Saturday, August 9, 2014

Mythcon, day 1


Discovery - apparently this has been published, though I have not seen it - of an unpublished preface to the Screwtape Letters, attributing their discovery to Ransom and stating that they are translated from the Old Solar, which puts quite a new perspective on the context.

Lone professor bearing the Sisyphean load of counter-acting Jacksonian readings of Tolkien by showing his students film scenes of, e.g., Aragorn being angsty about the burdens of becoming king, or Arwen hauling Frodo around like a sack of potatoes, and then saying, "Now let's look at how Tolkien did it." Yet another rebuttal to the lie that most Tolkienists like the movies.

Richard West's GoH speech on the place of sfnal views of the universe in fantasy, and of fantasy-oriented insights in sf. Lot of good stuff, includong the discovery of green suns, Tolkien's key example of the subcreative imagination, in Robert Sawyer's Starplex. Take-away quotes: "Science fiction is fantasy masquerading as realism." "I prefer fuzzy sets to definitions."

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