Christopher Tolkien at it again....

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by davem

Christopher is turning into a bit of a book burner, tbh, & sorry, but book burning (or 'pulping' if you're of the 'collateral damage' school of thought) is immoral & barbaric, & I'd rather have a million badly written, trashy novels out there (& there are far worse novels out there than this one appears to be) than see books being 'burned' simply because some old rich bloke decides he doesn't 'want them to be'.

Ah. Paperback writers have it so rough don't they? Perhaps CT objects to people wanting to use the Tolkien name merely to give an air of importance and credibility to an otherwise inferior product? This'll no doubt come as a shock, but I'm not all that fussed about this.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

Ah. Paperback writers have it so rough don't they? Perhaps CT objects to people wanting to use the Tolkien name merely to give an air of importance and credibility to an otherwise inferior product? This'll no doubt come as a shock, but I'm not all that fussed about this.

Perhaps I see a difference between a) 'X' not wanting the 'X' name used merely to give an air of importance and credibility to an otherwise inferior product & b) burning books.

Perhaps, as this kind of thing becomes more & more the norm (not just CT & the Estate, but others following in their wake) we'll eventually get to the burning of something you will find yourself 'fussed about'?

What right, exactly, does CT & the Estate have to start censoring whatever they don't approve of, demanding that those things be destroyed? None of this is about publishing copyrighted material, merely about using a person who has been dead more than a quarter of a century as a character in a novel.

This is NOT about the quality of this particular book - I've bought it but don't know if I'll get around to finishing it - it may be the most dreadful thing ever written, but why does that make it acceptable to destroy it?

[davem]

For those interested in the depiction of JRRT in fiction, this piece is worth a read http://home.earthlink.net/~dbratman/infiction.html so it can hardly be claimed that we are dealing with something out of the ordinary when we come across a fictional representation of Tolkien. And have a look at this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_biographical_films - should the inheritors of the Estates of any famous person be able to control/prevent the depiction of of that person in the media?

[Bêthberry]

This almost tempts me to get a kindle.