Mayan Southwestern fantasy. Cool stuff. Louis L'Amour, of all people, also wrote some things in this vein.
Posted on 05/03/2010 1:16:39 PM PDT by Borges
Why hasn’t there been a Christian version of Mel Brooks :)
If wishes were horses then beggars would ride....
Isaac Asimov? Gene Roddenberry?
He’s making a distinction between SF and Fantasy.
Of course if ANY genre makes me want to vomit it is "Magical Realism," which seems to be the province of Catholics.
Asimov was an atheist, as I understood it, although he was not concerned against anyone ever praying on his behalf.
I immediately started thinking of Jewish sf writers, too ... Harlan Ellison, Avram Davidson ... but the author of this article makes a firm, if not inarguable, distinction between fantasy and science fiction. The lines have blurred in much recent writing, as I learned when I asked my daughter to define “steampunk.”
Because it’s not a proselytizing religion. Jews right fantasy, what they don’t right is parables designed to bring people to the faith.
Ah, I see now.
Salman Rushdie is a “magic realism” writer - and NOT a Catholic. I like Isabel Allende, myself, although my Spanish has faded since college so that I have to read her books in translation.
This is, of course, the answer to the author's question, coupled with the reality that most successful commercial fantasy is deeply rooted in Anglo-Saxon, English-language legends and myths. Sadly, today's fantasy genre still consists primarily of pale Tolkien clones , hearkening back to lost tales of knights and wizards and dragons and orcs and elves that are primarily - if not uniquely - English in tradition. Try to tell similar stories based on African or Mayan myths and you may earn praise from trendy, Leftist reviewers, but you'll sell about 150 copies.
Thus, if you aren't an Anglophile, you will find fantasy literature tough going. Obama probably detests it. :)
Interesting, as Asimov wrote an excellent guide to the Bible (including the Christian sciptures).
I like both SciFi and Fantasy but they are different genre.
Mayan Southwestern fantasy. Cool stuff. Louis L'Amour, of all people, also wrote some things in this vein.
Wasn’t Rushdie raised Catholic?
Asimov may have undertaken it as a research project. He was studious. I think he also claimed to have at least one book in every category of the Dewey Decimal system.
Examples? Examples of Jews' "left" fantasies would be okay, too, but you'd probably run out of bandwidth ... starting with the entire output of Noam Chomsky ...
Forgot about Rushdie. I enjoyed “Midnight’s Children,” but have never been able to get through his other work (Zzzzz).
Salman Rushdie is an Indian Kashmiri, raised in a secular family, derived of Kashmiri Sufism.
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