3. The Wells/James rift was complicated but based on the two men deciding they didn't like each others approach to fiction: James seeing Wells as slapdash plotmonger & Wells concluding James was a effete wanker.
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14. The thing with allegories is that they can be read in different ways, and its easy for competing factions to repurpose them for different ends. Were orcs evil reds or rapacious industrialists?
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15. All of which is to say that it's natural to use fantastika to describe the world, so
@paulkrugman &@mattyglesias reference Asimov's Foundation, resistance liberals Harry Potter, feminists Handmaid's Tale, Bernie supporters Dune, & NR types Tolkien.Show this thread -
16. I should add, of course, that these political readings are not the only way into s.f. & fantasy. Guy Davenport also wrote a beautiful essay about Tolkien as a teacher and also what he might have gleaned from a Kentucky friend:https://www.nytimes.com/1979/02/23/archives/hobbits-in-kentucky.html …
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A lot of the sci-fi of that era was anti-communist allegory. Fahrenheit 451, for example. Which doesn't hold up very well today IMO.
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I have a copy of the Ace edition of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING right here, and it contains no such introduction. I suspect you’re thinking of Beagle’s intro to THE TOLKIEN READER, a paperback collection of Tolkien’s shorter works published by Ballantine in 1966.
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Argh. You're probably right. I was going by memory and should have checked.
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