Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true? Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end.
Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. that long magic moment before we wake.įantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real. “The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. Nice hypocrisy there GRMM, he also said this: >'But if you’re going to write about war, and you just want to include all the cool battles and heroes killing a lot of orcs and things like that and you don’t portray, then there’s something fundamentally dishonest about that. But the vast majority of wars throughout history are not like that. The Tolkien model led generations of fantasy writers to produce these endless series of dark lords and their evil minions who are all very ugly and wear black clothes. I’m not sure that it’s a good template, though. >The war that Tolkien wrote about was a war for the fate of civilization and the future of humanity, and that’s become the template. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles? But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. We look at real history and it’s not that simple.
Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with.
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