Huh? Michael Moorcock hates LOTR?

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage

http://leogrin.com/CimmerianBlog/knocking-some-stuffing-out-of-moorcock’s-“epic-pooh”/

Now i can see why Moorcock is considered a joke in some fantasy forums. That, and when he accused Sapowski of ripping him off with Geralt.

Mathsorcerer

Mr. Moorcock complaining about Tolkien makes him sound petty and childish--he is jealous that his works will never be as widely-read or widely-loved as Tolkien's.

Necomancer

I can't help but feel his entire argument can be boiled down too "CLASSICAL FANTASY SUCKS! UP WITH GRIM DARK SAD STORIES!"

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage

Personally, I more than disagree with his potshots towards Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. Tolkien was a fundamentally different from Moorcock, both as a person and a writer. I never much liked Moorcock as a person or a writer. His main attraction is Elric who is pretty much the original edgy and emo fantasy anti-hero. Though his influence is profound in everything from D&D and Warhammer to Wolverine and Adam Warlock, I never found any real relatable human qualities in any of his characters and frankly can't stomach his worldview in any capacity. However, there is something weird and fun about the Eternal Champion stories, which I think serves other media like video games far better than epic fantasy literature made for reading (Lords of Chaos and Law clearly influencing the Daedra and Aedra from Elder Scrolls). I think his ideas are great but he's kind of a sloppy writer, jumping from one scenario to the next in his Elric stories without, interestingly for fantasy fiction, never providing any semblance of conflict or suspense. I don't care about any of his characters enough to care about what happens. We know Elric 'loves' Cymoril, who is supposed to be an 'amoral' Melnibonean yet who can somehow behave as if she understands love and loyalty, okay, so Moorcock says..... He never shows us anything that substantiates that love or the Melnibonean trait. His villains and supporting characters are less than one-dimensional, as is Elric who has the self destructive ingenuity of a lemming. The most interesting thing about his works are the trippy occult-esque elements. I liked reading about Arioch, and his many different incarnations. I liked reading about sorcery, traveling in between planes of existence. Although his 'Pantheon' is really pretty much just a tweaked version of the Ars Goetia and his set-up of Law and Chaos is ultimately empty. 

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage

Moorkcock went from an angry young man hipster to a grumpy old man hipster with nothing in between.

Fardragon

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage said:

Moorkcock went from an angry young man hipster to a grumpy old man hipster with nothing in between.

to be fair, so did I.

GodKaiserHell

 

CoM_Solaufein

Who?

Francois

I bought a Stormbringer anthology a long time ago, but I never finished it. I really wanted to like it, but it never captured my interest. I have to say I'm not crazy about Tolkien's style of writing either, but at least the LOTR storyline and characters are engrossing and I read it many times. I would say it is a ''comforting read'' in the sense that good and evil are well defined and easily identified. It lacks the moral complexity of real life conflicts, and that's why it is satisfying to many people.

atcDave

I don't know, I think real life is usually pretty easy to tell good from evil. Its usually only when someone is trying to justify evil that they make it all sound more complicated than it is.

SharGuidesMyHand

CoM_Solaufein said:

Who?

Exactly!

Fardragon

atcDave said:

I don't know, I think real life is usually pretty easy to tell good from evil. Its usually only when someone is trying to justify evil that they make it all sound more complicated than it is.

Sure. In real life good = "what I believe"; evil = "what they believe".

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage

atcDave said:

I don't know, I think real life is usually pretty easy to tell good from evil. Its usually only when someone is trying to justify evil that they make it all sound more complicated than it is.

Sounds like something Steve Ditko's Mr. A would say.

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage

Fardragon said:

atcDave said:

I don't know, I think real life is usually pretty easy to tell good from evil. Its usually only when someone is trying to justify evil that they make it all sound more complicated than it is.

Sure. In real life good = "what I believe"; evil = "what they believe".

I do believe in a n objective good and objective evil though. Its not only a matter of beliefs. Rape, kidnappings, murder and robbery are pretty evil in my book.

Fardragon

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage said:

Fardragon said:

atcDave said:

I don't know, I think real life is usually pretty easy to tell good from evil. Its usually only when someone is trying to justify evil that they make it all sound more complicated than it is.

Sure. In real life good = "what I believe"; evil = "what they believe".

I do believe in a n objective good and objective evil though. Its not only a matter of beliefs. Rape, kidnappings, murder and robbery are pretty evil in my book.

"In you're book" being the key words. In other people's book all those things contitute doing God's work. There is nothing more dangerous than some who unshakably believes that they are Good.

Naveen

I think Moorcock hates everybody. He also despises Warhammer, though I can understand why. The first edition began with something like "And thanks to Moorcock, who's fault all this is", but later they acted as if he never existed.

FinneousPJ

Can you imagine what his school life was, with a name like more cock.

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage

Naveen said:

I think Moorcock hates everybody. He also despises Warhammer, though I can understand why. The first edition began with something like "And thanks to Moorcock, who's fault all this is", but later they acted as if he never existed.

He also said he wanted to kill Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. What a douchebag.

Francois

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage said:

I do believe in a n objective good and objective evil though. Its not only a matter of beliefs. Rape, kidnappings, murder and robbery are pretty evil in my book.

I'm not talking about specific actions, because in real life it is not always easy to know who is guilty or not, and what the motivations were. I'm talking more about conflict betwen the ''heroes'' and ''bad guys'' in fantasy. In LOTR and most similar fantasy, the bad guy are unmistakenly evil. There is absolutely no question about their intent. It's a clear enemy with a simple solution and nobody questions the necessity to destroy that enemy. That's why it's a comfort reading, because most people likes a simple explanation for who is the bad guy. In real life we can point to a mad dictator and call him evil, but his country is not populated by evil monsters and the solutions are not as simple.

Fardragon

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage said:

Naveen said:

I think Moorcock hates everybody. He also despises Warhammer, though I can understand why. The first edition began with something like "And thanks to Moorcock, who's fault all this is", but later they acted as if he never existed.

He also said he wanted to kill Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. What a douchebag.

Yes, going back in time and stopping them becoming writers would be quite sufficient.

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage

But i Like Dragonlance.

Francois

I read Dragonlance long before LOTR and I actually like it better. That and David Edding's Elenium.

CoM_Solaufein

This nobody obviously doesn't know Tolkien. I saw something mentioning that he glorified warfare in his books? Tolkien was a World War 1 vet who did time in the trenches, been shell shocked and saw the horrors of warfare first hand. Not to mention he lost his dear friends in that war. Glorify? No. More like tell you how barbaric it is.

Fardragon

CoM_Solaufein said:

This nobody obviously doesn't know Tolkien. I saw something mentioning that he glorified warfare in his books? Tolkien was a World War 1 vet who did time in the trenches, been shell shocked and saw the horrors of warfare first hand. Not to mention he lost his dear friends in that war. Glorify? No. More like tell you how barbaric it is.

Moorcock is of the 1960s Mutually Assured Destruction generation. What he resents is that whist Tolkien portays war as awful, he doesn't portay it as meaningless and futile. It's an issue Tolkien himself addesses in the forward, when he talks about LotR not being allogorical.

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage

Fardragon said:

CoM_Solaufein said:

This nobody obviously doesn't know Tolkien. I saw something mentioning that he glorified warfare in his books? Tolkien was a World War 1 vet who did time in the trenches, been shell shocked and saw the horrors of warfare first hand. Not to mention he lost his dear friends in that war. Glorify? No. More like tell you how barbaric it is.

Moorcock is of the 1960s Mutually Assured Destruction generation. What he resents is that whist Tolkien portays war as awful, he doesn't portay it as meaningless and futile. It's an issue Tolkien himself addesses in the forward, when he talks about LotR not being allogorical.

In other words, Tolkien is classical music and Moorcock is Heavy Metal.

SmilingSword

I always find it strange how much people seem to love LoTR's. It's a fairly boring read, with Tolkien's meandering style and the sheer amount of time you spend reading descriptions of the landscape and don't get me started on the section of Frodo, Sam and Gollum just walking and walking and walking sigh...
I personally preferred the Silmarillion, where there was just so much going on. The basic history of middle earth in 300 pages, sign me up. The Hobbit is a fun children's book and some of his poetry is quite good, most of it's not though.

Honestly I don't know if Tolkien even makes it into my top 10 fantasy writers anymore, I was a huge fan in high school, but having read a lot of fantasy over the years I came to the realization there are better writers out there. I have a great respect for Tolkien for what he did for fantasy as a whole, but LoTR is a bit of a snorefest.

I have never read Moorcock, but now I kinda wanna see what all the fuss is about.

Fardragon

It's amazing how many students get totally stumped when trying to answer a descriptive writing question for GCSE English. Has description vanished from the modern novel?

Nonnahswriter

Fardragon said:

It's amazing how many students get totally stumped when trying to answer a descriptive writing question for GCSE English. Has description vanished from the modern novel?

It hasn't "vanished," but most readers nowadays (especially young ones) scoff at too much detailed description. They just want to get with the story; some publishers are like this too. Novel-story-telling has become a lot like film-story-telling in that you have to "hook" the reader right in and keep them engaged with the plot and characters. Too much description can slow that down, and you know what doesn't sell well? Slow-paced books.

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage

ShapiroKeatsDarkMage said:

Personally, i never really liked Moorcock as a writer. His biggest attraction is Elric of Melnibone, who is pretty much the first emo antihero in the history of fiction. Now i can't deny Moorcock's influence on D&D and writers like Jim Starlin, Walt Simonson and others and i even like the concept of the Eternal Champion and the conflict between Law and Chaos, but he's a writer with good ideas and sloppy execution. His prose feels like a Robert E. Howard/Lovecraft wannabe, the setting is barely described and pretty much all of his characters are one dimensional, including Elric who spends many pages whining about how it sucks having to deal with a sentient sword that killed his loved ones.

Plus the last page of ''Stormbringer'' is one of the most ugly and rushed endings in the history of fantasy.

the_spyder

Nonnahswriter said:

It hasn't "vanished," but most readers nowadays (especially young ones) scoff at too much detailed description. They just want to get with the story; some publishers are like this too. Novel-story-telling has become a lot like film-story-telling in that you have to "hook" the reader right in and keep them engaged with the plot and characters. Too much description can slow that down, and you know what doesn't sell well? Slow-paced books.

I'm not sure it is appropriate to say "Most readers" in this context. Certainly it depends on the type of book being published. If the book is intended to be basically a pulp read, (YA novels, Serial novels on a given series, etc...) they are looking to fit a given format, specifically around 250 pages and with a story that fits nicely and completely within that amount with a distinct beginning, middle and ending. Those types of novels by virtue of not having the room for description and being targeted at an audience that merely wants an 'Easy' read, don't want the level of description.

However, if it is a true Novel the author has a lot more freedom to add/include as much or as little detail as they like. There are novelists out there that write those types of books. But it is a different thing than say the Doctor Who or Star Trek novels that get ground out one a month. Not that I knock those types of books, they are what I read the most. Merely that I know what I am getting into and don't expect something like Tolkien if I am reading that.

Personally, I grew up loving Tolkien AND Moorcock in just about equal measures. And hey, if Mr Moorcock doesn't like Tolkien's work? That's his prerogative.

atcDave

One nice thing about the current publishing realities is that its truly irrelevant what any publisher wants to do. Thanks to the internet serious writers can make their material available to any audience, at any time. There are so many free hosting sites for such things, probably 40% of what I read these days will never be in "print" and will never make a dime, but they're available regardless.

Of course that means many writers will remain amateurs. But that's always been true of most writers, its just now you can post/publish everything yourself.