Raphael, @38: Good post. He's right of course when it comes to laymen (although I confess I find defining things amusing). Academics have to define what they talk about to be able to talk about it, though.
Actually, by two of the more useful LitSci definitions of science fiction, Broderick's megatextual definition (loosely: SF is a literary form where the depicted deviations from the author's contemporary world (what Suvin calls nova) are part of the institutionalised array of themes, motifs, gadgets, and situations specific for this type of literature, used consciously by the author in a dialogue with the reader) and Määttä's paratextual definition (loosely: SF is a type of fiction that constitutes a separate marketing category, identifiable by the title, the cover, an imprint, or the name of the publisher's series, principally distributed as mass-market literature), 1984 and Brave New World aren't SF.
However, no reasonable definition in the world can exempt Ballard's pre-80s work from being SF.
This was slightly unnerving to read. I had (apparently) TBI once. Thankfully, it's a long time since, now, so I'm healed from it. I was seventeen, was playing rugby in school and fell to the floor. When I woke up again, the nurse and my classmates told me I had been out for five minutes, and then woken up, spoken a little, and become unconscious again, about five times in a row. They were just going to call an ambulance when I came to for real. I had lost the previous six months of memory. That is, I knew eactly which day in March it was and what I had had for lunch a couple of hourse ago, only that day was in March, not in September.
My memories returned during the day, slowly, all except the five minutes that immediately preceded the accident. No nausea or headache to speak of, though. I wasn't worried at the time, regaining my lost memory was a delightful experience that felt as if taken from a novel.
Reading your text today, 27.5 years later, I realise I should have been more worried at the time.
Your friends and acquaintances in Sweden are thinking of you and hoping everything turns out all right in the end!
>>Oh dear. I'm afraid this isn't what happens at all.<<
Nope. The paths of the dead/corsairs subplot is a means for Aragorn to get more brute force to bear on the enemy. That's it, and nothing else, I'd say. The whole point is solving the problem of how to beat the enemy with too few soldiers.
Regarding Arwen, there was a rumour going round a couple of years back that Liv Tyler had some sort of mental collapse during one of her more difficult scenes (involving riding, I think); a collapse due to being closed up in a very intense and closed miniature society revolving around a world she didn't quite grok. Some of the other actors described the shooting of the film as a magic experience, and have told us of how they identified completely with their characters and felt that they *were* in Middle-earth, so to speak. Well, except Liv Tyler allegedly couldn't understand the mindset and couldn't take it after a certain point. After this supposed collapse, Jackson couldn't use her half as much as he had intended to, she plain refused, and had to cut down Arwen's role considerably as a consequence.
I don't know if this story has been confirmed (or disproven) or if it is still just a rumour.
I loved it. I have some gripes, though. The scale of Anorien, Mordor, and Ithilien was very weird. Perhaps a mile from Minas Tirith to Osgiliath and another mile to Minas Morgul? Mordor a few miles across? (And where was Rammas Echor?) And why that fluorescent mass sweeping through Minas Tirith? And why, why, *why* didn't the death of the Witch-King reverberate through the hordes of Mordor?
But the Pelennor scene was powerful, immensely powerful. One of several scenes that drew tears from my eyes. The charge of the Rohirrim; I loved it in the book, I loved it in the silver screen. Plot be damned, what I love about the films is the settings and how the magnificent battle scenes illustrate the book.
And very little Arwen, yay!
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