Saktoth wrote:stilicho wrote:
Almost all fantasy is derivative, even Tolkien, most stories are retellings of
"the hero's journey". Tolkien's achievement was in creating such a well-conceived world (with a huge backstory) for events to take place in.
Compared to the fantasy (and sci-fi) worlds of today, Tolkiens is incredibly shallow. Sure, it has a long history, but a lot of this 'history' is just the retelling of essentially the same stories. These days, almost every world has incredibly rich detail, describing entire ecosystems, cilvizations, religions and economies in minute detail by people who are able to flesh out believably the workings of such structures much better than Tolkien ever did.
Different authors bring different things to the table when writing. On the one hand, it pays to be able to flesh out a universe to some relative detail, but in the case of Tolkien I think it's going a bit too far. The fantasy world Tolkien's characters inhabit is inherently nonsensical to a degree, part of this is to allow mystery and plot curves, and part of it is just because it makes universe creation easier. Other elements of Tolkeins universe are very well defined however, for instance, elven language and culture, history and mythology. You give something up inherently when you write an adventure novel in which the universe is too well described to the reader. Tolkien's characters didn't know what danger they would face next, they weren't all ecologists and general scientists, with the exception of gandalf who Tolkien intentionally put far above the understanding of the normal characters and cast in somewhat of a mysterious light.
For scifi authors however, having a well defined universe who's mysteries unfold before intelligent characters in a systematic manner just make sense. Where Tolkien didn't describe the ecology of X magic forest, or Y economy system, because inherently the characters them selfs didn't know most of the time and they did not use such knowledges to any advantage throughout the novels (adventurer paradigm), that certainly isn't the case for all novels. The mystery of the unknown is something Tolkien played on very heavily, but something we rarely grapple with in modern day living.
