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Originally Posted by tumhalad
It seems to me that many fantasy authors have made two mistakes. Firstly, they have assumed a godless world is not a free and rational one, but a nihilistic one - hence the comparisons of Tolkien and Anderson - "Catholic" vs. "capricious", hence Moorcock's "Elric", Conversely, they have assumed religious authors like Tolkien are incapable of moral nuance. Compared to Tolkien, Anderson apparently displays "grimness", which apparently makes his moral vision more complex (even though Tolkien can be just as grim, at times). I have yet to read a good humanist fantasy, but I think Tolkien actually comes closer than Moorcock and those like him.
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Well, I don't think there's that much good ideologically-
driven fantasy of
any stripe. It's all too easy for it to come across as merely the author's way of cheating in an argument: "I don't care what you say, in
my made-up reality literally everything that happens supports my point of view, so, um... I win! Nyaahhh!"
But then, I also think critics see books more in those terms than the authors themselves do, anyway– or at least than they did
while writing. At the risk of sounding cynical, it's my belief that some "messages" are more the result of lazy plotting than anything else. Sometimes, for example, an author simply writes himself into a corner and has to use a
deus ex machina to get out– and then later, perhaps, tries to pass it off as showing "the mysterious workings of providence" or "the capriciousness of fate" in a flavour-according-to-taste kind of way.