Michael Moorcock's essay is certainly seminal, and lays out a kind of 'anti-anti' speculative-fantasy manifesto wherein that which is innovative and powerful and teaches us now ways we could be is that which defines itself against the conservative and nativist and redolent-of-death. Well and good, and his hand with the well-turned phrase lets you roll over a lot of the logicaly incoherent bits (even if it gets kind of rugged: balance the twee lispy stuff in e.g. Watership Down, one of Moorcock's biggest offenders--"if American SF is written by robots, about robots, for robots, then too much of British fantasy is written by trabbits, about rabbits, for rabbits")--against the animal terror that the book evokes so well and it becomes clear that Moorcock is telling only the half of the story that suits his purposes. And what better way to agent-provocate? Take on doyen Tolkien, of course, and while, again, some of the criticisms are fair--JRR would never have tried to deny that he was a high-Tory, or tha a big part of him yearned for a village past (though how that makes him the Little Englander Moorcock insists he is is pretty unclear to me--the, uh, Shire gets invaded, dude; it's hardly the hermetically sealed reserve of cozy rebuke to modern life that you pretend--and why are you so against cozy? Winnie-the-Pooh is simplistic, and God knows I would never use it to, like, try to impart an ethical framework to my kids, but I would read it to them to help them soothe their spirits and recover from the gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirths of toddler life. Like it's either discomfort all the time or pseudofascism ... silly.)


While some of these criticisms are fair, I was saying, others are just absurd. You can't just say whatever you want and expect us to agree with it just because you're clever, and anybody who thinks The Lord of the Rings has a "happy ending" just doesn't get it at all. Anyone who thinks JK Rowling gets off the manichean hook simply because she is ironical at moments and Tolkien is not really doesn't understand the deep parallels between the two writers' conception of good and evil (and really, we need someone to be keeping good and evil on the table for discussion, and what better place than in atavistic fantasy?).


So sometimes you're like "zing!" and other times you're more like "cut the rant, ranty." Which is as it should be--I give this a good rating because it defines one of the central fault lines in contemporary fantasy, even if it thinks one camp is all right and the other all wrong (how Tolkienesque!). I also like it because of the Terry Pratchett quote: "All my fans are named Kevin." Gotta check that guy out one day. ( )