How Have Tolkien and Lewis Affected Today's Society?

Here's C. Dunn's overview:

To begin with, Tolkien and Lewis, writers of The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia respectively, did influence some well-known and not-so-well-known stories, almost all of which are of the fantasy genre. One example of Tolkien's influence is Dennis L. McKiernan's Iron Tower trilogy which "was intended to be a direct sequel to The Lord of the Rings but had to be altered" [1]. The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling "mirrors some themes from ideas from The Lord of the Rings" [1]. A couple of examples of Lewis's influence include A Series of Unfortunate Events (Daniel Handler) and even the Harry Potter series. In addition to works of prose, there were also the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Last Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Video games based on The Lord of the Rings and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe have also been made. While the video game based on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has only been made based on the movie, The Lord of the Rings has had video games based not only on the film adaptations, but also the novels--and even games just based in the world of Middle-Earth. These games weren't the only ones based on The Lord of the Rings. It had a much greater influence on games in today’s culture. Because of its influence on fantasy, the late Gary Gygax was driven to create one of the most prominent role-playing games of the '90s: Dungeons & Dragons. This game was based on Tolkien's concepts of elves, dwarves, humans, and even hobbits (even though Gygax called them Halflings, they have very similar characteristics to those of the hobbit race). Dungeons & Dragons is still in production today, on their 4th edition of the game (which many avid Dungeons & Dragons players have come to shun). Dungeons & Dragons, in turn, had a large influence on the most popular MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) of today, World of Warcraft. The great Dungeon Master, Gary Gygax, passed away on March 4, 2008 at the age of 69. On March 25, 2008, Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of World of Warcraft, released patch 2.4.0 of the game, which was dedicated in memoriam to Gygax with this paragraph from the patch notes:

Blizzard Entertainment would like to dedicate the patch in memory of Gary Gygax. His work on D&D was an inspiration to us in many ways and helped spark our passion for creating games of our own. As avid D&D players and fellow game developers, we were all saddened by the news of his passing; we feel we've lost a true adventuring companion. Thanks for everything and farewell, Gary. You will be missed. [2]

So, if it weren't for Tolkien's influence on Gary Gygax, Dungeons & Dragons would likely not have been made, or at least been very different, and if Dungeons & Dragons hadn't been made, then World of Warcraft could very well have been excluded from the history of games as well. It should also be noted that, while Dungeons & Dragons has been and still is a game with a large fan base, World of Warcraft, as of October 2010, has 12 million subscribers.

Several music bands have been influenced by Tolkien, ranging from one or two songs to the whole band's theme. Some examples of this include such songs as "Elvenpath" (by power metal band Nightwish) and a few songs by the rock band Led Zeppelin. Examples of a greater influence by Tolkien in music include: "Gorgoroth take their name from an area of Mordor, Burzum take their name from the Black Speech of Mordor, and Amon Amarth take their name after an alternative name for Mount Doom" [1].

To summarize what I've explained here, if it weren't for Lewis and Tolkien's stories, Harry Potter and other stories who were influenced by Lewis and Tolkien would likely be quite different, if they even still existed; a handful of video games wouldn’t exist; Dungeons & Dragons, if it actually existed, would likely be radically different; World of Warcraft probably wouldn't exist, at least not how it is today. Lewis and Tolkien were very influential writers on not only the works of fantasy literature today but games that have over 10 million people playing.

Bibliography
[1] Works Inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien. Wikipedia. 10-15-2010. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_inspired_by_J._R._R._Tolkien#Literature
[2] World of Warcraft Patch Notes 2.4.3. Blizzard Entertainment, 7-15-2008. 10-15-2010. www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/patch2p43.html

Can Fantasy Stack up to Other Genres?

Zain Syed's answer:

The fantasy genre often is among the top tier of popular culture and conversation. Perhaps the most internationally recognizable film that has ever been made, Star Wars, is a fantasy story. Certainly the most recognizable children's stories of the past century, Harry Potter, are of the fantasy genre. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, both the original novels and the newer film adaptations, is immensely popular to people of all ages. Now, the Twilight series has over taken young women and has become a staple in popular culture. Just by looking at these examples alone, it is easy to see that fantasy is exceedingly prominent in terms of popularity. And that isn't the only area in which fantasy overcomes other genres.

One of the most disputed topics of discussion when talking about fantasy is its quality. Most people will side with the idea that fantasy is of a lesser quality than nearly all other genres, simply as a rule. However, this is not the case. Because fantasy is such a broad and appealing genre, more people write fantasy. And, since a great number of people write fantasy, there is a greater chance of there being bad fantasy, if only by rule of probability. Though, admittedly, there are plenty of bad fantasy works, there is just as much good fantasy. And luckily, just like those who write it, good fantasy always outshines the bad.

There is a great breadth of different types of fantasy created by many different fantasy authors, all of whom have their own distinct styles and contributions to the genre. Fantasy authors like J.R.R Tolkien lend to betterment of fantasy and literature as a whole. Tolkien, an English professor and philologist who taught at Oxford University, one of the most prestigious schools in the world, used his incredible knowledge of words and language to create several fully developed languages for The Lord of the Rings. He also made a timeline for all of the many different races and people in Middle-Earth as well as a complete history of the world in The Silmarillion. Tolkien's work proved that fantasy can be taken seriously and gave inspiration to future fantasy writers. H.P. Lovecraft also legitimized fantasy by writing horror and, like Tolkien, stories with darker themes. Writers like Piers Anthony have made the genre more appealing to the public by writing comedic fantasy. With Mark Z. Danielewski’s The House of Leaves and Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, fantasy has implemented ergodic literature, an innovative writing style that breaks the fourth wall. Through writers like these and many more, the genre of fantasy has kept current and progressed along with, and perhaps even farther than, every other genre of literature.

Most important, fantasy does what other genres don't. That is, fantasy gives readers what they want. It doesn’t matter what a reader might want or how obscure their desire is, you can always find what you want in fantasy. This is because fantasy, unlike other genres, or rather, exponentially more so than other genres, gives back to the reader what the reader puts into a fantasy work. Readers always give their own thoughts and criticisms while reading a story, despite the genre, knowingly or not. However, fantasy is the only genre that actively recognizes this, that actively sells itself to the reader. Take relatability for example. A reader might read about a character and identify with certain traits of that character, such as courage or bravery. The character will certainly have other traits, but since the reader doesn't identify with those specific traits, the reader will ignore those attributes that they don't see in themselves. The same rule applies with the setting or plot of a fantasy story. The reader may relate to how the protagonist, say for example, has run away from his home, much like the reader may have gone away from home for an extended period of time. However, the reader will push away everything else that doesn't coincide with them, like, in this fake instance, the fact that the protagonist is a fish and that, in this hypothetical situation, if it doesn't flee from home, it'll be killed by a fisherman.

Fantasy knows this. Because of this, fantasy does match up to other genres. In fact, it surpasses them.

The Future of Science Fiction Movies

It seems like the new age of science fiction technology in movies is about to start. With the release of James Cameron's movie Avatar, if it is successful it will seriously raise the bar of the technical side of science fiction movies forever. And any movies that use any sort of cg effects. James Cameron spent the last couple years since he made Titanic doing deep sea diving and developing new camera's and computer software to help him realize his vision of Avatar.

The storyline of the movie is that planet Earth is dying and marines have been sent to the moon Pandora to retrieve resources to help save the planet. However the natives the Na'vi (9 foot tall blue humanoids) don't appreciate the marines "borrowing" resources British colonization era style and attempt to drive the marines off the moon. The Avatar part comes in when the marines are given control of "Avatars" bodies that are the result of the mixing of genes of the Na'vi and the marines, which the marines control to infiltrate the natives ranks.

While the storyline sounds like a pretty typical Hollywood action movie, it's actually the technology that interests me more. As i mentioned James Cameron spent years developing special camera's and software for this movie. A stereoscopic image is a picture that is made to look like it is three dimensional. (Look it up on google they are really cool and will give you a greater appreciation and understanding of what i am talking about.) This is accomplished by taking a picture, then moving the camera just a slight bit to one side or the other and taking another picture. The two pictures are then swapped back and forth repeatedly at a high speed making the image appear to have depth. Cameron has invented camera's that have the same effect but in video instead of a still picture. So instead of some shitty 3-D effect from spykids where only certain things look 3-D when the camera pans sharply and you need to wear those stupid glasses that make you nauseous. The whole movie looks like it has depth constantly.

Evidently he accomplished this by building a camera with two lenses that are placed right next to each other. And have special software to sort the video out properly. You still have to wear glasses but they are clear instead of tinted and have something special about each lense that allows you to see the "depth" in the movie.

While the cameras sound impressive, the software he developed is even more impressive. While usually for computer generated images in videos the scene would be filmed in front of a blue or green screen and then the computer generated images would be added later in the studio. He invented software that allows him to point the cameras at the actors in special suits which the camera and software automatically add the cgi to. He can literally point the camera and it will generate the scenery and characters as they will appear in the finished movie. I have no idea how it works not being a software engineer but it sounds complicated, and expensive. The cost of the movie is estimated at $500 million though Cameron and fox have yet to announce how much it cost. Regardless it sounds like a visual experience to be looked forward too, if for no other reason that because movies in the future will hopefully look as good as this.

Movies

I am a movie buff and really love watching them. I think that it is important to have good movies out there to give people something to do. There are some things that I have seen a trend in with the recent movies. Most of the movies out are either a remake of a book or a sequel to a movie. There are more movies out now that are a remake of a book then I know what to do with. The Blind Side is a book, Twilight, Dear John all books. Marley and Me, Harry Potter both just came out on DVD and they are books as well.
There are also movies that are either remakes of another movie or are a sequel to another book. There are an ungodly amount of SAW movies. They just keep making them and much to my dismay. I think they get worse the more they make. I thought the plot line was good when it started and then it just went way down hill. There are also movies like The Christmas Carol that was recently made into another movie. It is now a 3-D movie. They just keep making this movie and it is always a different take but that doesn’t mean that it is a good one. I think that they should just leave some movies alone. They also redid Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They made it much freakier. There has been a rash in these kind of movies and it makes me wonder if they just can’t come up with movies on their own.
I wonder if they make movies like this because they simply cannot find ideas to make movies of their own. I don’t like this at all. I think that when they make books into movies it ruins the book sometimes. It also is never as good as the book. They usually leave out part of the book and it is never how each reader believes it should be. They would be further ahead coming up with something different and making a movie of that. They need to be original and give us something different. I don’t want to go to the movies and see all the books I have read in movie form. Mainly because most of the time they are terrible remakes of the books. I also don’t want to see these poorly adapted movies. I love books the way they are and go to the movies to see something different.
When they make remakes upon remakes they are really drilling their movies into the ground. They just don’t know when to stop. The SAW movies are a great example of this. They were just out of control with sequels. There is no reason to have that many especially after it seems that he plot has ended you can see that it is coming out with yet another. It is just too much. Even the Spider Man movies were basically done after the second one. We were all gung ho for it but now we are not. They need to learn to not do this to movies that are good.
I want producers to realize that we want something new and different. We don’t want what we can get every time we go to the book store.

Are There Original Ideas Anymore?

It seems to me that their is this trend that started within the last five years let's say that remaking popular movies of decades past is the thing to do.

I'm sure one of the reasons behind this is to see if movie studios can once again incite the excitement, the spark, popularity that the original had for a vehicle of financial gain. Come on, we aren't idiots. It's not to bring a story to a new generation that may not know about these stories. The thing that disgusts me though is just the sheer amount of movies that are getting remade. Many of these films, I have enjoyed the originals and cannot fathom the idea of why they have to remake something that was fine the time before. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Here is a very short list of movies that are currently being remade, are rumored, and/or are in production currently:

The Karate Kid
Red Dawn
Short Circuit
Footloose
Fame
The Thing
Child's Play
Rosemary's Baby
Forbidden Planet
Barbarella
My Fair Lady
Highlander
The Evil Dead
Conan the Barbarian
Hellraiser
Nightmare of Elm Street
Clash of the Titans
Meatballs
Dune

My question is: WHY?!?! Why mess with classics? Is Hollywood running out of creative material? I highly doubt it. Yes, maybe the 20 screenplays a director sees on his desk each day aren't always the best material, however it still may be something original rather than recycling movie standards that no one wants you to touch.

I think Hollywood is trying to be too safe. They saw the success of these movies and figure that it would just generate that same success again with a newer version with the latest most-wanted actors and actresses and computer animation and other technologies that apparently make movies better. I personally prefer old school miniatures, camera effects and flying saucers on strings than a completely fake looking props ( I hated all the Star Wars episodes for that exact reason).

How long is it going to take people who enjoy movies to say they had enough? Maybe having all these remakes makes people think of better or easier times in a world of unemployment, recession and debt.

I know I have had enough.

Things I generally hated about the Golden Compass movie

After reading The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman I decided to check out the movie version despite numerous warnings from other people who had also read the book. I really liked the story and since reading and re-watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy I have learned to be a little bit easier on film adaptations. I thought that I would check it out for myself. The result was a rekindled hatred in film adaptations of books. There were so many things that I hated about this movie but before I get into those I would like to point out that the film did have two redeeming qualities; Sam Elliot as Lee Scoresby and Ian McKellen as the voice of Iorek Byrnison. That being said, two well casted roles were not enough for me to like this movie.

Let's start from the beginning. The movie opens with the voice of a narrator, I am assuming Lyra's voice, that blatantly explains that there are multiple worlds and that in "her" world people's souls reside outside their bodies in the form of daemons. As soon as this voice began to speak I should have realized how bad the film was going to be but for some reason I kept watching. I don't like this narrative voice for a couple reasons. For one, the beginning is the ONLY time that it appears in the film. I think that is just seems kind of lazy or sloppy or both. If you are going to set up a film in the context of a narrative the narrative voice should probably be consistent throughout the movie. Otherwise you don't get a sense of who the narrator is and why they are speaking or telling the story. Essentially the voice becomes a tool to throw some information at the viewer. That is really what it felt like. In Pullman's novel he begins with the story in progress and allows the reader to make inferences about the world that he sets up through sensory details, interaction between characters and interesting scenes that develop the plot as well as the world. In the film it felt as if they were shoving Pullman's world down our throats both with this opening narrative voice and awkward expository dialogue throughout.

On that note I also feel that many of the transitions and major changes throughout the film seemed incredibly forced. I'm thinking of when Serafina Pekkala literally drops in from out of nowhere and decides to introduce herself to Lyra for no apparent reason. Also the scene where Lyra and Iorek go off to find the severed child then the gyptians storm in and a battle erupts. It was like they just mashed together a bunch of parts from the book without really thinking about it too much. I just kept wondering where the Gyptians came from and how they got there so fast. Quite possibly the worst transition in this movie and probably the worst transition I have seen in ANY movie was the shift from Svalbard to Bolvangar. After the battle is over Iorek just says, "And now, I will take you to Bolvangar" and immediately there is a cut to her riding him across a snow covered field. I actually had to rewind that part and watch it again because it was so unbelievably bad. In general all of these forced transitions and moments in the film made me feel as if I were being beaten over the head with the plot of Pullman's novel.

There is also the matter of one of the most fundamental changes to the plot in the film adaptation. They completely switched the events of Svalbard and Bolvangar for the sole purpose of hyping up the battle scene at the end. I felt that this switch really took away from the complexity of the events at Svalbard. In the film we didn't get any sense that Iofur Raknison (renamed Lord Rakna in the film, presumably because it sounds cooler) is trying to go against his bear nature and act more human. Moreover, we don't see that the struggle between Iorek and Iofur is really about the conflict between two ideologies that will ultimately determine the fate of the bear race. They might as well have cut the entire sequence from the movie altogether. I also found the actual battle scene between the bears pretty tame and disappointing. When Iorek knocks off the other bear's jaw I was really hoping to see his tongue flop out like it describes in the book...then Iorek doesn't even eat his heart! It seems like they tried to downplay some of the more gruesome elements of the story in an effort to make the movie appeal to a younger audience. I found this disappointing because one of the things I liked about Pullman was that he did not seem to censor or restrict himself despite the fact that he wrote for a younger audience.

Related to the issues of censorship and restriction is the ending of the movie...Lyra and Roger fly off into the sunset in Scoresby's balloon. Credits. It seems like in an effort to make the end more appealing to younger audiences they really limited the possibility of a sequel. So how does the Subtle Knife movie start? They land the balloon, Lord Asriel brutally murders Roger in an effort to tear open the fabric of reality and thousands of kids expecting another delightful romp featuring talking bears run from the movie theater screaming and crying. I don't see it happening. If they are going adapt the whole trilogy it seems like it would almost make more sense to start again by remaking The Golden Compass with the whole project in mind. I can only hope that happens because the movie version I saw butchered a story that I really liked. It would be nice to see a version come out that actually does it justice.

Welcoming New Student Authors to sf@SF

This semester I'm teaching 2 courses that are going to stretch the boundaries of this blog's "science fiction at SUNY Fredonia" focus. American Popular and Mass Cultures looks at fantasy, comic books, video games, tv, and film in addition to science fiction, while Major Writers: Tolkien, Donaldson, Pullman focuses primarily on fantasy. In both courses, I'm requiring a certain number of blog posts from everyone--whether here or on their own blogs (which I'll link to)--and expecting everyone to be reading, commenting on, and responding to each other's writing. The dialogues that I hope to see emerge here will be the public face of what goes on in class discussions and on our ANGEL discussion forum, which are for class members only, but will hopefully go beyond the limitations of the 50-minute class meeting or the quick-hit nature of a discussion board. Our common text to start the semester, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring (and the Peter Jackson movie based on it) should give us enough of a common ground to get some discussions going. Let's see what comes of them!

The Day the Earth Stood in the Balance

First, a confession. I've never watched the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Nor have I read the short story on which it is based, Harry Bates's "Farewell to the Master" (at least according to the wiki gods).

But I did know enough about them from my interest in the conventions of sf's "first contact" and "alien invasion" subgenres to know what to expect before I sat down to watch the 2008 version. I knew that it was one of the few such movies in Cold War America to use those subgenres to critique the paranoia, militarism, and authoritarianism of a nuclear United States. I knew enough to list it as a precursor to Independence Day (the quintessential American response to War of the Worlds), a movie I love to teach in my Introduction to American Studies course.

What I don't know is whether I should blame the limitations of the 2008 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still on its adherence to its sources. Don't get me wrong--the movie gets a lot of things right. It made good dramatic and allusive sense to bring out the double meaning of apocalypse by making Klaatu more of a second-coming-type Jesus figure, bringing judgment to the sinful rather than simply bringing a warning to humanity, as in the original. Making it a chase movie also probably improved on the original, from a narrative standpoint, at least. And turning the original's focus on nuclear weapons in the Cold War into a focus on environmental and ecological issues in the 21st century was a canny political move, not only as a critique of the Bush administration and a spur to the Obama administration, but also as an attempt to define the most pressing global issue in our times. Any movie that tries to start a dialogue between fans of Left Behind and An Inconvenient Truth is doing interesting cultural work, at the very least. There's a lot that's teachable about this movie.

But my impatience, even irritation, with it remains. It's not over-the-top cliche-saturated hyper-cheesy fun like Independence Day (for pre-9/11 audiences, at least) or even a charming, nostalgic, and well-crafted faux-period piece like Iron Giant. Instead, it suffers many of the same faults as Sheri Tepper's much more interesting and better-thought-out 2000 novel, The Fresco, chief among them didacticism. War and peace, fear and love don't have to be treated as simplistically as they are in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Yes, it's almost a nice line when the Secretary of Defense waxes on the lessons of first contact history and it's almost a nice idea when the Nobel Prize-winning biologist argues that species only evolve when their survival is at stake, but even Kathy Bates and John Cleese couldn't quite pull them off. As much as it pains me to say it, Independence Day did a much better job riffing on the conventions of their shared subgenres: alongside its rah-rah Americanism, the movie is pretty green, with the aliens representing industrial-technological consumer capitalism's own worst tendencies and all humanity left to find a different path at the end of the movie.

Finally, I hate sf movies that leave me arguing over plausibility, but that's what the 2008 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still ends up doing best. If there are really so few planetary ecosystems capable of sustaining complex life in the universe, why would the alien civilizations only plant one long-term observer on the planet and wait a human lifetime before acting? Why wouldn't they intervene more directly and more quickly? Or at least collect a lot more ethnographic data? If the filmmakers gave even a hint of the internal politics among the aliens and what they had been doing between 1928 and 2008, questions like these wouldn't be so annoying. But tougher ones would remain. Why only 1 representative? Why the United States? Wouldn't it make more sense to send someone--or even a small team--to each of the world's leading political, business, scientific, and artistic figures? And even if it could have been hinted that all this had already been done and that Klaatu's coming to Earth was the final result of a longer evaluative process, problems still remain. In 80 years the best solution the supposedly enlightened and advanced aliens could come up with was xenocide? If so, why not focus more on Klaatu as a relatively low-level functionary "just following orders" in the banality of alien evil sense, rather than make him into a surprisingly ignorant (and inept) figure of final judgment (I mean, if he wanted to address the UN, why didn't he just wait until he was used to his human body and land right at the UN Building instead of in Central Park--or, better yet, broadcast his intentions to the world before leaving his spacecraft?)?

In the end, Klaatu decides the problem is not us--that we can change--and goes with his backup plan to the nanotech-bugs-eating-everything-human-and-human-made one, which is apparently to disable all fossil-fuel-based and electrical power generation on the planet and leave, taking samples of most species on the planet away with him. (I guess our technology was the problem, after all, or perhaps our underlying way of life.) And that's that. Maybe they're just preparing us for a postapocalyptic sequel, but I have to suspect that Hollywood's butchering of Brin's The Postman precludes that. It's too bad, because it would be interesting to see what happens to the humans and the aliens--and how the filmmakers would use that to get us thinking about what a post-petroleum future ought to be like.

[Update 1 (6:54 am): Purposely wrote this without reading any other reactions to the movie. But it's nice to see that Geeks of Doom's Empress Eve already found other plot howlers (although I think #12 can be partially explained by the fact that the bridge is built into the earth, not to mention by Klaatu's line that he's holding the nanotech bugs off).]