Books like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings brought an immersive experience that really hadn't been seen with many books or stories for that matter. Tolkien's approach to build a world with such depth is what made into what it is today. We discussed in class his fascination with language that drove him to creating multiple languages for the series and the many races that fill it. I think this created a cultural diversity in the beings and backstory of them that sparked such an obsession with Middle Earth. It made this world feel at times something close to ours. Perhaps like a lost civilization uncovered in some remote part of the world that we were slowly started digging up. His wide array of characters from the many different backgrounds that fill his kingdom have this deepened detail that makes readers feel as if they know them. A level of such detail hadn't reach before the writings of Tolkien and even today we seen movies, shows, and games trying to replicate such an immersive world. Examples like Avatar, Dark Souls, and Game of Thrones are only a few that try this.
The Fiction of Ideas
Upon hearing we’d be cover this subgenre of science fiction, fiction of ideas, I immodestly jumped into an old favorite of mine, Slaughter House Five. This subgenre seems to avoid certain characteristics of other forms of syfy that tend to make them cornier. It instead directly tackles real world issues and imbeds them in key parts of the story. Slaughter House Five is an incoherent tale that conveys long-term effects of war. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is forever psychologically damaged by ww2 and his imprisonment in German camps. The book itself goes in depth on how he was abducted by aliens and taken to their space zoo where he experiences time travel as a result. Billy seems to be devoid of all emotion for the entire book and I interpret these events that happen to him as his way of coping with his uninteresting life/ marriage and the horrors he experienced during the war. He gets a movie star wife while he was abducted and lives out the fantasies of
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