Searching for the next Tolkien and Asimov

[AndrewT]

I have wanted to start a thread for really promising debut fantasy and sci fi authors. Feel free to post your thoughts on any brand new jewels just from the last year. I plan to read at least one debut each year. I am just starting Blood of an Exile by Brian Naslund.

 

[Bick]

Best SF I've read from an author whop first published in the last year was Memory of Empire, by Arkady Martine. It was good, and I enjoyed it. But she's not the next Asimov, I feel.

 

[Extollager]

No nominations from me, and I don't believe we will have another Tolkien,* but I wanted to say I like the way you linked these two. That took me back 50 years to when Tolkien was my favorite author and Asimov was my best friend's favorite.

*At least, if we do this author won't be from the Americas or western Europe. Maybe from the east, where a university education may still be rigorous and strong on languages rather than theory. Tolkien's creativity was pervaded by his immense scholarly knowledge. But good grief, does his discipline -- philology -- even exist in America and western Europe any more?

 

[Bick]

No nominations from me, and I don't believe we will have another Tolkien,* but I wanted to say I like the way you linked these two. That took me back 50 years to when Tolkien was my favorite author and Asimov was my best friend's favorite.

*At least, if we do this author won't be from the Americas or western Europe. Maybe from the east, where a university education may still be rigorous and strong on languages rather than theory. Tolkien's creativity was pervaded by his immense scholarly knowledge. But good grief, does his discipline -- philology -- even exist in America and western Europe any more?

But there are surely some highly erudite folk in the US Extollager?

 

[Extollager]

Bick, Tolkien’s fantasy was “creation from philology,” to use a phrase I associate with the foremost Tolkien scholar, Tom Shippey. See his book Roots and Branches. That kind of education and scholarly environment is gone. Tolkien’s fantasy was also rooted in the natural world he’d grown up in, the Switzerland he had a walking tour in, etc. Such experience must be very rare indeed now. And Tolkien wanted to dedicate his creativity to England. Nobody is allowed to love their land the way he did, now. If somehow a young person felt that kind of love when he or she arrived in school and university, it would be undone, by the doctrine of globalism, the ethic of progressivism, etc. Traditional, Latin-based Catholicism was deep in Tolkien’s imagination. From what I read and hear, that is simply not available now.

I’ve written elsewhere here about what’s happened to humanities studies. There’s a closed thread, on “Dear Social Justice Warriors of Yale,” that has some of this. Tolkien’s love of land and his walking tours etc occurred in a less mechanized agricultural milieu than people experience now except in small-scale enterprises here and there. Children are raised to worry about the planet, but raised in ignorance of their own place as a rule. Do you suppose one kid in a thousand could identify the common wild flowers in his or her location? Or that she or he could learn them from a parent or neighbor? I can only speculate about how a young Roman Catholic’s imagination is shaped in the age of guitar masses and Pope Francis.

When I imply a lament over the state of humanities education, some may think this is nothing but the usual grousing of an oldster about how things used to be better. But, from the point of view of nurturing a Tolkienian imagination, things really were better formerly and denying that is, in my view, kind of like denying climate change; sometimes things really have deteriorated. But don't take my word for it. Check the George Steiner thread I started at the beginning of this month for more that's relevant to this -- not so much bewailing was is now, but displaying the kind of humanities experience that was known to people like Steiner and, before him, Tolkien, and that Steiner knows is gone -- a whole humanistic culture.

George Steiner

Just this week, after a friend recommended I look into them, I have started to listen to this critic, who died a week ago. He's remarkably interesting. I've paused at his comments on memorization, about 13-15 minutes in, to post this. What he says from the experience of people under the...

www.sffchronicles.com

 

[Extollager]

It would be interesting to see a discussion about the formation of an Asimovian imagination. That's still possible, isn't it?

 

[tegeus-Cromis]

@Extollager , there are still plenty of philologists in Classics (Greek and Latin) departments, while elsewhere what used to be called philologists are now historical (or comparative) linguists. Historical linguistics - Wikipedia

 

[Extollager]

t-C, I don't think linguistics is philology, which was more closely related to the humanistic study of literature. Again, see Tom Shippey's Roots and Branches, particularly the essays called "Fighting the Long Defeat: Philology in Tolkien's Life and Fiction" and "Tolkien's Academic Reputation Now." After reading "Long Defeat," read also Raymond Edwards's chapter "Philology at Bay" in his Tolkien (2014).

And, if you can, browse Oronzo Cilli's Tolkien's Library. Look at the books there that bespeak his scholarly world. Now what would you find in a modern linguistics professor's office? What -- Noam Chomsky & co.?

To continue with another reason why there cannot be another writer comparable to Tolkien from America or western Europe (at least). Tolkien's imagination was nourished on the written word -- works such as the romances of Haggard and Morris and MacDonald as well as medieval texts; almost no one's imagination is thus formed now, because we are bombarded with so much processed visual information. Not just words and sentence patterns have changed; the experience of language itself was different in 1905 than it is now in the same locations, and, of course, the teaching of rhetoric has been changed almost out of recognition. But, too, on that business of the visual imagination -- think of what Tolkien saw: illustrations in Lang's color Fairy Books, in Haggard's stories, etc. -- nothing like so much "information" as what any youngster now has seen before age 10. Surely this affects even the working of brains (though I make a bigger distinction between mind and brain than a lot of people do). By the time a youngster is a few years old today, his or her imagination has become accustomed to a tremendous, continuous flow of imagery -- almost none of it something one lives with daily, btw.

And then think of what it says about Tolkien that he could read Owen Barfield and feel, evidently, that here was someone saying what he too had sensed -- on this, Tolkien's 31 August 1937 letter to his publishers contains a tantalizing aside -- the roots of language in "mythology," etc. I suppose linguistics today is caught up in the usual stuff about intersectionality and so on -- useless or worse than useless for a nascent fantasist, I should think. I haven't read the revised edition of Verlyn Flieger's Splintered Light: Language and Logos in Tolkien's Fantasy, but I'm sure it speaks to such things. I won't go further into this matter now.

Amazon.com

 

[Extollager]

The closest I have seen to an imagination akin to Tolkien's in new fantasy is Eugene Vodolazkin's Laurus. The author is a Russian medievalist born in 1964. Laurus is not very obviously Tolkienian. But on a non-superficial level it's probably much, much more truly Tolkienian than any new fantasy series you'll find at your bookstore.

 

[Extollager]

"Like other survivors of the Great War, [Tolkien] dedicated himself anew to rescuing Europe's cultural artefacts, even when these legacies resided in the tiniest details of a canonic author's spelling and pronunciation" -- John Bowers, Tolkien's Lost Chaucer, p. 6.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

One Asimov was more than enough :/

 

[soulsinging]

If somehow a young person felt that kind of love when he or she arrived in school and university, it would be undone, by the doctrine of globalism, the ethic of progressivism, etc... Do you suppose one kid in a thousand could identify the common wild flowers in his or her location? Or that she or he could learn them from a parent or neighbor?

That seems to me due to 1) technology providing eternal distraction/focus on one's vices/interests and the ability to have an expert answer via google in an instant and 2) cutthroat competition for employment preventing anyone from devoting time to what we've been taught from the cradle are economically useless skills. I grew up in the conservative Reagan 80s and can't identify flowers because the thought bores me to tears, and was repeatedly told by conservative Catholic schooling that reading SFF trash like Tolkien was a waste of my mind and would do nothing for my job prospects. I think blaming the lack of a hypothetical creative mind like Tolkien's (what would that even mean?) on political ideology is a little off the mark.

 

[Extollager]

Soulsinging, Tolkien's most cherished book, when he was a teenager, was a guide to British wildflowers.

Tolkien's "Most Treasured Volume"

Here, in several postings, is an article that I wrote some years ago for Beyond Bree. It will appear in J. R. R. Tolkien: Studies in Reception. Tolkien’s “Most Treasured Volume”: C. A. Johns’ Flowers of the Field by Dale Nelson When nearly eighty years old Tolkien was asked to name...

www.sffchronicles.com

He wasn't bored at all by such knowledge. It was an important aspect of his love of his particular place, a love that shows up in his fiction, too, e.g. Bombadil's love of the small realm of which he's master, the hobbits' love of the Shire's fields, etc.

There wasn't a lot of commercial market for philology in Tolkien's day, but when he did connect with philology, he found something that spoke to his temperament; he was made for it and it for him. So if we posit someone of Tolkien's imaginative gifts and temperament now, still we would have to say that this person -- I'll assume a young woman -- would not find a milieu suited to her in the modern school and university.

Chrons isn't the place to discuss politics, but 1980s American "conservatism" doesn't have a lot of overlap with Tolkien's conservatism, just as post-Vatican II Catholicism has departed from Catholicism as he knew it in youth, when a priest was his and his brother's guardians (they were orphans), or when his son John became a priest, etc. But Tolkien wrote LotR as a consciously Catholic book (before Vatican II) -- see letter cited in the N. Y. Times below.

Again, my main point is that, if we do the thought experiment of positing someone today having an imagination and temperament like Tolkien's, I doubt we would get a Tolkien thanks to so many cultural, political, and academic changes.

To be sure, I do not mean by these remarks to imply that Tolkien's work is outdated -- far from it; it's in part because it's so different in meaning and tone from much that's prevalent in our time that it has much to offer. "Tolkien turns people into birdwatchers, tree spotters, hedgerow-grubbers," as Shippey says. Tolkien, in other words, was an oikophile. That isn't fostered in our day of airport globalism, academic theorizing, etc. See below on oikophilia -- a concept that I think is very pertinent to an understanding of Tolkien's imaginative creation -- a real keynote of it.

Concerning Hobbits and Philip Marlowe

Catholic Literary Giants

In Catholic Literary Giants, Joseph Pearce takes the reader on a dazzling tour of the creative landscape of Catholic prose and poetry. Covering the vast and impressive terrain from Dante to Tolkien, from Shakespeare to Waugh, this book is an immersion into the spiritual depths of the Catholic...

books.google.com

Conservatism and the Environment - Sir Roger Scruton

A guide to Roger Scruton's professional life as a writer and philosopher.

www.roger-scruton.com

 

[BAYLOR]

The King of the Worlds Edge by H Warner Munn.
Merlin's Ring by H Warner Munn
The Well of the Unicorn by Fletcher Pratt.

 

[Extollager]

Tom Shippey, "Fighting the Long Defeat: Philology in Tolkien's Life and Fiction," in Roots and Branches:

"...I believe it is now very difficult, even impossible, to follow a course of study of the sort Tolkien would have approved anywhere in the world, especially the English-speaking world, and especially in England itself" (p. 139).

"In the longer term, in Tolkien's lifetime and my own, literature, and modernism, and then postmodernism, and theory, rolled over poor Dame Philology and squashed her flat" (p. 153). Well, no philology, no Tolkien.

 

[Extollager]

Also in Shippey's Roots and Branches and germane to the argument I have been making here about why there will never be another Tolkien, see the essay "History in Words: Tolkien's Ruling Passion." By the way, the discussions there of "ninnyhammer" and "dwimmerlaik" are delightful.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

We might, however, find someone equally gifted who based his or her story around some other academic field to which they had devoted their life. They would not be the next Tolkien in that they would not be like Tolkien, but in the sense that they would come as a revelation to a new generation of fantasy readers and writers, in the same way that Tolkien was for many of us who read him for the first time in the fifties or sixties when we were young.

 

[soulsinging]

Soulsinging, Tolkien's most cherished book, when he was a teenager, was a guide to British wildflowers.

He wasn't bored at all by such knowledge. It was an important aspect of his love of his particular place, a love that shows up in his fiction, too, e.g. Bombadil's love of the small realm of which he's master, the hobbits' love of the Shire's fields, etc.

There wasn't a lot of commercial market for philology in Tolkien's day, but when he did connect with philology, he found something that spoke to his temperament; he was made for it and it for him. So if we posit someone of Tolkien's imaginative gifts and temperament now, still we would have to say that this person -- I'll assume a young woman -- would not find a milieu suited to her in the modern school and university.

I'm not disputing it meant a lot to him, I'm just saying I think that while his personal interests, hobbies and studies undoubtedly influenced him as a person and his works as a writer, it is a long leap from there to say his literary imagination will never be matched just because society has changed and his particular mix of interests is unlikely to occur again. Asimov didn't embrace these disciplines as far as I know, yet is mentioned in the same breath and I'd say he was every bit as imaginative as Tolkien, even without the flower/philology obsession. It's not necessarily what you study or even how you study it, it's how you combine what you DID study with the story you're telling that shows one's imaginative powers. Tolkien's studies gave him a lot of interesting material to draw from, but I think the imagination to fuse those studies with his creative endeavors existed apart. There were many Catholics in England working as humanities academics with a fondness for naturalism, but only one of them was able to write LOTR.

Homer and Shakespeare also lacked Tolkien's specific schooling and studies... are we to say their works suffer in imagination because they have different temperaments and backgrounds? Does Asimov's? What about Marlowe or Spencer or Dickens or Joyce or Faulkner?

Formal education is all well and good, and there's good reason to mourn the waning appreciation for Humanities studies, but plenty of writers have managed to produce great works of literary imagination, in or out of the genre, without any of Tolkien's academic pursuits.

So I guess I agree nobody will ever produce a work EXACTLY like LOTR because that work evinces an unusual mix of influences and knowledge, but virtually nobody will ever produce a work exactly like any other for the very same reason. Nobody will ever produce a work exactly like Foundation because of the way Asimov's unique variety of interests informed that work, and so on. That doesn't mean Tolkien's background is somehow the platonic ideal for developing compelling SFF for all time, it means his background helped produced the most compelling fantasy of our time.

But Tolkien wrote LotR as a consciously Catholic book (before Vatican II) -- see letter cited in the N. Y. Times below.

Again, my main point is that, if we do the thought experiment of positing someone today having an imagination and temperament like Tolkien's, I doubt we would get a Tolkien thanks to so many cultural, political, and academic changes.

I'm aware of this and actually wrote my thesis on how Tolkien's Catholicism infused his work and how the blend of Catholicism and pagan fairy tales was and still is quite unique. I'm just saying it's one thing to acknowledge the role his background had on his work, and another to say that only that background could produce a work that measures up. Most authors were NOT academics, even in Tolkien's heyday.

In short, LOTR as we know it would not exist without Tolkien, but Tolkien the writer likely would have existed even if he had grown up Protestant instead of Catholic, or if he'd been born a few decades later and pursued his studies today rather than a few decades ago (though his works may obviously look different). The background informed and shaped the work, but the imagination and temperament came from the man and preceded the rest. This sounds like an argument the elves of Lothlorien would make... nothing will ever be as good as it was in our prime!

 

[Toby Frost]

That doesn't mean Tolkien's background is somehow the platonic ideal for developing compelling SFF for all time, it means his background helped produced the most compelling fantasy of our time.

I agree.

It seems to me (and which may already have been tacitly admitted), is that a modern Tolkien or Asimov wouldn’t resemble the old version for various factors (not or not solely "the PC brigade" or anything like that) acting on them – even things as banal as what age society would expect them to get married at could have an effect. The question of whether the factors would be justified, artistically good etc is pretty debatable and, I suspect, hard to quantify. For instance, had there been a strong taboo against embellishing history in the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare might have produced some very different plays. Would they be better or worse for it? I'm not sure anyone can say for sure. It seems to me that the important things are skill, knowledge and intellectual curiosity (as well as more prosaic abilities like actually finishing the novel, etc). Some understanding of classical scholarship or “the canon” might be useful, but is far from obligatory.

I would also add that being outside the mainstream can be a real strength. It seems to me that any clear tradition or meeting-place (“the X school”) of thought, politics, world-view and the like can be oppressive and unhelpful in terms of producing great writing. I would potentially include the intellectual background of the great universities in that, and probably the Campbell-influenced Golden Age of SF. I remember reading Howard’s End years ago and being strongly aware of it coming from a clear tradition: a sort of genteel-intellectual Oxbridgeness, which was in no way bad or offensive, but was very much its own thing. And there are other “own things”.

(As an aside, I would say that Asimov is nowhere near as good a writer as Tolkien. For various reasons, both good and bad, I don’t think SF has an equivalent. I don’t think any genre has ever been so overshadowed – and inadvertently squashed – by one writer.)

 

[olive]

There are probably writers with this potential and there will be writers in this merit. However, they will not reach that status of being a part of the world culture and history like the given examples because of the mass communication culture, the new forms of consumption we created. There will be movies, tv shows based on their works before they mature, grow against time, become/create a culture of their own. It will be reduced to a series of memes, a magazine show around a series of actors sooner or later.

Under the circumstances we live in today, anyone with that scale of talent and imagination should publish their great work with an alias -several if possible- and stay unknown to the world, not letting their work be made into a tv show or a movie, at least as long as they live. There is no other way to create that distance and depth in time; a stable culture of its own, providing a historical sense of consciousness breaking new horizons that would breach every border or limit in every corner of the world. The writers named in the title made it there, you know. But it is also about their time, not just them. There are no political, cultural or religious borders to them. Anyone can try to prohibit or forbid in this or that region of the world, they haven't been successful yet. They can't do it, because their stories are universal, lol. That's one of the few things that really gives hope to me in life.

However, that's not just asking for a great writer today, is it? It's rather a desire for a unique human being just out of Plato's cave, with every ideal personal trait, talent, a limitless vision, and no ego. We might as well ask Gandalf himself to write.