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Stephen Donaldson also would be in with a good shot as the "anti-Tolkien" - the first Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are in many ways a mirror opposition to Tolk
by thenomad 12y ago
Stephen Donaldson also would be in with a good shot as the "anti-Tolkien" - the first Chronicles of Thomas Covenant are in many ways a mirror opposition to Tolkien's work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Thomas_Covenant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Thomas_Covena...
Possibly the finest - and darkest, in the genuine sense of the world rather than "this has sex and violence in it" - portal fantasy ever written.
- zaphar 12y agoCompletely agree. I greatly enjoyed the Thomas Covenant series as a teen. But really didn't like Moorcocks work. A pet peeve of mine is when a writer uses "Sex and Violence" as a crutch to stand out and "push boundaries". I don't enjoy that sort of writing and as a general rule find that the whole trope gets used to hide the lack of good writing in a piece. And the derision of Tolkien is just beyond me. The depths of Tolkeins characters is staggering. It seems like the complaints mostly boil down to Hero's with moral fiber are boring. I don't get it.
- thenomad 12y agoSex and violence are a way to stand out, and they can be used very effectively for that. Clive Barker springs to mind as someone who crafts genuinely original, brilliantly written stories from those elements, for example. But I agree, there's a tendency toward using them lazily - in the cast of fantasy, largely in the wake of Song of Ice And Fire. It'll calm down in a bit, I'm sure, just as the unoriginal fantasy doorstops tailed off in the late '80s as the D&D craze faded.