Oh, what the harsh light of reason hath wrought:

[elfs]

Harsh, but true:

Hollywood has done something even more depressing: It's revealed the "Chronicles of Narnia" books to be what they actually are: a rather lean slice of delightfully wrought but fairly simpleminded, largely hobbled fantasy for the imagination-deprived single-digit set.

You want to have bad dreams? Read Lewis's The Great Divorce and Ted Chiang's Hell is the Absence of God back to back and realize that both Lewis and Chiang are telling the exact same story.

Really.

Comments

Re: Yeesh!

[elfs.livejournal.com]

To which Chiang's dispassionate reply is: just how different is the world he depicts from the one in which people like Jerry Falwell and George Bush believe they live?

Re: Yeesh!

[(Anonymous)]

That particular story of Chiang's reminds of Robert Charles Wilson's "The Perseids and Other Stories". I'm not fond of R.C.Wilson's novel-length fiction, but his short stories are immensely creepy in a similar way.

Speaking of Chiang, have you read "Understand"? I think he also wrote a great story about golems (and God, and Godel), but it might have been someone else.


-Malthus

Re: Yeesh!

[(Anonymous)]

Hardly different at all... but while they suffer under their delusions (and the rest of us suffer from the actions they take which are driven by those delusions), the rest of us don't have "Acts of God"(TM) going off like tack nukes every so often.