Essays
Ad effigiem
The strawman fallacy in Utopian fiction
Of all the habitual fallacies and prejudices that have poisoned the wells of reason in our time, none, perhaps, has been so destructive as what Owen Barfield christened ‘chronological snobbery’.
Critical Conditions
11 rules for writing bad fiction
An acquaintance of mine, an aspiring young writer, once asked a commercially successful author to critique her work. This is, in general, a good idea, but there are three things that can go wrong.
Genesis 3
Reality, responsibility, and ‘The Eye of the Maker’
Eve, then Adam, ate the forbidden fruit: that, we are told, was the first sin. The second sin, which followed immediately, was trying to shift the blame.
Gondor, Byzantium, and Feudalism
Some historical parallels in ‘The Lord of the Rings’
Tolkien at various points made both explicit and implicit comparisons of Gondor with Byzantium. And the story of Eorl the Young and the founding of Rohan is a sort of alternate history of the Goths, somewhat sanitized, and with the bitter tragedy left out.
History, Language, and the Higher Blarney
The cleverer we are, the more easily we will clothe our stupidity in plausible verbiage. Ignorance in a three-piece suit is more welcome in public than ignorance in the nude. But to cover a fault is not to cure it.
Moorcock, Saruman, and the Dragon’s Tail
A second look at ‘Wit and Humour in Fantasy’
I have before me an essay of Moorcock’s, ostensibly an argument for the natural and necessary alliance between humour and fantasy. But he makes his argument very badly, because his real purpose is to attack his arch-enemy, Tolkien.
The Problem of Being Susan
Religious experience and the will to disbelieve
In comments on R.J. Anderson’s essay ‘The Problem of Susan’, several people expressed their frank disbelief that Susan Pevensie could ever forget her time in Narnia to the point of thinking it had all been a silly childhood game. Actually this is the most grimly plausible of the suppositions behind Lewis’s treatment of Susan in The Last Battle.
The strawman fallacy in Utopian fiction
Of all the habitual fallacies and prejudices that have poisoned the wells of reason in our time, none, perhaps, has been so destructive as what Owen Barfield christened ‘chronological snobbery’.
Critical Conditions
11 rules for writing bad fiction
An acquaintance of mine, an aspiring young writer, once asked a commercially successful author to critique her work. This is, in general, a good idea, but there are three things that can go wrong.
Genesis 3
Reality, responsibility, and ‘The Eye of the Maker’
Eve, then Adam, ate the forbidden fruit: that, we are told, was the first sin. The second sin, which followed immediately, was trying to shift the blame.
Gondor, Byzantium, and Feudalism
Some historical parallels in ‘The Lord of the Rings’
Tolkien at various points made both explicit and implicit comparisons of Gondor with Byzantium. And the story of Eorl the Young and the founding of Rohan is a sort of alternate history of the Goths, somewhat sanitized, and with the bitter tragedy left out.
History, Language, and the Higher Blarney
The cleverer we are, the more easily we will clothe our stupidity in plausible verbiage. Ignorance in a three-piece suit is more welcome in public than ignorance in the nude. But to cover a fault is not to cure it.
Moorcock, Saruman, and the Dragon’s Tail
A second look at ‘Wit and Humour in Fantasy’
I have before me an essay of Moorcock’s, ostensibly an argument for the natural and necessary alliance between humour and fantasy. But he makes his argument very badly, because his real purpose is to attack his arch-enemy, Tolkien.
The Problem of Being Susan
Religious experience and the will to disbelieve
In comments on R.J. Anderson’s essay ‘The Problem of Susan’, several people expressed their frank disbelief that Susan Pevensie could ever forget her time in Narnia to the point of thinking it had all been a silly childhood game. Actually this is the most grimly plausible of the suppositions behind Lewis’s treatment of Susan in The Last Battle.
Procrustes the
Publisher
‘The Children of Húrin’ and the size of books
There seems to have been a deliberate commercial decision to publish a book with the covers a certain distance apart, followed by a dogged and quixotic effort to fill the space between them.
Sturgeon’s Law School
Why do people with good taste create bad art?
Stupid people overrate their own intelligence, socially inept people overrate their own social skills, and everybody thinks he’s a better driver than the moron he just crashed into. When questions of artistic value arise, I think something more insidious is at work.
Superversive
The failure of subversion in imaginative literature
Subversion is a popular word in literary criticism nowadays, and some persons have suggested that it is the principal function of fantasy. Not a function, which may perhaps be true, but the function, the sine qua non.
The Taste for Magic
Some thoughts on the ethics of enchantment in fiction
Why do we hanker for magic? That is a question that the large-C Catholic fantasy writer must squarely face, and the small-c catholic reader ought at any rate to find interesting.
The Terminal Orc
Middle-earth and the theology of evil
If the powers of Morgoth and the nature of the Elves gave Tolkien endless trouble in preparing The Silmarillion for publication, the problem of the Orcs nearly frightened him into giving up the attempt.
What Is Elf?
Folklore, theology, and the Tolkien Method
Tolkien’s Elves represented something valuable, something it behooves us to examine more closely.
Zen and the Art of the Tachyon Dragon
Koans, McGuffins, and miracles in fantasy
The average Westerner knows two things about Zen: that it features interestingly weird sayings called koans, and that it has something to do with motorcycle maintenance.
‘The Children of Húrin’ and the size of books
There seems to have been a deliberate commercial decision to publish a book with the covers a certain distance apart, followed by a dogged and quixotic effort to fill the space between them.
Sturgeon’s Law School
Why do people with good taste create bad art?
Stupid people overrate their own intelligence, socially inept people overrate their own social skills, and everybody thinks he’s a better driver than the moron he just crashed into. When questions of artistic value arise, I think something more insidious is at work.
Superversive
The failure of subversion in imaginative literature
Subversion is a popular word in literary criticism nowadays, and some persons have suggested that it is the principal function of fantasy. Not a function, which may perhaps be true, but the function, the sine qua non.
The Taste for Magic
Some thoughts on the ethics of enchantment in fiction
Why do we hanker for magic? That is a question that the large-C Catholic fantasy writer must squarely face, and the small-c catholic reader ought at any rate to find interesting.
The Terminal Orc
Middle-earth and the theology of evil
If the powers of Morgoth and the nature of the Elves gave Tolkien endless trouble in preparing The Silmarillion for publication, the problem of the Orcs nearly frightened him into giving up the attempt.
What Is Elf?
Folklore, theology, and the Tolkien Method
Tolkien’s Elves represented something valuable, something it behooves us to examine more closely.
Zen and the Art of the Tachyon Dragon
Koans, McGuffins, and miracles in fantasy
The average Westerner knows two things about Zen: that it features interestingly weird sayings called koans, and that it has something to do with motorcycle maintenance.