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Rath on 17 September 2010
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sapphi_snake said:
Rath said:

Pan's Labyrinth is perhaps better as a movie than the LotR films, but the depth of the books is simply staggering. Tolkiens entire Middle Earth was just so complete, I can't think of anything comparable.

The problem with fantasy and sci fi novels (I read this argument on a literature forum, and I personally agree with it), is that the authors mostly focus on constructing the world (and in the case of sci fi authors also describing the science), and wind up with poorly constructed characters and plots. I've never read an Asimov novel, but most of the peopel on the forum I mentioned said that he was a bad author (bad author in general, but a good sci fi author, as they considered sci fi an "inferior" genre).

If you think about it the sci fi novels which are also considered to be amazing books in general are dystopian novels (like Ninetenn Eighty-Four, Brave New World or Fahrenheit 451) which certainly aren't "Hard sci fi", and deal more with society from political/philosophical/psychological aspects.

Same thing goes for fantasy: Goethe's Faust, is one of the most acclaimed works ever, while no literary expert would ever consider The Lord of the Rings to be even half as good.

The thing that I personally loved about Pan's Labyrinth was that the fantasy elements shouldn't be taken at face value. IT was more a story exploring the psychology of a little girl affected by the political conditions sorrounding her and her troubled family life. It was a very complex story, and didn't need the huge budged and fancy special effects of The Lord of the Rings movies to be told (not that there's anything wrong with fancy special effects, but they can often be a distraction to the shallowness of the story and characters which is the case of The Lord of the Rings movies, and their source material).


You're being a bit too harsh on Lord of the Rings in my opinion, it is actually taken seriously by scholars as one of the great works of literature. There is a journal 'Tolkien Studies' dedicated to his works.

I don't believe that you should consider Asimov a bad author without having read his works and I don't believe you should take people seriously who consider certain genres to be inferior. I mean the romance genre has a lot of trash in it but Jane Austen's work is beautiful.