Omnivoracious: There and Back Again: Five Reasons Tolkien Rocks (Guest Blogger China Mieville)

Yes. I'm down with this. Great read. Read it all.

Omnivoracious: There and Back Again: Five Reasons Tolkien Rocks (Guest Blogger China Mieville):

"This is a debate that needs to be had. These are stories contingent to a world the reader inhabits--full of 'ideal creations' that the writer has given, in Tolkien's words, 'the inner consistency of reality'. Whatever else it is, that is a strange and unique kind of reading. Tolkien not only performs the trick, indeed arguably inaugurates it, but considers and theorises this process that he calls 'subcreation', in his extraordinary essay 'On Fairy Stories'. It is astounding, and testimony to him, that his ruminations on what is probably now the default 'fantasy' mode remain not only seminal but lonely. Whether one celebrates or laments the fact, it is an incredibly powerful literary approach, and the lack of systematic, philosophical and critical attention paid not to this or that example but to 'subcreation', world-building, overall, as a technique, is amazing. To my knowledge--and I would be grateful for correction--there is not one book-length theoretical critical work, or collection, investigating the fantastic technique of secondary-world-building--subcreation. This is astounding. In Tolkien, fully 70 years ago, by contrast, we have not only the method's great vanguard, but still one of its most important and pioneering scholars."