for them. Some of the commenters in the aforementioned blog [...]
- Revisiting Middle Earth: “The Children of Húrin” • June 6, 2007
“A darkness lies behind us, and out of it few tales have come,” says one character early in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin. “…It may be that we fled from the fear of the Dark, only to find it here before us, and nowhere else to fly to but the Sea.”
Sador is speaking here [...]
