National Review celebrates author Ray Bradbury on his 90th birthday. Essay here.
Posts Tagged ‘ Science Fiction ’
James Bowman Denies Denying Artistic Standing to Tolkien and Lewis
James Bowman has kindly responded to my comments on his assertion that “fantasy is not Art.” ‘Kindly,’ on second thought, might be stretching things a bit, given that he begins by marginalizing those who disagree with him as nothing more than blog-dwelling trolls*: You can imagine the reaction in the blogosphere— which, as you may or may not know, has way more Lewis and Tolkien fans in it than the population at large. I wonder why that is, by the way? I’ll bet there are far more readers of Mr. Bowman’s latest blog entry in the blogosphere than in the population at large, but I digress. After establishing a suitably dismissive tone with those lines, Mr. Bowman begins his defense with the following: I wonder if it is too late to protest that I did not say what Mr Crandall says I said. What I did say was that fantasy — by which I meant the fantasy actually being produced in our culture today, the fantasy of Avatar or The Dark Knight or that which is, in one way or another, merely derivative from Tolkien or Lewis — represents a break with the Western mimetic tradition to which the fantasies
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Are Not ‘Real’ Artists?
Not according to James Bowman. They and numerous others create what Bowman dismissively refers to as “fantasy art.” And fantasy art isn’t Art. It always surprises me when I run across them, but I have to acknowledge that some folks just don’t like J.R.R. Tolkien. Shocking, I know. The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit. The Silmarillion’s mythopoeic tales. What’s not to like? Great works of art and creativity, right? Well, they might be creative, but they do not qualify as Art. Mr. Bowman is among that group of curmudgeonly scolds that just can’t seem to abide anything that smacks of fantasy. According Bowman, fantasy is not art, at least not in the sense that the term has been understood within the Western mimetic tradition going back to Homer. … Indeed, Western culture is so intimately bound up with the tradition of imitation in art … that the now more than century-long vogue for fantasy art, beginning with George MacDonald, J.M. Barrie, and Kenneth Grahame and continuing through Lewis and Tolkien to the more unrestrained science-fiction and fantasy cinema of our own time, should be seen as a repudiation, conscious or unconscious, of that Western tradition
More on Lord Darcy
Matthew Bowman of Christendom College posted a very interesting comment on my article on Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy tales, which I think adds some value to the discussion. Matthew’s comment indicates some reasons why the stories are so interesting, and suggests that a renaissance of interest in them is possible. Here is Matthew’s comment: Well, I have to say you’ve got good taste in fiction. I only read Lord Darcy for the first time at the tail end of last summer, as I was getting ready for the new semester at college. I’d first heard about it from my father, thouh only iin very vague terms — basically just "alternate universe where magic is used to solve crimes." Years later, following some "you’d probably like this links" on Amazon, I came across a book that sounded good. Noticing it was a Baen book, I immediately switched over to Baen.com to read the sample chapters. The first story blew me away. It not only sounded like the story my father had alluded to years before but couldn’t remember the title of, it was also a fantasy story with a strong base in Roman Catholicsm. (I later found out that Randall Garrett
Philip K. Dick Canonized
It’s official: Philip K. Dick is a great writer, according to the Library of America. As the Galley Cat at Media Bistro reports: Buried at the tail end of Mark Sarvas’s interview with Jonathan Lethem comes news of one project on the novelist’s plate: "I’m helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my (formerly outsider) heroes, Philip K. Dick: I’m writing endnotes for The Library of America, which is doing a volume of four of his novels from the sixties, which I also helped select." I suppose that if Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and H. P. Lovecraft are great writers, then Dick is too. But in my view, this event is most important as further evidence of how poor the mainstream American novel was during the previous century. Solid but unspectactular and fairly uninsightful genre authors (though this last limitation does not apply to Dick) are touted as among the best the nation had to offer, and this is true because the mainstream novelists were so often confused, self-important, and wrongheaded. A good many of Philip K. Dick’s books and stories are well worth reading, but he really worked largely on frankly pulp material. His great
Deja Vu and Time Travel Fiction
Two time travel movies are premiering today, and a none of those astounding mysteries of the universe that Hollywood creates every couple of months. Tony Scott’s Deja Vu (directed with his usual great skill and creativity) is the bigger-budgeted and promoted film, and will probably do well at the box office. Darren Arnofsky’s The Fountain promises to be a bit quirkier and probably won’t make as much money but might obtain more critical accolades. Time travel fictions are certainly interesting and have been around for a long time. Peter Suderman suggests, in National Review Online, that their appeal is based on a natural human obsession with mortality, which time travel naturally brings to the fore. I can’t say I agree that human mortality is a special interest in time travel fictions, given that pretty much any narrative has a good deal to do with human mortality. I think that the real appeal of time travel is in the possibility of changing things—time travel is the ultimate power trip. We’ve all done things we wish we hadn’t, and failed to do things we wish we had. (Cf. the Lutheran rite of confession and absolution.) And we’ve all experienced things that
Lord Darcy Online
I have some good news for you regarding Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy mysteries, which I highly recommend for a bit of fun and somewhat meaningful reading—see article here and excerpts from that article below. The good news is that two complete Lord Darcy stories (novellas, really) are available online, at the site for Baen Books, the publisher of the Lord Darcy omnibus collection. The Darcy mysteries were written in the 1960s and ’70s and are set in an alternative twentieth century in which the Reformation never happened, the rules of magic were discovered during the Middle Ages, and technology has not advanced beyond the mid-nineteenth century. The stories (and one novel) combine dashing adventure, real fair-play puzzle mysteries, a world where magic is real but bound by definite rules, and some lightly presented insights into the human condition. To read the stories on the Baen website, click here. Once you read them, you will want to read them all. For more info on Lord Darcy and why you might want to read Randall Garrett’s delightful series, click here for my National Review Online essay on the subject. To buy a copy of the trade paperback edition, click here. Here’s some more info on Lord Darcy, from my National Review Online essay on
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