Science Fiction & Fantasy

People sneer at this wing until they need it. Every honest question about power ends up in 1984 sooner or later; every question about ecology and God ends up in Dune. Le Guin sits here quietly outwriting most of the literary wing next door; start with The Left Hand of Darkness and see if you disagree. Yes, there are dragons. There are also the only novels that took the twentieth century’s worst ideas seriously before the century did. I keep the trilogies pruned: you will not find book seven of anything unless books one through six deserved it. Half the pleasure is watching which prophecies embarrassed themselves and which read like this morning’s news.

The allegory is a blunt instrument. Julia is barely a person, the love story is scaffolding, and the book stops dead so Goldstein's treatise can lecture you for thirty pages. You read it for the architecture of the nightmare, not for the novel around it.

— against 1984

Herbert head-hops mid-scene, his characters think in italicized speeches, and the Baron is an obese predator whose queerness is written as part of the monstrousness; that one aged badly. After the first half's slow majesty, the ending sprints: years skipped, the climactic battle dispatched in a handful of pages. You also memorize a glossary for the privilege.

— against Dune

Tom Bombadil stops the quest cold for three chapters and answers to nothing in the plot. The verse interludes invite skimming, the archaic registers wobble, evil announces itself by being ugly, and the women barely speak. After the Ring falls you still have a hundred pages of farewells. Foundational, yes; efficient, never.

— against The Lord of the Rings