To me it is a very fine shade, if any at all, how that doesn't mean hatred of me, but I'm trying to put it precisely from ... their pov, as much as I'm any good at second guessing it.
My father was absent. A grandfather wasn't, but died when I was eight. Another had died even earlier. A stepfather divorced ma, and I couldn't quite see him as a father afterwards.
So, my best male voices when growing up were a few key authors.
On my old site, the MSN Group Antimodernism, I announced them. Taking them in the order they came substantially into my life, they would be:
- C. S. Lewis (before age nine)
- J. R. R. Tolkien (around thirteen)
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton (somewhat older, but still my teens)
- Hilaire Belloc (already in my twenties).
People who hate these guys are very likely to hate the person I grew up into. I'm not saying people who love them will love what I've become, but I am saying their enemies are objectively (whether they know it or not) my enemies.
I am no longer nine. I am no longer thirteen. I am no longer in my late teens. I am no longer in my early twenties.
It should be very obvious to anyone who knows anything about personal development, that I have already become the man I'm likely to remain this mortal life, barring extreme miracles or extreme defection. If I read Foundation, Dune, or Elric, I'm not likely to change into a different person or to get me different convictions.
Elric is, as far as I've gathered, not reading it myself, about a kind of devil's contract between a man and a sword reminiscent of Tyrfing. I'm already aware of the concept of Faustian contracts, and I'm also aware that God can break them. This is a common thread between Sagen aus Österreich (where in one of these legends a knight gets a castle in return for dying and getting damned on his wedding day, but the hermit to whom he confessed argues, when Satan complains about the force majeur that's preventing him from taking "what is his" that Satan hadn't fulfilled the contract: there is no chapel in the castle, so it's not a proper castle for a knight) and Hilaire Belloc (where a man argues to sell his soul on the limit between the 19th and the 20th CC. and when St. Charles Borromeo steps in and the Devil complains, St. Charles says "well, you're one year too late, it was the night between 31st Dec 1899 and 1st of Jan 1900 you would have had your go" and as the Devil says he has the universities on his side, St. Charles replies "but I have the Pope on my side"). And I read Krabat by Otfried Preusler at age 10-ish as well (he was redeemed by the love of a virgin).
So Moorcock's contribution to the genre would be showing how the Devil's contract just carries on and on and on. I could of course have misunderstood Elric, I haven't read it.
Foundation made itself unreadable very quickly. Hari Seldon is very unbearable, while alive. "Oh, they are arresting us? Well, it was a 97.5 % chance that they were going to do that right now" He becomes an even more unbearable pseudo-Jesus in a wild second guessing of how Christianity came into existance, with Asimov presumably agreeing with Karl Marx on a purely human and on top of that Socialist (Marxist style) Jesus having become misunderstood. Not least in "the Dark Ages" ... I happen to know a thing or two of Church history, and don't need a bad novelist to tell me all about it in a strictly fictional parallel.
Dune seems to have a similar story. So, like I've avoided Foundation since that page where Seldon worship takes on blasphemous parallels to Catholicism, I've avoided Dune since I read up on the plotline or watched a youtube about it.
I just came across an essay by Moorcock, which says among other things:
I suppose I respond so antipathetically to Lewis and Tolkien because I find this sort of consolatory Christianity as distasteful as any other fundamentally misanthropic doctrine.
Not linking, look it up if you really must, but don't ask me to help you out.
Now, some people think, I'm the equivalent of a fatherless child. No. I was a fatherless child. I didn't remain one. Those who dispute that are evildoers who are willing to misidentify a fandom for Chesterton (or even Seven Chronicles of Narnia) with a certain type of adult Disney who (at least supposedly) have refused to grow up. Disney didn't just make his (then, mostly, except Fantasia) films and stories child friendly. He in a sense catered to children, which, unlike the child friendly part in Lewis, the four I grew up with didn't.
Tolkien specifically is on record as being against this catering. Spare the child a specific story, if you think he can't handle it. But don't serve it up in a mollified version.
And no, a happy end and a mollified version are not the same.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Oculi Sunday
8.III.2026
PS. Perhaps some of the guys I speak of are kind of short on people to mentor. The solution is not banding up to mentor me against my will (or through my weaknesses). The solution would have been to do less abortion, contraception, other versions of infertile sex, and more babies, when they were young./HGL
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