Quote from: Cole;423120Your fortitude as a reader seems to outstrip my own.

I just couldn't accept that any halfway competent writer could write such a bad mars story.

Quote from: Aos;423130I just couldn't accept that any halfway competent writer could write such a bad mars story.

There is a certain magic combination of laziness and fidelity to a narrow genre and format that is a pretty reliable recipe for crap.

I.E. "Maybe if he'd either put more work/heart into them, or not worried as much that they be Burroughs/Kline -esque and just went hog wild, they might have been better, but I suspect he got caught bare-assed on both fronts.

Quote from: Benoist;423097...You mean the stuff before Stormbringer, in order of writing, correct?...

Yeah, that's what I meant.  Sorry for not being clearer.  Stormbringer is barely tolerable, and the stuff written after it rather tiresome.  (Although it's been years since I've read any Elric tale, so perhaps my recollection is a bit foggy.)

Quote from: Cole;423108Maybe Elric is whiny and grating.

"Maybe?! :confused:

Quote from: Cole;423108So is Achilles.

Yes.

Quote from: Cole;423108So are the hobbits.

Now I must destroy you.

Quote from: Akrasia;423135Yeah, that's what I meant.  Sorry for not being clearer.  Stormbringer is barely tolerable, and the stuff written after it rather tiresome.  (Although it's been years since I've read any Elric tale, so perhaps my recollection is a bit foggy.)

For whatever reason, I love the stuff - for example the luridly titled Revenge of the Rose is a favorite of mine (including Gaynor helps). I don't dispute Elric's unappealing personality, but I enjoy reading about him and his adventures, self-pitying as he may be. But then, I also own all the Bauhaus albums.

Quote from: Akrasia;423136Now I must destroy you.

Let us agree first that when the duel ends, neither of our bodies be ignobly left to the birds and dogs.

Quote from: Cole;423133There is a certain magic combination of laziness and fidelity to a narrow genre and format that is a pretty reliable recipe for crap.

I.E. "Maybe if he'd either put more work/heart into them, or not worried as much that they be Burroughs/Kline -esque and just went hog wild, they might have been better, but I suspect he got caught bare-assed on both fronts.

I am in complete agreement.

Quote from: Cole;423142Let us agree first that when the duel ends, neither of our bodies be ignobly left to the birds and dogs.

Ha!  When I'm done with you, there will be no body!

Quote from: Aos;423119Yeah, I stalled in the first volume as well.

I'd say that, in the original History of the Runestaff, the Sword of the Dawn and The Runestaff are arguably the best in the series (though really, I like them all). I think the Jewel in the Skull might be the weakest of the original volumes, actually. The Chronicles of Castle Brass have their brilliant moments as well. Count Brass being totally awesome. And of course, the Quest for Tanelorn.

Quote from: Akrasia;423145Ha!  When I'm done with you, there will be no body!

That's acceptable, then

Quote from: Cole;423140For whatever reason, I love the stuff - for example the luridly titled Revenge of the Rose is a favorite of mine (including Gaynor helps). I don't dispute Elric's unappealing personality, but I enjoy reading about him and his adventures, self-pitying as he may be. But then, I also own all the Bauhaus albums.

I like the Revenge of the Rose for Wheldrake. That alone makes it worthwhile, to me.

Quote from: Benoist;423147I'd say that, in the original History of the Runestaff, the Sword of the Dawn and The Runestaff are arguably the best in the series (though really, I like them all). I think the Jewel in the Skull might be the weakest of the original volumes, actually. The Chronicles of Castle Brass have their brilliant moments as well. Count Brass being totally awesome. And of course, the Quest for Tanelorn.

Pretty good assessment - I feel like I've heard the same opinion from a decent number of people. Frankly I think sometimes Moorcock needs a book to "warm up" on a series. One of those flaws I can't deny

Quote from: FrankTrollman;422993Yes, because he could plainly see that the Nazis were evil. He even want Sauron to stand in for Hitler when the book was used as allegory. Unfortunately, it doesn't hold up in that respect at all. The people promising a resurgence of people "knowing their place" and invoking the ideals of pastoralism and the nobility of the past were the bad guys. The war wasn't won by people clinging to ancient virtues, it was won by the real heroes - the people industrialized the shire.

Tolkien's work reads exactly like Nazi propaganda from the time, and that's because his actual social and political position really wasn't that different from the Nazis. Hitler was a Conservative European Catholic with romantic notions about the past and an interest in ancient European cultures and so was Tolkien. Tolkien knew that Hitler was a bad guy, but through his entire life he was never able to really explain how he knew that, or what the specific differences in ideology were. It bothered him, a lot. I actually think it's fairly praiseworthy that Tolkien did do a lot of introspection on that issue.

It was a different time. A time when I remind you: keeping Black Slaves was still totally legal in several of parts of Tolkien's empire (Northern Nigeria Colony, for example). Eugenics, racial hierarchies, and divine right of aristocracy were all respectable positions that real people in polite society would simply have. Darwin's theory that Black People and White People were the same species was still controversial, and books talking about it were banned in Germany and the Soviet Union.

But ultimately this thread is not about Tolkien and the similarities he himself lamented between himself and Hitler. This thread is more about HP Lovecraft. And HP Lovecraft was a fascist sympathizer who wrote extensively and often in support of Adolf Hitler until 1936 when the realities of concentration camps and possibly the influence of his own Jewish wife caused him to change his mind and begin writing letters discouraging people from supporting the Axis.

People being astonishingly racist by todays standards in the early part of the 20th century doesn't mean that they were bad people, it means that they were products of their times. The belief that Whites were a "superior race" was considered enlightened and scientific, and belief that aristocrats and kings were a superior breed of Whites was considered normal. Belief in the true equality of man was a fringe belief, and it is very much unsurprising that writers of the day such as Lovecraft, Tolkien, and Howard did not hold to it.

But that is ultimately a very strong reason that material from those old books, whether they be The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Lord of the Rings, or The Phoenix on the Sword, should not be used without heavy adaptation in modern gaming or storytelling. Books from the 1930s simply are very offensive to modern sensibilities and the worlds they describe are not something that people feel comfortable with. Villains need a better motivation than "they were born with wicked blood", and psychological horror needs a better reveal than "you might be part negro!"

So to bring it all back to topic, yes the Esoteric Order of Dagon needed to be updated to have some sort of real villainy appended to it, because the original horror element was mostly just that some people who looked like humans were actually part fish. And these days, if you found out that some of your ancestors were fish people and that as you grew older you'd eventually be able to breathe water, your response would be "Awesome!" rather than shooting yourself in the head before you turned. And indeed the EOD's use of apparently completely pointless rape camps is a perfectly fine way to make the EOD be "bad guys" to modern sensibilities. The problem sinks in with the later books, where completely pointless rape camps are used to make several other factions be bad guys, which robs the rape camps of impact and makes the setting feel comic and rape heavy - which is never a good combination.

-Frank

The assumption that because people could achieve prominnce in the past with views we hold today to be repulsive is too often used as an excuse for those views.  Something along the lines of "our poor benighted ancestors were too stupid and primitive to understand reality."  There is a story about Wittgenstein being at a cocktail party and getting into a conversation with a woman who said something like, "Think about how stupid ancient people really were.  They thought the Sun revolved around the Earth!"  Wittgenstein supposedly responded, "I'm sure you're right.  But I wonder what it would look like if the Sun did revolve around the Earth."  A response which may have been too subtle for her to pick up on.
Believe it or not our ancestors were not any stupider than we are and a variety of views on race were possible even back then.  The difference is primarilay that people who hold certain race beliefs today do not fee free to express them.
I am a huge fan of Lovecraft, but I do not accept the apologists logic that his racial beliefs were a product of his times.  Rather Lovecraft's racial beliefs sprung from his embrace of modernistic pseudo-scientific racial theories.  Lovecraft was a screaming lunatic racist, not just for today, but for his time as well.
My great-grandfather who was a near exact contemporary of Lovecraft (but while Lovecraft was born and lived his whole life in urban sophisticated East Coast communities, he was born rural Ohio and lived most of his life in the Oklahoma outback), was famed in his community for a stand he took.  He was at the opera one night (yeah, opera and opera houses existed in the Oklahoma outback) when the KKK had an unscheduled demonstration.  The marched into the opera house waving flaming brands and American flags to the organ player's strains of "Onward Christian Soldiers" (the Klan anthem).  Every man in the house stood and doffed his hat, save for my great-grandfather; a neighbor seated by him hissed, "Cleveland, aren't you gonna stand?" and my great-grandfather reply in his best field shout, "I ain't standing for a bunch of morons wearing sheets!"  Supposedly the crowd, who were friends of him and knew his family then laughed the Klansmen off the stage.
Now at this time the Klan was primarily an anti-Catholic (particularly anti-Catholic immigrant) organization.  But Cleveland's father (my great-great-Grandfather, C.C.{short for Christopher Columbus}) had maintained a farmhouse where "colored" farmhands hired for the harvest sat with the family for meals.  Now, Cleveland's views may have been no more common than Lovecraft's, but I don't they were any rarer either.
Tolkien deserves credit for how little race effected his work, particularly when compared to the works of someone like C.S. Lewis whose Narnians are explicitly whiter than the other races of men and thus nobler and purer (and presumable more Christian).

As far as "cliche leftist-anarchist intellectual" writers go, I much prefer LeGuin to Moorcock. I found Elric pretty dreary, and never bothered with anything else he did.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;423152As far as "cliche leftist-anarchist intellectual" writers go, I much prefer LeGuin to Moorcock. I found Elric pretty dreary, and never bothered with anything else he did.

While I haven't read everything LeGuin wrote, I've never read anything by her that I didn't enjoy.