TagFantasy
The Return of the Rings
Time to revisit Middle-earthAugust has been a big month for Tolkien fans. Season 2 of Amazon’s The Rings of Power is slated to premiere on Thursday, August 29th, two years after the first season (with its billion-dollar budget) dropped and garnered mixed reviews. You can read my own two cents on The Rings of Power here and here. The question a lots of Tolkien fans are probably asking now is whether the show can recover from a slow start, some poor character development and cliche dialogue, and some basic plot issues that made many of us wish more time was invested on the story than the stratospheric budget. We’ll see. Here’s the trailer for Season 2: The Rings of Power isn’t the only Read More ›
Westworld: Episode 4 Review
If nothing matters, then why are we doing this?Episode three spent a great deal of time simply building the characters and world but had one good scene that explored some interesting ideas about consciousness. Episode Four has a lot more action and much less depth. It does; however, feed us some nihilistic nonsense along the way, and I couldn’t help but wonder why. In the first scene, we return to a glass room where Bernard is once again talking to Dolores. She expresses concern about her world, and this seems to be the first time Bernard has heard her communicating thoughts that are somewhat independent of her programming. So, he gives her a wooden toy he calls The Maze and tells her that if she can find the Read More ›
J.R.R. Tolkien on Science Fiction
The master storyteller was more open to sci-fi and tech than the stereotype lets onIn early 2021, literary scholar Holly Ordway published a deep dive into J.R.R. Tolkien’s reading habits. The celebrated author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit was a linguist and medievalist at Oxford for decades until his death in 1973. Based on his immersion in ancient literature, people often assume that Tolkien despised all things modern – including modern books. Even C.S. Lewis is quoted as saying, “No one ever influenced Tolkien–you might as well try to influence a Bandersnatch.” Today’s conception of Tolkien stereotypically portrays him as a curmudgeon who refused to engage with modernity. Ordway, however, pushes back against such an image and lays out a comprehensive case for Tolkien’s interest in contemporary literature, including the Read More ›
C.S. Lewis and Science Fiction
Sci-fi can reveal that you don't necessarily need to visit Mars to find the bizarre and beautifulThe 20th-century intellectual, novelist, poet, and popular theologian C.S. Lewis was a rare bird. He spent most of his life embedded in the academic world, to which he contributed greatly, but was also a lover of fairy tales and the dystopian. His long-held affection for fantasy and science fiction led him to write some of the most popular fictional works in recent memory, most notably The Chronicles of Narnia and what’s commonly known as the “space trilogy,” though Lewis himself objected to the term “space” as an adequate descriptor of what he viewed as a vibrant and meaningful cosmos. In a more obscure Lewis title, Of Other Worlds, Lewis writes of his appreciation for science fiction and what makes the Read More ›
The Last of Us Review: Episode 2
A rather slow episode despite the sonar zombiesLast time, we looked at the first episode of The Last of Us and talked about how it was well written, but if you are aware of the controversy surrounding this game and its sequel, then you know bad things are on the horizon. Once we reach episode two, the writing quality drops a little but not much. It’s still pretty good, at least, when it’s consistent with the source material. Ellie wakes up to find Joel and Tess staring at her with a loaded gun. Her guardians are having a hard time believing that she is not infected with the virus despite the fact that her wound has healed. There is a brief debate about whether or not to Read More ›