{"id":12290,"date":"2019-03-07T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-03-07T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=12290"},"modified":"2019-03-06T11:49:49","modified_gmt":"2019-03-06T18:49:49","slug":"extra-sci-fi-s3e3-the-two-towers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/extra-sci-fi-s3e3-the-two-towers\/","title":{"rendered":"Extra Sci-Fi S3E3: The Two Towers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"750\" height=\"422\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/itYfBiB3bmM?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>This episode of Extra Sci-Fi got me to thinking about a speech that Orson Scott Card gave when he visited BYU back in 2007. He said a bunch of interesting things that have stuck with me over the years, including (to paraphrase) &#8220;conservatism is the new counterculture.&#8221; He was probably ten to fifteen years before his time on that one. But the thing that struck me the hardest was this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Fiction is the culture talking to itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>This goes along with what I talked about in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=12289\">my commentary on the last Extra Sci-Fi episode:<\/a> that every generation reinvents the world. How do they reinvent it? Through story. And because there&#8217;s a necessary give-and-take as part of the process, the bestselling fiction that a culture produces is a reflection of that culture&#8217;s values, the issues of the day, and the zeitgeist as it changes and evolves over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We can see this in the themes discussed in this video. While Tolkien denied that Lord of the Rings was allegorical in any way, I agree with the folks at Extra Credits that the world wars and the rise of fascism almost certainly influenced his depiction of good and evil. It&#8217;s probably also true that the conflict between industry and nature influenced the book too. This isn&#8217;t because Tolkien set out to tell a story about these things; rather, because Tolkien himself was a product of the culture of his day, that culture shines through in his works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This makes me wonder about the stories that don&#8217;t become bestsellers. Are there lots of amazing, well-written stories out there that don&#8217;t succeed simply because they&#8217;re out of step with the ongoing cultural conversation? Kind of like Orson Scott Card&#8217;s argument, back in 2007, that &#8220;conservatism is the new counterculture.&#8221; He made that argument a decade before we reached peak social justice, and got pushed more or less into cultural irrelevance because of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Card might not be the best example, because of his role as a culture warrior as well as his fiction writing career. With his Ornery American column, he was basically a shitposter before shitposting was a thing. But I wonder: what are the stories that aren&#8217;t getting traction only because they don&#8217;t really speak to the culture?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Or is it even possible to write a story that doesn&#8217;t speak to your own culture? Since you are a product of the culture that you live in, does that mean that your stories will be a product of that culture too? That certainly seems to be the case with Tolkien. Hindsight is 2020, though, and it&#8217;s really tricky to account for unknown unknowns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don&#8217;t know. I guess the big takeaway is that if you want to be a sucessful writer, you should do everything you can to immerse yourself in your own culture, not only because that&#8217;s the best way to improve your storytelling instincts, but because all of the most successful stories contribute something meaningful to the culture&#8217;s ongoing conversation with itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This episode of Extra Sci-Fi got me to thinking about a speech that Orson Scott Card gave when he visited BYU back in 2007. He said a bunch of interesting things that have stuck with me over the years, including (to paraphrase) &#8220;conservatism is the new counterculture.&#8221; He was probably ten to fifteen years before&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/extra-sci-fi-s3e3-the-two-towers\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Extra Sci-Fi S3E3: The Two Towers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[1204,1146,501,324,1011,599,829,232],"class_list":["post-12290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-culture-wars","tag-extra-sci-fi","tag-j-r-r-tolkien","tag-orson-scott-card","tag-social-justice","tag-thoughts-reflections","tag-why-we-read","tag-why-we-write","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-3ce","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12290"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12336,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12290\/revisions\/12336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}