The wrong side of the river

That right there is why I couldn't be doing with The Lord of the Rings. I grew up in England's stockbroker belt, and far too many of our neighbours were smugly insular like those hobbits -- gossip-loving, distrustful of outsiders, and appalled by people who didn't live the way they did. The hobbits of the Shire would all have voted Tory -- or probably Fascist if they got the chance. I didn't mind if Sauron did invade and shake up their lives.

It's what Andy Serkis was trying to say in the recent interview that has caused such an uproar in Guardian-reading circles: "The Shire feels very, very much like a very, a very white, you know..." Mr Serkis mumbled, probably sensing the Damoclean threat of cancellation above his head. "They’re not very concerned about what goes on beyond the borders of the Shire, but they know they don’t want people coming in."

And he's right. That casual xenophobia is what I disliked about the damned hobbits, but it is at the heart of Tolkien's story. If the Shire and every other region of Middle-Earth featured the same multi-ethnic mix as 21st century California then it would be a very different place (quite likely better) and you'd have a different story (quite likely more boring) to tell.

Ten years back, Jamie and I had a TV show that we were developing for the BBC when a partner absconded with all the BBC development money, scuttling our production partnership with Andy Serkis's company. (Small world; Mr Serkis's involvement was just a coincidence.) We needed to come up with a new show in a hurry, and Young Asgard was born. Wanting to give decent opportunities to today's actors, we had a different ethnicity for each realm: Asgard, Jotunheim, Alfheim, and so on. What we didn't do was make every realm the same racial mix, because that would suggest a universe without borders, and therefore free of fixed cultural attitudes and the perpetual knife-edge of conflict.

Personally I want to live in the 23rd century of Gene Roddenberry, not the 21st century of people like Victor Orbán. And I guarantee you Andy Serkis feels the same way. He didn't present us with an ethnically homogenous Shire because he's a nasty old racist. He did it because that's true to the story, and he didn't want to infantilize his movie just to pander to America's pathological issues regarding race. (Though he needn't have made the hobbits white; they could just as well all have been Hausa, or Han, or Inuit, or Tuareg, or Tamil.)

I won't be going to see the movie because I don't give a fig for Gollum or any of those narrow-minded hobbits. But movie-goers aren't interested in seeing Roddenberry's utopian, colour-blind vision of society any more, so I guess we're stuck with endless Tolkien spin-offs.

The Poughkeepsie problem

It turns out I need to set the record straight about my attitude to The Lord of the Rings. As I confessed in an earlier post, I haven’t read it. When I tried the first book, back in my mid-teens, the cosy Little England prose style didn’t grab me. I was more into Elric and Conan and the whole sword-&-sorcery side of fantasy. It might be different now, but the intervening years have made the plot so familiar that I’m not sure when I’ll get around to it.

All of that doesn’t mean I don’t respect Tolkien’s craft. I’m sure he knew what he was doing, and he did it with imagination and elegance. It’s much like my opinion of the Earthsea and Discworld books. I’ve dipped into them, I can see they’re done well, I admire the authors; the books just aren’t for me. And that’s a very different thing from disdaining them.

This cropped up recently when a friend told me he was planning a roleplaying campaign about defiance and resistance in the face of political repression. “There’ll be difficult compromises and harsh moral choices,” he promised. “And it’s all set in a brutalist industrial landscape.”

Sounded intriguing. I was almost hooked. But then he added: “And it’s got elves!”

Instant heartsink. "Oh," I said. "You had me until the elves.”

“It’s a long way from traditional D&D,” he protested. “The elves aren’t the Tolkien kind. It’s mysterious. It's dark and gritty urban fantasy.”

Imagine you were an HBO exec in 2016, you'd just heard Jesse Armstrong's story pitch for Succession, and then he'd concluded with: "And they're all orcs!" 

I'm against torture, but...

So -- disgust, obviously. But what really gave me pause was that my friend must have got the impression I despise Tolkien’s use of elves. Not a bit of it. From what I’ve seen, Tolkien put a lot of thought into them, and given that he was attempting a European (indeed, British) flavour of fantasy their presence makes sense. It’s worlds always from a recent bestselling fantasy polylogy I had the misfortune to come across, which had elves with guns and mobile phones in a Middle-Earth meets Blade Runner setting. Why elves? The author might as well have called them Romulans or Vikings or Cossacks, all equally out of place in an urban fantasy environment. This is using the surface styling of a fantasy trope without any of the context that forms its roots. It’s cosplay masquerading as storytelling. Ursula K Le Guin would have plenty to say about it -- and did, in her essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”:

"The lords of Elfland are true lords, the only true lords, the kind that do not exist on this earth; their lordship is the outward sign or symbol of real inward greatness."

Le Guin is not talking about moral greatness, by the way. The elves she refers to aren’t angels. In at least one of her examples the elf is being petty – but grandly petty, gloriously self-centred, whining as only a silver-tongued immortal can.

Talking of the stir-it-all-in approach, the modern mangling of myth, she says:

“It is not fantasy, for all its equipment of heroes and wizards […] A writer may deploy acres of sagebrush and rimrock without achieving a real Western. He may use spaceships and strains of mutant bacteria all he pleases, and never be anywhere near real science fiction.”

Le Guin recognized that Tolkien had the genuine fantasy touch. When I say that I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings, that’s not a judgement on the quality of the work. I could have mentioned Dune, another series I never got into only because it doesn’t happen to chime with me. That doesn’t mean it isn’t good. There are plenty of absolute stinkers in the fantasy & SF genres (Sturgeon’s Law tells us that) but also some gems, and those gems are worth celebrating, so I just wanted to be clear where I stand.

More about elves next time. The proper kind of elves, I mean.

I'm with Moorcock

"There's a tone to [Tolkien's writing] that pretty much all English children's fiction has. It feels to me, as an English person who grew up with Children's Hour on the BBC, which always had that tone, that they were basically trying to ease me into [...] being a good kid. And I didn't like stuff that asked me to be a good kid. [...] And I don't like children, or indeed hobbits, as the protagonists. I've never been able to get on with kids as protagonists. I like grown-ups as protagonists even if they're not really grown-ups -- like Conan."

That's Michael Moorcock talking to Hoi and Jeff on the Appendix N Book Club podcast. I feel exactly the same way. Although I'm too young to have listened to Children's Hour, that was my reaction to The Lord of the Rings, which I tried reading in my mid-teens but to this day haven't finished, having got no further than the encounter with the wights. Tom Bombadil was such a deus ex machina that I just couldn't be bothered after that. (Here's the Breakfast in the Ruins podcast making that very point.)

Probably I should give it another go. I also abandoned Titus Groan in my early twenties, only to rediscover it a few years ago and now it's one of my all-time favourite fantasy books. On the other hand, I never got beyond the first LotR movie -- so it can't just be the prose style that put me off. Maybe I'm just too familiar with SPI's War of the Ring boardgame, which I played so often that I know the story anyway. (And I don't think Bombadil is in the boardgame, which must have helped.)

Is there any popular fantasy or SF classic that just doesn't click with you? The comments are open.

Choose your universe

"What will determine the [online virtual worlds] that we want to invest our time in?" asks SF writer Damien Walter. "That we want to be immersed in? That we want to live lives within? Story. Story is what's going to determine which unreal worlds we choose. That's why I think it's very likely, despite the disappointing track record of Lord of the Rings games, that because Tolkien's storytelling has been so important to us, that we will choose to participate in the digital Middle Earth."

What Mr Walter has to say in this podcast is interesting, and I urge you to listen to the whole thing. [ADDENDUM 27/01/24: If you can find it online; the video has been deleted.] But I'm not convinced about Middle Earth being such a shoo-in as a leading virtual world. It may well have a cracking story, but it's not the story you'll be getting in the online virtual version. It's the scenery. The world-building. And the problem with Middle Earth, through no fault of Tolkien's, is that it looks pretty much like every medieval-ish European-ish fantasy world created since: The Witcher, D&D, Skyrim, Game of Thrones, whatever.

Middle Earth is not (these days) brandably distinct. It is just a primogenitor of the medieval imaginary. Anything with elves and dwarves probably swiped its act from Tolkien, but they've overploughed that ground so much by now that the original uniqueness is lost.

I think the design of virtual worlds will no more be driven by story than cinema as an art form was driven by literature and theatre. Which is to say, maybe a little bit, but most of it will be something else. We're going to want the virtual equivalent of exciting tourist destinations.

"The author can only say that he enjoys societies which are not simply reruns of the usual Graeco-Roman or Mediaeval fantasy mythos, but which present something really different; something akin to stepping off an airplane in Bhutan or Medina, rather than in familiar old London or Paris."

That's Professor M A R Barker justifying his exotic world of Tekumel. Nobody could mistake Tekumel for any other world. It has multiple influences, but it's impossible to say "it's the Maya" or "it's ancient Egypt" or "it's India" the way you can pin most fantasy down to Europe in the Middle Ages. That might not make for stories that the average punter can relate to the way they lap up cowboys-in-space or intrigues in Westeros, but virtual worlds aren't about the stories. What matters is the originality and quality of the world-building. And there Tekumel is in a class of its own.

Mi amore chicka ferdy

The hot news today (well, it's been a bit quiet) is that Britain's prime minister, Bojo the Clown, has been watching his favourite movie. Take a guess. Darkest Hour? Churchill? No, it's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It reminded me of a prophetic scene in Can You Brexit? where PM is relaxing with a spot of high fantasy escapism:

Johnson's choice of viewing comes as no surprise when you realize that his childhood ambition (ie just before he was made leader of the Nasti Party) was to be world king. And he made it, almost, because whenever he's on TV the name Cnut springs to mind. But let's not be too hard on him; there are far less qualified wannabe world kings out there.

There's little point in trying to flog Can You Brexit? now, I guess. People think that the pandemic has made the whole question of Brexit irrelevant. So I'll just say that Spanish Flu didn't negate the consequences of World War 1, and point out that if you want to give a non-fantasy, halfling-free gamebook a go, it's still on sale and you can also play it for free here using the character sheet here. Bonus points if you can salvage Britain's national health service from the current crisis. Come to that, bonus points if you can salvage Britain.



Anyway, enough of Lord of the Rings and of UK politics. Be here on Friday when we're off on a one-shot roleplaying adventure set in a whole other fantasy land. You won't want to miss "The Only Way Is Narnia".

A look at lawful good

What would a lawful good society look like? I’ve heard a couple of discussions about that recently and, although I think the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system is even more trite and unhelpful than the typical glossy-magazine-quiz psychometrics test (eg Myers-Briggs), it did set me thinking.

We know what lawful means. Laws, like rules in a game, ensure a level playing field for all citizens, free of individual whim or fashion. As for good – well, we could take that to simply be the opposite of everything that a Midwestern American senator believes (here's one) but let’s just say that it means an attempt to ensure that everybody has an equal right to happiness once all citizens’ basic needs are met.

What would such a society look like? The most obvious answer is the Federation. Decades of relentless libertarian ideology in the media – the supposed evil conspiracies of government, the fascism of the state, the ‘I aim to misbehave’ and ‘No one wants to be civilized’ mantras – has meant that it’s common now to take a cynical view of the Federation. ‘People just wouldn’t accept a utopia,’ insists the Randian, ‘because we all want more for ourselves than for other people.’

Well, you’d have been pitied for taking that view back in the ‘60s, and it tells us plenty about the speaker and nothing about the human race as a whole, so let’s just take as a given that the people in our lawful good state enjoy living there, enthusiastically support the principles of the society, and aren’t all eager to rush over the border into the Klingon Empire.

The snag is, the Federation is a post-scarcity society, well on its way to becoming the Culture. Most fantasy worlds tend to be more on the medieval side, and unless you assume the place is awash with magic (in which case your game might as well be set in the 23rd century) there will be shortages, famines, plagues, and all the other ills that bedevil humans when we’re not actively bedevilling ourselves.

Another complaint is that utopias are boring because they lack conflict. Would you rather live in New York in the ‘70s and ‘80s or today? (The homicide graph might help you decide.) If you’re relying on the volatility of society to maintain your interest in life, I suggest your priorities might be a bit skewed. There can be plenty of excitement and conflict in even a post-scarcity society. Just for starters, the old story of two men loving the same woman – or man, or any combination thereof – will still apply. You can be fed and clothed and warm and safe, but you can’t have everything you want when some of the things you want are other people.

A pre-modern lawful good society – that is, one where scarcity is still a problem – wouldn’t be feudal. You can’t have serfs because (trust me on this) people who are not free are not happy. I suppose you could make it a kind of benevolent hierarchy, where the lords have a strong sense of noblesse oblige, but you’ve still got some poor buggers toiling ankle-deep in mud and shit while another fellow rides by in a velvet jerkin. I’m really not sure if the typical D&D player would call that ‘good’.

How about the Shire? That’s a little more egalitarian. At least the rich folks live and work alongside the poorer ones. It’s just that they live better and work less. Everyone’s technically free, but if you have to slog your guts out while your employer rides the high hog, said freedom is really an illusion.

Your lawful good state would need a form of socialism. Food would be distributed according to each citizen’s needs. Some citizens would work, others would be needed for administration, soldiering, and so on. In times of hardship, everybody would have to pull together. It’s looking less like the Middle Ages and more like the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic in its theoretical ideal, that is, not its messy reality. Or maybe like post-war Britain as envisaged in a movie like They Came To A City.

I’m not sure if most D&D groups are interested in developing the setting to that extent, though. Do they normally just want the background to look medieval, and the difference between an evil and a good country is simply whether the peasants get raped and tortured at the pleasure of the barons or not? Maybe lawful good means you think God would prefer you to be nice Wenceslas-style: just pick one random peasant to give Christmas gifts to and you qualify for sainthood.

The Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice podcast was one of the places I heard this being chewed over. Myself, having no truck with alignment as a system, I probably wouldn’t start out designing a fantasy game setting on the basis of an abstract ethical stance. Economics and history would have more of a bearing. But it did lead me back to the idea of science fiction utopias. What would happen to the Federation if the replicators broke down? Would the principles of the society hold up now that people have to share? If everyone was like Starfleet personnel, then yes – but aren’t there millions of people in the Federation who only know a life of leisure and abundance? How would they cope? Would they cope?

In putting the whole idea of ‘lawful good’ to the test, you might find out something interesting. It doesn’t make me want to play D&D or use alignment in my games, but I can see it making fertile ground for an SF campaign. That really would be to boldly go.

Shrouded in glory

It's convention season again. This year I was invited to be a guest of honour at Sentieri Tolkieniani in Turin. The cognoscenti of this blog will perhaps raise their eyebrows at that, as they'll be aware I've never read The Lord of the Rings, but I was assured by the convention organizers that no specialist knowledge of Middle Earth was required so long as I was willing to join a couple of panels on roleplaying.

Well, I'm always happy to talk about roleplaying, and the convention is set in the beautiful Osasco Castle, and it would have given me the opportunity to visit Turin, of which Calvino wrote: "It is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness."

Sadly, I was already booked up for a family gathering here in the UK, so I had to turn it down. But if you're interested in some hobbity chat and gaming, the convention takes place on June 1 and 2 and they might still have some tickets.

Spark of genius

I wonder if it’s fair to blame J R R Tolkien for all the really bad fantasy? Those oriental monks rubbing shoulders with European knights. The elves in sports bras. It’s enough to drive you back to Ivanhoe. As Tolkien himself said: “Fantasy can be carried to excess. It can be ill done.”

Tolkien had a quality that his imitators don’t even see. There’s a creative unity to his work. He doesn’t keep throwing any old rubbish at you, he'll never perpetrate the incoherent text. He asks just that you accept the axioms of his world and the rest all falls into place.

To create something on the scale of the Lord of the Rings movies, involving a team of a thousand people over more than two years, is remarkable enough. To do it and maintain that cohesive vision is sheer genius. And only possible because, at the heart of the project, there was the novel itself.

It’s more than a question of having a core design document. You can’t build anything until you have a plan of what you are trying to build. Tolkien’s novel is the design document of the movies, but it’s also more than that. It lights the way for any new artistic work set in Middle Earth. It’s the creative Flame.

Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens (the scriptwriters) became keepers of the Flame while they worked on transforming it for the screen. Peter Jackson took it over while directing. Throughout the project, all of his team had that Flame to refer back to.

That’s because the process of good creative design isn’t the dictatorship that some people seem to fear, with “the guy in charge” coming up with rules that everyone must slavishly follow. Nor is it a case of committee thinking, with everyone pitching ideas into the stew.

It’s more like proselytizing a religion. The designer or author is the prophet. He or she lights the Flame, is its keeper, and brings the team to it. Once you see the light, you can go off and do your own thing and the work you do will have unity with everyone else’s.

Movies like Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit - or The Amazing Spider-Man, or Star Trek - show that it’s possible for a team of a thousand creative people to share one dream. A handful of man-years to write the novel – and it lit the Flame for a two thousand man-year project. Doesn’t that sound like a bargain to you?