When I first read Lord of the Rings back in middle school, I was blown away. It instantly became my favorite novel.
However, even as a twelve-year-old a certain fact stuck in my brain: Middle-Earth was at about a 12th-century AD level of technology, and had been for several thousand years. These people had water mills, steel forges and sailing ships, but somehow movable type and steam engines remained beyond their reach.
Yeah, yeah, I know I’m not supposed to think about that, but I couldn’t help imagining a future Middle-Earth of the 20th century, where Minas Tirith has gleaming mithril-and-glass skyscrapers, Bag End has central a/c and the dwarves do their mining with diesel backhoes.
And of course that just took me further, to imagine a genre-crossing world where elves join men in starships when they strike out to colonize the galaxy.
Or, back in the present day, a rumpled fairy PI in a double-breasted suit and fedora, investigating a murder at a neon-nightmare fleabag hotel.
Or hobbits fighting vampires.
I don’t consider myself terribly well-read in science fiction and I actively avoid fantasy; has this sort of genre-blending been done before? It seems impossible to think that it hasn’t.
You do bring up an interesting point re Tolkien’s overwhelming conceit in LOTR that mankind would stand around stagnating, more or less in place technologically, at a quasi-medieval level for thousands of years.
Tolkien actually was a bit of a Luddite. In most of his works you’ll find a thread of wistful nostalgia for the days of the small farmer and nature in wilderness. His view of “progress” was rather dim…you’ll notice that an awful lot of the technological aspects of LotR was attributed to Sauron, Saruman or the orcs, and most of that is war machinery. Remember what Saruman did to the Shire, changing it from the bucolic picture of the English countryside that it was at the beginning into an industrialized region, complete with polluting factories and mills and strip-mining.
In Emma Bull’s excellent novel Finder there’s a female elf mechanic riding a motorcycle. All sorts of other mod cons are also available, though no ray guns as far as I can recall.
