The Culture: A Reading List To Compliment Appendix N

JD Sauvage did everyone a solid over this past weekend and posted a nice reading list; some Appendix N overlap, but not all of it.

The full thread is here. Below is the first post.

The reason for the list? Talk about getting away from Pink Slime Fantasy slop, which means reconnecting to the fantastic literature that existed commonly before Lester Del Ray's 1975 diktat that make "Muh Tolkien" Clone into said slop.

You may balk at some of them, but you shouldn't; everything not of Appendix N that he included fits just as well if not better. (Flash Gordon and the original Buck Rogers novel certainly do, as they are derivative of A Princess of Mars as much as Brackett's novels about Eric John Stark are.)

Through that connection, notably at the pont of Dunsany, one needs to use these to bridge back to the mythic and thus past literature to mythology. (Yes, history is important, but we're talking about a failure of imagination and that stems from a lack of connection to the mythic via mythology.) Treating the myths of old, and the folklore that arised from them, as real as history and physics are- to see these as the means by which our ancestors (and some peoples today) see how life works and why it works that way.

This is what was lost during the 20th Century. It can be corrected now.

Once that connection is restored, that meaning needs to be expressed anew in ways that matter here and now. That's how this flattening is reversed.