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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38223 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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These - look, I don't want to be insulting about Mormons, but good Lord is it very, very hard to resist dropping one of the "m"s there - blond denizens of the Mountain West have not got one scrap of imagination above the banal.

...yeah, I'm going to have to second @RaiderOfALostTusken here. There are many things Mormons can be accused of, but having no sci-fi/fantasy chops just isn't one of them. Orson Scott Card is one of the sci-fi greats; Brandon Sanderson is one of the most successful and imaginative fantasy writers around. Twilight has a bad reputation, but I'll cop to thoroughly enjoying Stephanie Meyer's The Host. I've never paid much attention to Battlestar Galactica, but it seems close to the core of space-faring sci-fi classics. The list of successful, popular LDS sci-fi/fantasy writers drags on: Tracy Hickman, Shannon Hale, Brandon Mull, James Dashner, so forth. None of these rely on tired American political slogans to define their work.

I have no interest in or particular knowledge of Rings of Power, but I see very little to suggest Mormonism is the cause of its triteness. You'll have to look elsewhere for that.

Ooops, Brandon Sanderson is one of the writers I dislike, because of his style. It's very - functional prose, I suppose is the best way I can describe it. Same with Orson Scott Card, whose work I was never able to get into - to this day, I haven't read "Ender's Game", though I have read some other things by him.

Sanderson's problem, for me, or if you prefer the problem I have with his writing, is the "baseball stats" problem. So much work going into creating the magic system down to the last decimal point, and then once that is done, the writing doesn't rise above it.

I haven't read "Twilight" or anything of that series, nor seen the movies, but I did enjoy the suggestion that the Italian vampires are meant to be the Catholic Church or that Meyer is writing a Mormon version of vampirism in distinction to the previously Catholicism-influenced version.

As for the other writers you cite, I haven't heard of them.

To be more serious, I do think that fundamentally, Tolkien did have Catholic understanding of the world he created, and that as Mormons Payne and McKay do not share this or understand it, so they can't 'translate' the work. They can take the surface elements, but so far I think they're going on the movie versions (so we get Elrond and Dain as copies of Legolas and Gimli, complete with excruciating 'banter'), and where the movies can't cover them (as with 'why are Númenoreans pissed off with Elves?') going for the weaker, secular, political understanding - and of course, being Americans, they go with the American political situation.

Wasn't Sandy Petersen, designer for Doom 2 and Quake, also a Mormon?

Yes, he is. Also the designer of the original Call of Cthulhu RPG.

In The Expanse, the mormons are the ones to fund and launch a generation ship.

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