Yeah, I kind of wasn't sure what to make of that statement either. I agreed with almost all of what she had to say, and I thought it was a really cutting diagnosis of why the speculative fiction genre went from being so wild and inventive up until sometime in the 70s, with literary merit and wonderful to read, into being a pretty boring cash cow with formulaic stories that killed the genre. But yeah Tolkien was special.

I also didn't like how she set up GRRM as some kind of antagonist to Tolkien. "Game of Thrones" was a little bit of an outlier into the "standard fantasy formula" territory compared to a lot of GRRM's fiction. I would actually hold him up as an example of one of the old-school speculative fiction authors that's just telling his own stories without really being hemmed in by convention or boring-ly adhering to it.

But yeah those issues aside I thought it was a really informative and important piece. Oh well, looks like I am the only one maybe.

[–] SonOfAntenora@lemmy.world 2 points 19 hours ago

On top of that, a large chunk of fantasy moved towards games and a lot of other media. Without fotgetting thesr books too. The witcher is immensely influential and it featurea books and games. Fantasy is very much alive, but if you want another Talkien it takes time. Talkien didn't become the foundation of modern fantasy in a day...

[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Martin is also a throwback in a lot of ways with the WildCards line where he opened up this shared universe to other writers and serves in an editorial role like the old pulp magazines back in the heyday of sci fi and fantasy pre-Tolkien.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, I never heard of that, I was just going off of "Tuf Voyaging" and "Seven Times Never Kill Man" and all that wonderful stuff. I read about it and:

The series originated from a long-running campaign of the Superworld role-playing game, gamemastered by Martin and involving many of the original authors. The framework of the series was developed by Martin and Snodgrass, including the origin of the characters' superhuman abilities and the card-based terminology.

How could anyone say this man is not legit

[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago

The Wild Cards gag is great, earth gets hit with an alien virus which distributes super powers.

The results are described with a playing card metaphor:

Superman level abilities = Ace
Lower tier = Deuce
Disfiguring mutations = Joker

The brilliant bit is open sourcing the world. Martin doesn't have to write a word, and hasn't in years. All he does is edit the stories written by everyone else.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards

"thirty-three books have been released through four publishers."