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EUROPE'S MOST VISITED SF/F WEB SITE |
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Mediations On Middle-Earth: New Writings
On The Worlds Of J.R.R. Tolkien edited by Karen Haber check out website: www.simonsays.co.uk
This was an interesting angle to me as I had always assumed that Tolkien was akin to Shakespeare or Dickens - in that they had been around for so long that their ideas and styles of writing had permeated their genre.
It charts the evolution from reader to writer and how, as Raymond Feist puts it, Tolkien is the grandfather of Fantasy. This book has some fantastic authors writing about a fantastic book. They are not Tolkien scholars and so this is not some dry dusty text but each essay shines with the knowledge and love that each author has about ‘Lord Of The Rings’. Yet the book fails to captivate and I found it hard to pick this book up and read it. Many of the authors had had similar experiences and while each was skillfully told the tale itself became repetitive. Terry Prachett and Harry Turtledove did stand out and were worth reading but I couldn't help wondering while reading it,'What was the point?' There wasn't anything that I got out of this text that I hadn't already got out of ‘Lord Of The Rings’. This book is like listening to one of today's Top 40 songs. The song itself is good with a skilled team behind it and the original ideal, on paper sounds like a winner, and yet somehow it fails and while reading it you wish for something with a little more soul, like the ‘Lord Of the Rings’ itself. Katie McGivern
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OTHER REVIEWS - June 2002
NEW NOVELS Diplomatic
Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold The
Book Of The Unicorn by Nigel Suckling The
Treason Of Dortrean (The Arrandin Trilogy Book 2) by Marcus Herniman The
Empire Of Fear by Brian Stableford Mediations
On Middle-Earth: New Writings On The Worlds Of J.R.R. Tolkien edited by Karen
Haber Thorns
of Nature edited by Doyle Eldon Wilmoth Jr Richard
Matheson’s The Twilight Zone Scripts Wizardborn
(The Runelords Book 3) Harry
Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone Dark
Thane (The Last Clansman Book 2) by Miller Lau Fortress
Of Grey Ice (Book Two Sword Of Shadows) by J V Jones Paper
Tiger Fantasy Art Gallery edited by Paul Barnett
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‘Meditations
On Middle Earth’ aims to understand the initial impact that JRR
Tolkien had on writers and the fantasy genre. 
To
the authors featured in ‘Meditations On Middle Earth’, however,
Tolkien was new and fresh. Writers attempt to explain why, without
Tolkien, their own creations would never have happened. 
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