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Re: Re: Re: Re: suggestions, please...
Hi,
> Oh, and thanks for giving away the entire series, Mr. Smartypants. Now no one
> needs to read it.
Oh, come on! Like that wasn't obvious from about page 5! :-)
Anyway, I didn't mean to imply the series was bad, or wasn't worth reading;
quite the contrary. The characters are engaging, and although I think he
cribbed liberally from other places, he did it well.
> I think we groove on the scullery-boy-could-be-the-king idea until a
> certain age;
And that fantasy made sense in a culture where your status in society is
determined by birth. Why do we hold on to those fantasies in a society in
which status is determined by upbringing and individual achievement?
> If he were a scullion, there wouldn't be much of a story, I suppose.
Oh, I disagree. What if the whole plot had been the same, right up
to the end, where they ask him to become king, based on his achievements,
regardless of who his parents were? You could have the same rags to
riches story, except it wouldn't have those deterministic overtones.
> As for the elves, the society and structure is pretty much the same no matter
> where you read.
But they don't have to be. Why should they be? I'm not even sure that's true.
I mean, Tolkien's elves were a *far* cry from the fairies of victorian whimsy,
for example. i don't think Williams needed to copy them so completely, down to
the immortality, the lost land over the seas, the wistful sorrow at the passing
of time, the sundered kindred... been there, done that. :-) I think Williams
could have come up with his own elves; he's got the talent.
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
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