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LotR Rewritten From a Mordor Perspective
Hugh Pickens writes writes "It's been said that history is written by the winners but Laura Miller writes in Salon about a counterexample as she reviews a new version of Lord of the Rings. The Last Ring-bearer was published to acclaim in Russia by Kirill Yeskov, a paleontologist whose job is reconstructing long-extinct organisms and their way of life. Yeskov performs essentially the same feat in his book. The Last Ring-bearer is set during and after the end of the War of the Ring and told from the perspective of the losers. In Yeskov's retelling, available in translation as a free download, the wizard Gandalf is a war-monger intent on crushing the scientific and technological initiative of Mordor and its southern allies because science 'destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men' and Aragorn is depicted by Yeskov as a ruthless Machiavellian schemer who is ultimately the puppet of his wife, the elf Arwen. Sauron's citadel Barad-dur is, by contrast, described as 'that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic.'"
It's a great book, I've read it ten years ago, in the Polish translation.
Quoting Wikipedia: "fear of the vigilant and litigious Tolkien estate has heretofore prevented its publication in English". Tell me again, how exactly copyright encourages creation of new works?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
In 1000s of years of history there has been pretty much no technological progress in Middle Earth. Several 1000s years of civilisation and they are still in the Dark Ages.
it's already happening. many of our 'illusions' are fading fast. see you on the other side of it? after all of the distressed babies have been accounted/cared for.
If y'all are interested in this kind of fiction, Jacqueline Carey did a really good duology on it in her Banewreaker series.
She's mostly known for steamy fantasy/romance novels (the Kushiel series), but she does a very good take on a LOTR-analogue world in which the Sauron equivalent is shown as the good guys. Or not good guys, precisely, but as more or less a guy wanting to be left alone, with the Gandalf-equivalent instigating the "good" races to destroy him in his Mordorish fortress. You really end up hating the good guys by the end of the series. =)
I highly recommend it.
http://www.amazon.com/Banewreaker-Sundering-Book-Jacqueline-Carey/dp/0765305216
Available here:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/msg/697476f4e92d2483?dmode=source&output=gplain
>Seriously though, I have read Yeskov's novel some ten years ago, when it was
>officially published in Poland. It caused a great turmoil among die-hard
>Tolkien's fans, who considered it "blasphemous" - not because of the
>copyright issue, but because the good and the evil were so thoroughly
>reverted there. Those who remember Gaiman's "Snow, Glass, Apples" should
>understand what I mean. Personally, I liked the book, but this reversal of
>well-established stereotypes is its main merit. Without any references to
>Middle-Earth it would have been just a second-rate spy story/political
>thriller, like the many clones of Frederick Forsyth.
For my part, I'd rather read a first-rate spy story / political thriller, irregardless of the trappings or lack thereof.
I was a little unsure whether the author of the article had read the books due to the "Sauron is a giant eye-lighthouse". She goes on to talk about how the book is more a book in its own right than fan fiction but if the author bases their knowledge on the subject by the Peter Jackson films then the validity of her opinion is in question.
If that is not the best practical "in soviet russia..." joke, i don't know what is.
"Eye-of-the-beholder"-dept?
=)
... that there should be more of these stories taken from the point-of-view of different characters. Wicked was incredibly clever, as was Ender's Shadow. I'd also like to see it done with movies. Perhaps an action film from the 'villain's' POV, or maybe it could follow a civilian who gets screwed over by every car chase and explosion.
Will someone please do this for Twilight from the view of Victoria? My *ahem* daughter needs more reading material....
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[i]The Iron Dream is a metafictional 1972 alternate history novel by Norman Spinrad.
The book has a nested narrative that tells a story within a story. On the surface, the novel presents an unexceptional pulp, post-apocalypse science fiction action tale entitled Lord of the Swastika. However, this is a pro-fascist narrative written by an alternate-history Adolf Hitler, who in this timeline emigrated from Germany to America in 1919 after the Great War, and used his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp-science fiction illustrator and later a successful science fiction writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed adventure stories under a thin SF-veneer.[/i]
[Wikipedia]
Motorcycles, leather clothes, genetically pure heroes against the mutant scum. Rise to power and noble leadership! ...yep, the story inside the story is utter crap, the kind of utter crap Hitler could have written. And then the "critique" foreword and afterword really put this in perspective...
Don't get it wrong. This is not a pro-Nazi book. This is a work of satire, the high-quality kind of satire that is hard to distinguish from the real thing, unless you really dig under the surface.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The Lord of The Rings is 6 books, often published as 3 volumes. The Fellowship of the Ring is the name of both Book 2 and Volume 1.
It's called a sidequel, there's fan sites for Star Wars that deal with these a lot. Here's one that uses the toys to tell stories about auxiliary characters with the backdrop of the actual films:
http://www.photonovelalliance.com
Stories about like imperial officers, jedi during the clone wars, conscripted storm troopers, etc.
I had wondered why that scheming little hobbit was allowed to run around with stolen property and why nobody locked them all up and threw away the key. About time the truth came out and we start treating hobbits and wizards with the scorn they deserve promoting of course the sheer kindness of the Ork.
"And I would have got away with it, if it wasn't for you pesky meddling kids. Oh, wait, you're hobbits, not kids."
If you want this kind of fiction on a daily basis, just watch Fox "News"
In Soviet Russia, Mordor does not simply walk into you.
A rewrite of the Silmarillion (LotR background story) from Melkor's perspective http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Arda.
Bonus: it preserves the spirit of the original a little bit better than the Last Ring-bearer, IMHO.
No idea, if there is an actual English translation, though.
where good and evil can sometimes swap places in the minds of the reader if not the populace in the story. Many of his books were recently reprinted in large paper back format making the stories accessible to many. His The Black Company series is a great story where the mercenaries start working for the bad guys but eventually end up for working for the good guys and even team up again with the bad guys. A nice back and forth. The one good point throughout is that being the good guys doesn't mean your not just as rotten as the bad guys, they can even be worse at times as justification comes from not being the other side.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Company
http://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-Black-Company-Glen-Cook/dp/0765319233/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1298297648&sr=1-2
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The correct usage is regardless. I'm not doing it to correct you, just to reach the millions of kids who might be harmed by reading your post.
I haven't read the book, which is probably excellent. But I get annoyed that people do think everything is a matter of perspective. The Lord of the Rings was about Hitler and he was a bad guy. Sure in the US we had our internment camps and that was wrong. Sure we dropped the atomic bomb and that was wrong. But at the same time Hitler had the holocaust and he had to be stopped.
It's like on CNN when they're just listening to lies and nodding. No. Just because someone believes in a cause (genocide) doesn't make it OK.
It would seem, at least from my perspective, that the download link, from sendspace, given in the original blog does not work correctly.
So I searched around and found another copy on mediafire. http://www.mediafire.com/?82xn3qkue3iu12a
But the movie showed that when Sauron was defeated, everyone of his side got devoured. (Not the book, I know) Besides, where was the philosophy or progress in Mordor? They relied on magic just as much as the "good" guys. You had the grunt warriors, diseased trolls as captains and then the evil wizard helping Sauron.
The story should have been told from the view of Tom Bombadill. (sp) Now that would be interesting.
It's not much different that current attempts to re-write history. But I digress. I find a Russian re-write interesting. As if to say, "You've all misunderstood the former Soviet Republic!?" Could be something subliminal.
Is the free pdf download actually hosted by livejournal? If not, why do all the links point there, and could someone please post a direct link to it without the pesky social networking site in the way?
Sometimes a book makes a much more effective argument. Orwell comes to mind.
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When I was a young child decades ago, Fred Rogers had the woman who played the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz on his program. She explained how they did the scene where she melted. But she also tried to get kids to think about what things looked like from the Wicked Witch's perspective. Her sister was killed. The one keepsake was stolen. Her home was invaded. Finally, she is attacked just for defending herself and trying to get back her sister's property. And so on. It really shocked me in a good way, to think that things looked different from her point of view.
Here is a FOSS project (Rakontu) my wife developed (I helped a small bit) to help people see situations from multiple perspectives.
http://www.rakontu.org/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here... it's not a reply to anyone. And as such, makes no sense whatsoever. What does this have to do with LotR or this translation of a Russian book?
Bite my shiny metal ass!
Russian fantasy is actually quite different. The motif of 'restoring the balance' is present in a lot of works, but quite a lot of fantasy books focus on _transformations_ of society or about factions vying to transform society. Lukjanenko's 'Night Watch' (which is available in English) is a typical example.
I particularly like Loginov's "The Many-handed God of Dalayn", though I'm not sure it's translated.
This might be a reflection of recent turbulent history in Russia.
Actually, SW is pretty much fantasy any way you want to look at it. It's got some SF props, but otherwise it pretty much tells a story of a noble knight, or rather son thereof, fighting the usurper of the throne and returning the kingdom (ahem, sorry, "republic") to the God-given (err, force-given) order. It's pretty much a 12'th century chivalric story, given some SF props.
And it proves that old hookey religions and ancient weapons are more than a match for a good blaster, the only one who puts a missile down the Death-Star's tailpipe does so by innate skill and faith instead of a targeting computer, hi-tech walker tanks are defeated by ewoks with sticks and stones, and the evil Emperor isn't killed by modern weapons but by the old knight Anakin coming to his senses, etc. Pretty much wherever you look, battles aren't won by technology, but by the l33t knights, and in fact technology is often the weak link that _loses_ a battle. It is very much anti-progress, even if set in a technologically advanced but otherwise very much stagnant world.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This is a valid answer to a dumb question, why is it (and not the GP) marked as a troll?
And guess what? Bambi`s mother was shot.
I tried to read this a while back. I was really excited because I always was more interested in the lives of the Orcs than reading about the hicks of the Shire. My favorite scene in LotR is the two orcs talking to each other and expressing a desire to stuff this Mordor stuff and get lost in the world somewhere distant, where they can waylay passing travelers. It's the closest thing the Orcs get to being treated as characters. I was really disappointed with The Last Ringbearer. It really didn't make any sense, maybe because it was translated? I skipped ahead several times before just giving up. I had really wanted to like this book but it just didn't work.
Of course, the whole thing ignores the fact that Sauron was evil, and he committed many evil acts in his thousands of years of existence prior to the events of LotR. Sauron was a total sociopath control freak. If he were alive today he'd be in charge of a corporation poisoning the public for profit. The entire point of his forging of The One Ring was slavery. Sauron crossed the moral event horizon and went full-on evil when he helped Morgoth destroy the land of Almaren, and that was in the First Age. Honestly, this review tells us a lot more about the reviewer that it does anything. Sample quote: "The novelist Michael Moorcock has attacked Middle-earth as a childishly rose-tinted vision of the Merrie Olde England that never was, as well as willfully blind to the hardships and injustice of preindustrial and feudal societies." WTF? It's a fantasy novel, people. It's something you read when you're not reading real books. Oh. I see. The reviewer has an axe to grind. "So I was horrified to discover that the Chronicles of Narnia, the joy of my childhood and the cornerstone of my imaginative life, were really just the doctrines of the Church in disguise." Yeah, surprise surprise, lady. No wonder she sees racial demonization, it's what she's looking for. Yet another writer who can't write anything original and instead can only parody others. That's the greatest failing of The Last Ringbearer. If the author had something to say, great! Say it. But jeez it's pathetic when the only thing you can do is attach another author's name to your work while criticizing the shit out of it. Am I the only one who is utterly sick to death of sequels, rewrites, spinoffs, and reimaginings? I suppose so if that's what everyone is buying. Can't argue with the market.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
What were the civilian casualties on the Death Stars? Also, the whole thing would be pretty interesting through the Empires point of view. Yeah, they blew up Alderaan, but what exactly made the Empire evil? Mind, that I've only seen the trilogy and don't know anything about the extended universe.
And this is why we must defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting immediately.
It is more than a bit over the top in the role reversal. While at times I tend to confuse the novels and movies some of the character changes needed to accomplish his story are extreme to the point of bizarreness. So far it is an interesting read, is it a good read, time will tell when I finish it. However fourteen pages in and the portrayals of the formerly good guys is a real stretch, I can see how fans of the book had issues.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Whether by science or magic, when you impose your own ideas on other people and force them to live the way you want, not the way they want, that is evil. In this morally relativistic world, evil is still evil when you commit acts where you harm others or deny them their free expression. In the telling or retelling of tales of Middle Earth, the evil is committed by whichever side is the aggressor. I haven't read the retelling, but in the original telling, the armies of Mordor were going about conquering and Gandalf and friends were defending their lives, their homes, and their freedoms.
How about:
No more free copyright. No more copyright when ink hits the paper. If you want it, you have to register and pay for it. And you have to renew every year to keep it. It only costs a dollar the first year, and we double it every year thereafter. If there is continuing value in the copyright, they will pay. If there is not value, they can release it.
This way, Disney can keep Mickey Mouse out the hands of us mere mortals as long as they like, but they must pay. Eventually, they can pay off the national debt.
You know, Tolkien never discussed the politics of his original set of books and said they are not meant to reflect contemporary politics.
The author of the 'response' says just about the same thing at the end, telling people to find something better to do if they don't like it.
In either case, your outrage is misplaced. Each author explicitly disavows any political statement. Authors who do inject politics into every single sentence and phrase tend to be outspoken, since they are trying to achieve poltiical change.
You can read the story from the perspecive of Mordor if you like, but I'm still waiting for a version of the original LOTR that removes the offensive word "hobbit" and replaces it with the more politically correct, "large-footed halfling".
This sig is false.
Gee. Somebody should write a book about that. Perhaps it could also be turned into a best selling Broadway show.
http://www.cracked.com/article_18881_5-reasons-greatest-movie-villain-ever-good-witch.html "Right off the bat, the Western Witch wants to know who killed her sister. Fair enough. Glinda smiles blandly while the witch accuses Dorothy, no doubt enjoying the double whammy of a grieving witch's rage and Dorothy's terror."
He can't write any more. No amount of compensation will convince Tolkein to do anymore work.
So why should the copyright still exist on his work?
But Orwell is also an example of how a book can be misinterpreted -- Animal Farm is commonly misread as a critique of communism.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
cannot be located here! however, I have 200 differing opinions from non-copyright lawyers about copyright law.
after I read this book, I will post a review of the copyright comments entered here.
I'd say it have been commonly mis-not-read or mis-spoken-about.
Seriously, all you have to do is read a little about the author (apart from the book) and you understand what the author is critizicing exactly. You know, Napoleon (character) was evil, but the other farmers weren't nice.
You let me know when copies of Picasso sell for millions of dollars.
Millions of copies at a dollar each sell for millions of dollars.
Why not just demand that our leaders pass laws and make treaties that reduces the limits on copyright terms and places some mandatory licensing schemes into play after a certain period of time?
Because said leaders have repeatedly shown that they won't listen to their constituents on copyright issues. It's impossible to get elected to the U.S. Congress without support of the TV news networks, and MPAA members own those.
Sauron was a total sociopath control freak. If he were alive today he'd be in charge of a corporation poisoning the public for profit. The entire point of his forging of The One Ring was slavery.
... Sauron is Steve Jobs?
U.S. copyright in old works used to expire until 2003, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Congress's successful workaround to the Constitution's "limited Times" stipulation. The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, criticized by as "perpetual copyright on the installment plan" by librarians and other proponents of participatory culture, is constitutional because on paper, copyrights last "for limited Times" at any given point, even if the Congress repeatedly extends them when they are about to expire.
Not all authors of non-commercial parodies have the money to hire "any halfway decent lawyer" who is familiar with Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin .
Just think what would have happened if we still had to pay royalties or not be able to use a "wheel" invention based on some "wheel" patent?
You will find wheels today everywhere from cars to mechanical inner workings of machines, clocks, trains... etc.etc... we'd be stuck in stone age... this is exactly the case just not on that large of a scale. It is good for people to take an idea and modify it and apply it to solving new problems... I can't understand how human race can just sit idle limiting themselves and watch this in order for to grow capitalism.
True, this story would affect society on a small-insignificant scale, but how many of these limitations does it take to slow down human evolution and progress of human societies to a stand still?
I'd rather read "Black Book of Arda", but that's just me.
It's not a rewriting from Mordor's perspective, more a reimagining. A proper rewriting in the same narrative universe would have had to have Sauron as still a Maiar, not a human with a title and Arda as Earth, not a parallel world.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
That's actually IMHO an even worse criterion.
For a start, SF routinely relies on technologies that are very likely impossible. E.g., the quantum entanglement faster-than-light communication in Mass Effect 2 is flat out getting it wrong what "entanglement" means and does. It can't work that way. E.g., the lightsabers as a laser beam that somehow loops on itself and somehow bounces on other laser beams, is very much bogus.
Second, in fantasy the "magic" is routinely subject to rules and even calculations. In a lot of fantasy works, it _is_ basically a form of technology.
Third, fantasy doesn't really need much magic, or indeed at all. In LOTR for example -- and I use that not just because it's the topic, but also as _the_ work of fantasy that started the whole frikken fantasy genre -- there is actually very little magic and virtually none that actually impacts the main plot beyond that enchantment on the ring. The only ones who can do any magic at all, are basically angels, like Gandalf. They're few and they use spells very sparingly, if at all. I mean, what spells does Gandalf use? Making his staff glow? When he wants to help against the orcs, he charges with the sword on his horse, not chuck a fireball.
Heh, magic was sooo necessary for LOTR. Not.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
He asked what made Palpatine evil, you describe his ascent to Emperor. Not even his ascent to Sith lord.
It is here that the prequels fail. In the original movie it didn't really matter. We are given the most basic background for Darth Vader to give some dimension to his evil but he is evil end of story. The next two movies turn him from the master villain into a henchmen of a greater evil but this only deepens the role of Vader, we know nothing about Palpatine. The prequels should have answered the why of Vader and Palpatine and all we get is an angsty teenager going on a rampage for no good reason. Instead of us showing the Jedi order failing (more then being totally blind) or being corrupt or to strict or whatever we get little more then a angry kid who can't see either that is he is being manipulated. It ain't up to Fantasy standards. It might make sense in a drama, where mis understandings are the name of the game but not in a space-opera where we like our motives well and truly explained.
As for your idiotic statement about civilians aboard the death star. Are you insane? How many civilians are their aboard military vessels on active duty in a war zone? Zero? The only people that would have been there who didn't serve the empire were rebels prisoners. And that they only saved the royal princess in a huge prison, well that is the way these stories go. Guards die. If you want to read about their story, read Terry Pratchetts Guards! Except that he makes them into undying heroes as well. The story of the private who gets killed in the first scene just isn't that interesting.
But really, we are in dangerous Myth Busters waters here where we start to believe movie fantasy is reality and movie special effects need to be tested for realism.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The Last Ringbearer
Whoosh
Your head
Sorry bro, but you completely missed the point.
The premise is NOT that Sauron was not evil but that history is written by the victor. IF Sauron had won, what would history have recorded of him?
Only in movies do the evil guys proclaim their evil. Hitler (oh come on, this is a thread about evil) never ever made a speech proclaiming that he was this evil creature who just wanted to see the world burn to create from its ashes a hellish world in which he himself would be the first in the gas chambers (diseased, crippled and non-arian)
So, if you take that history invariably is written with some propoganda motives by the victor, what if you turn it around? Read the losers propaganda. That Eisenhower was a puppet for the eternal jew (actual part of Hitlers speech on the decleration of war on the US) etc etc. Lies? Yes, we think so but would we also be thinking this if Hitler had won? How many germans actually believed this to the very core of their body so that it was reality to them?
Sauron is evil but we are told this by his enemies. Why are orcs corrupted? Because the other side said so? Well, bad luck for a lot of groups on earth then, we all have been called corrupted and evil by someone else at some time or another. Doesn't make it true does it?
Take Napoleon. Short mad man intent on forcing his will on the entire world... as told by the british. Except he wasn't short and we are told this by the British EMPIRE the largest empire ever in human history... In Napoleon's army religion did not matter, merit dictated who was promoted. Not so in the British army. Who Napoleon really is depends a lot on who you ask. And who the British are... well a LOT of people will have something to say about that.
Yes, this particular book does tend to gloss over a lot of things OR you can ask if what you read in the The Lord of the Rings, was the real story. Of course it was, it is fiction. But just imagine "how the west was won" written through a native American's eyes. The industrial revolution through a child of three forced to work in a mine with no light for 12 or more hours a day. Is James Watts a hero then? Custer a Mengele?
This is not really about trying to excuse the fictional character of Sauron and the actions that his creator dictated he has committed but trying through the Star Trek method of putting aliens in place of real life to get us to think about how history, the "truth" comes into being.
You look at this new book as if Sauron still is the guy from the Lotr, the entire premise is that the Lotr is a lie.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I just downloaded the PDF and skimmed the first dozen pages or so.
The text is in heavy need of editing. Punctuation and capitalization is non-standard, there are odd quotes around certain bits of vocabulary, and the prose is disjointed enough to make this a slow, unrewarding slog. Not reading Polish, I don't know whether this is the fault of the author or the translator, but likely the latter since this is volunteer work...
If you are expecting a readable translation, expect disappointment.
the truth lies somewhere in between!
That was the premise behind the novel Wicked, which is also a Broadway musical.
When I first saw the title of this article, I was almost certain it said "LotR Rewritten From a Moroder Perspective". I assumed it was some sort of Italo disco deal.
That's the entire script of the Broadway show "Wicked". It's awesome.
Thats true. Ive seen the 1970s film version with Bodil Joensen and its nothing like that AT ALL
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beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his mind he dreams himself your master
If that's so, then you should check out Wicked or book it's based off of . Both retelling of the Wizard of Oz from the perspective of the Witches.
Tell me again, how exactly copyright encourages creation of new works?
Tolkien worked from public-domain works and added a lot. According to copyright theory, copyright encourages authors to do that. Otherwise, we would have to read the original Beowulf or Kalevala instead of Tolkien's works. Thanks to copyright, Tolkien was encouraged to publish his work.
Actually, probably Tolkien would have created his work anyway. He wrote Christmas stories for children and did a lot of background work that was not published in his lifetime. But it can be argued that the existence of Allen & Unwin encouraged him to actually publish.
As for Yeskov, it is a derivative. I don't know how he was able to be published in Spanish and other languages.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Tolkien abhorred of political interpretations of his work, but you can read in Yeskov some justification of the Soviet civilization (or maybe the Central Asian version of it) versus the West.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Legend Of The Red Dragon.
I miss that bbs door
Much, if not all of copyright laws that are in question are there and covered by international treaty. Congress does not negotiate treaties and if we repealed all of them (there is actually about 5 in connection with copyright) in order to make adjustments, we would lose some things of value within the treaties.
The primary copyright treaty under TRIPs is the Berne Convention, which allows a country to adopt the rule of the shorter term. If the Congress were to adopt this rule, it would roll back the copyright term for works of e.g. Canadian authorship to life+50. Then the US could roll back the copyright term for "United States works" to life+50 while still recognizing life+70 terms in those foreign countries with which the US has a specific bilateral treaty. Or does the Constitution allow treaties to override domestic policy?
Someone plz gimme some spicy hot monkey love NOW!
. . . f***ing elf."
From your comment, I think you may enjoy this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lCpQU75gsY
Another Russian biologist, Nikolay Perumov also wrote a sequel to LoTR from the perspective of Sauron's side. I only know this, however, because I read about in The Book Barn's "That was the Worst Book Ever!" thread. Read it with caution: it was originally written as a fanfic (like TFA's work), which was later published.
But Orwell is also an example of how a book can be misinterpreted -- Animal Farm is commonly misread as a critique of communism.
Hmmm, maybe I'm misunderstanding you here, but I find it hard to imagine what other reading you could make of it. I thought Orwell was pretty explicit that he wrote Animal Farm as a critique of communism, or more specifically, of communist totalitarianism as practiced by Stalin. If you're saying Orwell was not necessarily a critic of socialism, on the other hand, I agree there.
Breakfast served all day!
More Soviet revisionist history
And then they made the play called "Wicked" ...
If you haven't read Wicked: http://www.amazon.com/Wicked-Life-Times-Witch-Years/dp/0061350966/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1298340196&sr=8-1
you really should :)
During a web search on the early web (pre-google search, iirc), I came upon a left-wing paper's television listing for the wizard of oz, to the effect of, "A young girl travels to a foreign land, kills the first person she meets, and sets out to kill again" . . .
While I too have also not read it, however I can easily understand how any differing view of events can look like it came from a "Propoganda Department". There is always more than one side to any story. Self Defense from one view may appear to be Murder from another.
Going all the way back to the Music of the Ainur, Melkor had just as much right as any of the Valar as to what was to become of Middle-Earth and the peoples within it. Manwë and the others formed a clique about what the Vision of Ilúvatar should be like and left Melkor out. Basically, Melkor was the geek outcast to the popular Valar. Melkor was the smartest of the bunch, "the nerd". The popular crowd even sent their "jock", Tulkas, to go beat up Melkor and stuff him in a locker. Go read The Silmarillion for yourself. It's all there.
The whole War of Wrath, and everything else, was probably started when Melkor made some really creative thing and the others were jealous and then ruined it. Why? Because they didn't approve. Who are they? Nobody special. They were all essentially equal with no one really having a real claim over another. But they chose to gang up on him because he was different. Melkor's idea of beauty didn't fit in with theirs, so they went about ridiculing and undermining all that he tried to do. Push came to shove, and next thing you know the Valar ganged up on Melkor. Melkor sees that he'll never get his own way with anything as long as the popular Valar gang is keeping him down. So he decided to wreck what they are trying to do. It's not "evil", it's JUSTICE! Melkor's responding in kind. And he's very good at it 'cause he's smarter than all of them. Melkor is the geek. Along the way he starts to gather his own clique of outcasts from the Valar gang, one of which is Sauron. Obviously, the Valar gang stepped on a lot of toes with their "Holier than Thou" attitude. They even started using derogatory nick-names to reference him, like Morgoth. See that? He's geeky AND goth and they make fun of him 'cause he's different.
But, you can't fight the popular clique. Principal Ilúvatar is always going to side with them. Eventually the Valar brats gets Melkor expelled from Middle-Earth High. Sure, Melkor probably went too far here and there, but if the Valar brats did to you what they did to Melkor...you'd be fighting right along side him. All because the Valar brats thinks that technology and industry, and the Vo-Tech kids in general, are stupid and ugly. Melkor's best friend, Sauron, swears that he'll do what he can to make them pay for it, but it is to no avail. They get him expelled too.
The Rings of Power. That was Sauron's last ditch effort to show the rest of Middle-Earth how the wool was pulled over their eyes by the Valar. The Rings of Power didn't brainwash anyone. Sauron just showed them the kind of life they could be living if not for the Valar keeping them down. There were all kinds of technological cool stuff that they could be using to improve their lives. The Rings alone gave them superpowers. IMMORTALITY! Sauron basically said to The Nine, "look at all this cool technology you could you could be using. The Valar have been keeping it from you only because they are technophobes. Isn't that stupid?!" And The Nine were like "This stuff is AWESOME! You're totally freakin' right! How have I been living without these things?? Sign me up." (it was probably similar to when you got your first smart-phone) I'm sure Sauron was proably workin' on some steampunk tech too before the end. Just take a look at Grond.
You see, it's not that Melkor was Right or Wrong. He was DIFFERENT. That's all. But the Valar didn't like that, not one bit. So they went about humiliating him and destroying him and all his friends. Does that sound "Right" to you?
I'm not going to provide a full review, but I will say this: It's worth reading. Parts of it, like the chilling conversation with the Nazgul, are absolutely brilliant. I came away with the impression that the trilogy makes more sense now. I guess I just never really believed Tolkien when he painted a country/kingdom as being unambiguously evil in every way. This story doesn't claim that Mordor was good while the others were evil. It just that like the other powers, Mordor had noble motives that wholly good people could understandably follow. Those motives were actually really interesting and deep. If we view the Middle Earth myth as fake history, I have to say this take is a whole lot more plausible than Tolkien's own.
I think the Uruguay round table added the extra 20 years in 96 or so.
Wikipedia's article about TRIPS, the copyright treaty negotiated in Uruguay, doesn't mention anything beyond the life+50 of Berne. Go ahead and follow the WP article's citations if you remember differently. As I understand it, treaty requirements for life+70 come out of largely Bush-era bilateral treaties between the United States and other countries.
I don't think it would matter with dropping only 20 years off because the actual loss would be realized after the copyright holder is dead.
At that point, the copyright owner is the author's estate, and the estate can still argue that the copyright was "taken" from it and demand compensation.
...but it was so awful I had to comment. Awful, awful - like Shannara-awful. Utterly terrible fan-fiction/mary-sue non-david-foster-wallace-ishy david-foster-wallace footnoting in the main text, modern idioms, just ridiculous. The translation also has some pretty glaring errors - lots of present perfect tenses stuck inside of relative clauses consistently (you keep using that tense - it doesn't mean what you think it means). Not a terrible or unexpected translation for an L2 translator, but it adds to the cumulative effect. Sorry, but bad.
When I was a young child decades ago, Fred Rogers had the woman who played the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz on his program. She explained how they did the scene where she melted. But she also tried to get kids to think about what things looked like from the Wicked Witch's perspective. Her sister was killed. The one keepsake was stolen. Her home was invaded. Finally, she is attacked just for defending herself and trying to get back her sister's property. And so on. It really shocked me in a good way, to think that things looked different from her point of view.
Here is a FOSS project (Rakontu) my wife developed (I helped a small bit) to help people see situations from multiple perspectives.
http://www.rakontu.org/
Read or go see Wicked. I loved it. It made all the good people into bad people and all the bad people into good people. My favorite line was, "It's a pair of shoes. Get over it!"
http://www.cracked.com/article_18881_5-reasons-greatest-movie-villain-ever-good-witch.html