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Corey Olsen is The Tolkien Professor. I grill him about Tolkien and then I Iet him talk about more modern fiction… so it’s all books all the time. His book Exploring the Hobbit is available for pre-order. I am excitable and on-freaking board. Listen and enjoy.
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NOTES:
Nenya
Narya
Vilya
Letter from CS Lewis just a reference to it.
Lord of the Rings Game - Fellowship
Charles Williams – The Greater Trumps
Peter Beagle – The Last Unicorn
Wizard of Earthsea – Ursula Le Guin
George RR Martin – Game of Thrones
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Audio leveling by Patrick Brady
Music is by Mike Ruekberg
Website design by Vilmos: who has his own podcast
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http://socialistjazz.blogspot.com/2011/10/ffb-special-beyond-and-alongside.html
...where I devoted several lines to Peter Beagle (and THE LAST UNICORN among others) in the whirlwind tour, but it was some time back now (October) and deep down column...the only serious issues I'd take with the discussion would be, first, the notion that, while it's beyond unreasonable to criticize the Christian science-fantasy of C. S. Lewis for not keeping up with the science of his time (and you can be sure that rocketry and the understanding of gravitational and other forces was much farther along in the 1930s than Lewis was up on...it had to be, for Sputnik, et al, to happen, after all, two decades later), some sf was certainly keeping up with scientific advances and reasonable speculative technology (particularly the gadget-oriented sf of the Jules Verne tradition, also exemplified by the new fiction in early issues of AMAZING STORIES), and the kind of sociological sf that Wells was engaging in with THE TIME MACHINE, where How the gadget worked was less important than what the traveler saw when he got there (Wells could also write gadgety, and when he didn't, Verne particularly was put out by his Wild Fantasy), and then there was the kind of phantasmic sf/science-fantasy that, say, David Lindsay was writing, and the kind of slam-bang adventure that E. E. "Doc" Smith offered...and while the last usually tried to stick by reasonable gadgetry, that went out the window if something Kewl could be introduced for adventure purposes (faster than light travel, for obvious example). But relatively sober science-congnizant sf was Very much with us, even outside the magazine field, in 1938 (Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD, for example, was reasonably faithful to sensible tech in 1932).--The other issue I'd have is more arguable, but a number of the modern fantasy items you'll be teaching owe A Lot to work that didn't come up in discussion here, though I suspect (and certainly hope) they will in the actual classroom environment...certainly much of the grit and earthiness (and not a little of the ironic tone) of George R. R. Martin's work owes something to a number of his predecessors, including Jack Vance and through him such folks as James Branch Cabell and the other Decadents, as well as L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt and the other died in the wool historians who were also fantasists. Also, Corey Olsen...you got some Lewis even before Grimm or Andersen? And the layered overlapping of reality and fantasy, of course, is a tradition the fabulists as well as such latter-day geniuses (and inspirations to Beagle and others) such as Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch and Theodore Sturgeon and Shirley Jackson and Jorge Luis Borges have enriched...and, of course, all literature, not solely fantasy literature, descends from early examples of fantasticated literature, including such oldest surviving examples as that of that bromance for the ages, Gilgamesh and Enkidu...