Now that's a good point, El Mac. Though I personally probably wouldn't boycott the actual author, I may well boycott the publisher if they made charitable donations that I objected to strongly enough. That would, of course, be an indirect boycott of the author as well.
Reading books by bigots.
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Ajidica
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If the entire premise you are operating under is wrong, that needs to be addressed before further discussion is taken.
Tahuti
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I hate North Korea, but I do not mind any works I would make being published in North Korea (though it's unlikely it will be allowed). Let alone Israel, which government is not even half as bad as that of DPRK. I don't see why anyone should punish the inhabitants of a state whose views you do not agree with.
Fiction which is political tends to be bad anyway. In my view even a slight focus on specific (as in polarising for example) politics can make art be worse than it would have been without it.
Iirc the only text which was centered on a political premise (the rise of nazism) and had some degree of interest for me, was Ionesco's "The Rhinoceros". But i only read it once, when i was 17. It is a massive play anyway, and i recall that one reviewer of it in Paris in the 60s had commented that "During the impossibly long three hours that the play took to finally end, mr Ionesco unfortunately convinced us that he is able to think"
Almost all fiction is to a strong extent political. You're not going to tell LOTR, 1984, Flatland, The Trial or any of the works by Lovecraft are free of political influence. The key is subtility. It must not be too overt as in "[X Political movement] is awesome", unless you want satirise it of course.
Tahuti
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Well, you basically said it yourself.
Ajidica
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Still not really seeing how that forms a political message on any meaningful level. It would be like saying "Pet the Rabbit" had a political message in that it encourages children to respect animals.
Also, men from the east are evil and uncivilised and your personality is mostly determined by your race.
I haven't read 1984 (hated the first pages, maybe the only Greek translation which exists as a monopoly -
- sucks way too much) but i did like Animal Farm despite being very political (i repressed that...).Haven't read Lotr or other such works (only a bit of the hobbit, which i disliked, but it was a children's tale anyway).
But i do have an opinion about The Trial (Kafka) or Lovecraft's works, and i don't agree they are political. The Trial (given who wrote it) is most certainly (to a huge extent) a large allegory on some "invisible internal courtroom" that Kafka mentioned in his diary a number of times including the period he was writing the Trial.
Lovecraft might have some political themes, but they are either very secondary, or they are not conscious. No work of his (fictional) has any theme about politics, despite the motif of lower groups of people getting sucked into the cults (but even the protagonist of Shadow over Innsmouth suffers the same fate)
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
You are free to hold that opinion and I am free to think that it is hilarious. And you did include that tidbit in the OP, so I responded to it - if you didn't want people talking about it you shouldn't have done that.
The last good book of his I read was Pastwatch: the redemption of C. Columbus. That was a really good book. Empire was so incredibly bad though that it just turned me off him for a while. It's like he didn't even try. That and he rubs me the wrong way anyway with his hateful rhetoric about homosexuals. I'd read another book again, but I have no idea what happened with Empire. It was horrible.
PhroX
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Yeah, Tolkien's work has a fair few...objectionable...ideas behind it. The obsession with racial purity and bloodlines. The quite blatant racism - orcs are a clear stand in for turkish/mongoloid people (confirmed in some of Tolkien's letters), while dark-skinned men are all evil and Dwarves are a thinly veiled (predominantly negative) stereotype of Jews. Women are almost exclusively objectified - even the one vaguely positive example ends up being forced to be a dutiful wife in the epilogue.
Now, I'm not saying he used the books to push his views in the way of, say, Rand, but likely they simply reflect his beliefs and prejudices.
I confess to have read the Bible.
^Tolkien is just not a good author :/
Dunsany (a contemporary, and known before Tolkien) is massively better in my view, although i only like a few of his stories (at least five of them, and his flash-fiction tends to be great as well).
Dunsany (a contemporary, and known before Tolkien) is massively better in my view, although i only like a few of his stories (at least five of them, and his flash-fiction tends to be great as well).
Formaldehyde
Both Fair And Balanced
There is little actual basis for these allegations about Tolkien. He even made it quite clear that LOTR should not be viewed as an allegory:
Racism in Tolkien's Works
Is It True There is Racism in The Lord of the Rings?
PhroX
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What a surprise Forma, you didn't respond directly to my post at all. You just, as usual, pulled out a website that points sort of in the vague direction.
I didn't claim that "all good people are light-skinned" - in fact the claim I would have about good people is that they can only be so if they are of proper bloodlines. It's not a matter of "white people are good", but it is a matter of certain races, certain bloodlines being good and others evil as inherent traits. Even among the Hobbits, those with good bloodlines are good, and vice-versa. Their "good" traits come from their bloodlines. Sam is the lone exception, falling into the "loyal servant" role, but even then, that continues the theme: he's of lesser blood so he's the servant. Those who have mixed their blood are fallen - witness how the Gondoreans lost the nobility and purity of their Numenorean ancestors when they dared mix their blood with "lesser" men. Aragorn is the king because, well, because his bloodline is purer than anyone else's, whereas those of more dilute heritage are easy prey for the wiles of the Enemy and undeserving of being royalty.
Did I ever claim that only black people are evil? No, again I didn't. Where people are described as black, they are evil. That says nothing about whether other people can be evil.
Orcs may have some redeeming features, but they are still portrayed as savage and brutish. And given that they are clearly meant to be Turkic/Mongol peoples - not just in appearance (as explicitly stated by Tolkein, who describes "Mongol-types" as "unlovely"), but in language and culture (what little remains under the brutish caricature), it's kinda hard to avoid the impression that this was deliberate.
Maybe he liked Jews, but the dwarves are pretty much spot on for the typical anti-semitic stereotypes: greedy to the extreme, insular, hostile to outsiders. Even to the point where they have been exiled form a homeland now controlled by the evil eastern types. Tolkien even admitted that he thinks of the dwarves like Jews...
And you know, maybe he wasn't racist. Or maybe he changed. Maybe it was accidental, maybe not. Maybe I'm reading far more into this than he intended. But the undertones certainly seem to be there in LotR and his supporting writings.
And I notice you didn't even address the sexism point at all. Women are objects, to be claimed, to be put on a pedestal. Nothing more. Sure, he might not be alone in this, many other authors are similar. But that doesn't mean it's not reprehensible.
I didn't claim that "all good people are light-skinned" - in fact the claim I would have about good people is that they can only be so if they are of proper bloodlines. It's not a matter of "white people are good", but it is a matter of certain races, certain bloodlines being good and others evil as inherent traits. Even among the Hobbits, those with good bloodlines are good, and vice-versa. Their "good" traits come from their bloodlines. Sam is the lone exception, falling into the "loyal servant" role, but even then, that continues the theme: he's of lesser blood so he's the servant. Those who have mixed their blood are fallen - witness how the Gondoreans lost the nobility and purity of their Numenorean ancestors when they dared mix their blood with "lesser" men. Aragorn is the king because, well, because his bloodline is purer than anyone else's, whereas those of more dilute heritage are easy prey for the wiles of the Enemy and undeserving of being royalty.
Did I ever claim that only black people are evil? No, again I didn't. Where people are described as black, they are evil. That says nothing about whether other people can be evil.
Orcs may have some redeeming features, but they are still portrayed as savage and brutish. And given that they are clearly meant to be Turkic/Mongol peoples - not just in appearance (as explicitly stated by Tolkein, who describes "Mongol-types" as "unlovely"), but in language and culture (what little remains under the brutish caricature), it's kinda hard to avoid the impression that this was deliberate.
Maybe he liked Jews, but the dwarves are pretty much spot on for the typical anti-semitic stereotypes: greedy to the extreme, insular, hostile to outsiders. Even to the point where they have been exiled form a homeland now controlled by the evil eastern types. Tolkien even admitted that he thinks of the dwarves like Jews...
And you know, maybe he wasn't racist. Or maybe he changed. Maybe it was accidental, maybe not. Maybe I'm reading far more into this than he intended. But the undertones certainly seem to be there in LotR and his supporting writings.
And I notice you didn't even address the sexism point at all. Women are objects, to be claimed, to be put on a pedestal. Nothing more. Sure, he might not be alone in this, many other authors are similar. But that doesn't mean it's not reprehensible.
NonCon is the name of an annual regional science fiction convention held in Alberta in the '80s and '90s. Most were held in Edmonton, some in Calgary, once in Red Deer (I was on the concom for that one) and once in Banff. As with the other Alberta-based SF conventions, the emphasis was on writing, editing, fandom, and art, so none of the guests were ever actors. Thanks to NonCon and Con-Version (the convention that started when some of the NonCon people based in Calgary decided to have a summer con instead of Thanksgiving weekend, like NonCon), I've had the pleasure (or displeasure as the case may be) of meeting quite a few authors. My personal favorites were Frederik Pohl (a legend among SF writers, editors, and fans), Alan Dean Foster (extremely friendly; I've emailed with him a few times over the years), and Robert Silverberg (was GoH twice, always willing to chat and answer questions; he has a Yahoo! group I'm a member of).
I don't see how an author could ever hope to enforce that 100%. There is this thing called a "used book store", and another thing called "eBay." If people are really serious about getting somebody's books, they will find a way.
That said, if any author decided he didn't want to sell to a non-Conservative Albertan, I'd probably say, fine. You obviously don't want or need my support, and I'll shout it from the literary rooftops what a jerk you are.
Are you referring to The Diary of Anne Frank?Kyriakos said:
I've managed to do that with some actors. I may despise Mel Gibson's attitudes and open bigotry, but he can act, and I bought the DVD of his Hamlet movie with full knowledge that he's really not a nice person.
Time zones... while a lot of other people were posting in this thread, I was still asleep.
It wasn't what he did, so much as what he wrote when I asked him to autograph the book I'd brought along. It was a jerk thing to write in somebody's book, and his general attitude and body language were rather off-putting. No, I am not going to say what he wrote. It was a personal remark that was inappropriate.
On the matter of boycotting: There are a couple of Star Trek authors I am boycotting, based on interactions with them on TrekBBS. No professional author gets to act like a jerk or swear at me and then expect I'm going to buy his books.
Are you referring to The Diary of Anne Frank?
^No, i meant her longer work on the existential crisis of a man who digs a massive system of corridors below a forest and then cannot allow himself to stay inside that burrow out of a collection of fears that drive him to harmful compromise and anxiety.
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