[Dain]

I haven't had time to read everything carefully, but it seems to me that Mr. Brin (an award-winning science fiction author) has brought up and simplified a lot of points that I find rather obvious and undenyably present in Tolkien. Many have been discussed over and over, I'm sure. We who study Tolkien can easily dispute Mr. Brin's facts about orcs, but if you look just at the LotR, Hobbit and even Silmarillion, his points are somewhat valid--for a modern reading of the work. And I don't think the work is at all modern, and so a lot of his analysis is mis-directed. In LotR, Bad-guys are Evil, good-guys are Good, and that's the fact of the matter. Sauron is Evil, and thoug maybe the "Eternal Rebel" tag is appropriate, it's not a just rebellion when he wants to enslave ME (Mr. Brin ignores this). I just think analysing Tolkien's characters through a modern lens is unrevealing. And I don't want to get into the literature or philosophy or even history discussion, because I don't have time to do it right...

But, I still feel his title is right. I wonder what kind of science is okay in Tokien. The only real scientists we see are Saruman and Sauron, Maiar who try to create new things like orcs or gunpowder--and these are evil things. The rest of ME is stuck in the dark ages--except where some ancient learning is still remembered, and so the wise ones on the good side are those who recall these discoveries of earlier ages. And what do they amount too? Mostly things that are better explained by magic than any real science. The world is hardly paradise, but not too many people seem capable of hauling themselves out of it. I can understand if the elves don't need science much, since they are immortal and can afford to live the idyllic, natural life and craft things over time without worrying about disease. The Hobbits seem to live in a very peaceful and relatively advanced way (much less dark ages than Rohan, for example, more like the 18th or 19th C.), and they have a few clever inventions like pocket-hankerchiefs and other civilised adaptations that the big folk don't seem to care for. Dwarves, well, they craft good things, but don't seem to invent anything new over three ages. And men, well, we know that Numenor was their high-point of learning, but again the major achievements seem to be magical devices like the seeying-stones. Orcs, in the Hobbit, are actually credited with being very inventive, at least with weapons and cruel things. Of course, the industrial revolution was a thousand years after the dark ages, and most science was evident in astronomy or biology (and much of it was wrong) which we don't hear about in Tolkien (Do they know that ME is round? Is it even round?). So, even though Tolkien is against the industrial revolution as he sees it (with a major result being the horros of the first really industrial war, WWI, followed by even worse inventions for the second) it's unfair to say he's against all science, because if we use a historical model (which isn't very accurate to such a fantastic setting) it would be hundreds more years before men would invent even the printing-press. So, on further examination, Mr. Brin is over-simplifying again (I guess he doesn't have a point after all...and I was trying to help).

Overall, I was quite disappointed by such a shallow article by a well-known writer.Personally, though, I suppose as a scientist myself that it's a shame that science only seems to have negative associations. I do sometimes think physics is magical, though, so maybe we are on the good side after all...