Tolkien is not for everyone: he has a very formulaic sentence structure, slow pacing and dry descriptions. But this combo also make his epic resonate across history. The (few) emotions he shows are steeped in compassion and empathy. I personally love him, but I also understand the criticisms.
If we constantly shift the goal post, are constantly unhappy about all achievements, why should we be catered towards? To get people on board, you need positivity, and celebrating achievements is a great way to get people more motivated.
I have been reading the English translations and the characters and especially their dialogues feel very fake. I do appreciate the hard science aspect of the books but the long monologues, kids speaking like middle-aged philosophers, and army personnel being one-dimensional macho men breaks the immersion for me. It has the depth...
I personally had a bigger problem with the science… I am a scientist and I worked on chaos and the three body problem, there are many elements in there that just killed my immersion by being wrong. One of them was the mathematician that was computing the solution to the three body problem. No sane person would consider that worthwhile! Chaos means sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Between other things, that means that any error you are making is going to be exponentially magnified in finite time. So if you only considered 3 digits of accuracy in your solution, you can just throw your solution away after a couple of time steps. But if you considered 30 digits of accuracy? well… you only get one or two extra time steps in which you solution still makes a little bit of sense! Check out this youtube video on the double pendulum, another well-known chaotic system, to get a feeling: youtu.be/ldnEHycw40E
Still talking about math, when the “the baby problem” planet is kicked away from the two-stars system, likely it would not be able to ever come back. Assuming the planet never actually leaves the solar system is quite a large assumption.
The Silmarillion creates a mythology
A bit criticism to the Silmarillion is that the style is very dry and the plot is disconnected....
EU blindsided by ‘spectacular’ solar rollout (www.politico.eu)
The writing in The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu) feels tacky
I have been reading the English translations and the characters and especially their dialogues feel very fake. I do appreciate the hard science aspect of the books but the long monologues, kids speaking like middle-aged philosophers, and army personnel being one-dimensional macho men breaks the immersion for me. It has the depth...