| Re: Is there life in fantasy after Tolkien?
One thing I've been doing for the last couple of years is prowling the used bookstores for some of the older fantasy works that I a) never read, or b) never owned a copy of before. (I try not to buy anything used that is currently in print, because I DO want to support the authors I like.) As a result, I've been reunited, as you might say, with some old favorites. Some had already been around for a few years when I read them back in the late sixties or early seventies, some were newly published.
And I have to agree that there were a lot of really excellent and original fantasies written before Tolkien, or at the same time that Tolkien was writing LOTR, or during the period after LOTR was published but while it was still sort of a cult classic known and loved by the few. Books written in the English language I might add.
But I will also say that there has been an even greater quantity of really excellent fantasy written and published since (the published part being thanks to the popularity of the genre after Tolkien) -- you just have to dig through whole truckloads of the more ordinary stuff in order to find it.
I suppose I ought to sit down in front of my bookshelves and make a list of some of these to bolster my argument ... |