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Originally Posted by littlemanpoet
So for Tolkien it was a longstanding love affair, as it were. It's also interesting that in that Letter I mentioned above, Tolkien said that he pretty much avoided fantasy of the 60s as pretty bad stuff, but liked sci fi. What does that tell you?
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That Tolkien, like me, was pickier about his Fantasy than his Sci-Fi?
I can't speak for Tolkien, but personally speaking, I am a lot more tolerant of poorer Sci-Fi than I am of poor "fantasy". Perhaps Tolkien is to blame. My first fantasy was Narnia, shortly following by
The Hobbit, and then the entire legendarium. I was raised on the finest fantasy mankind has yet to offer. As a result, any other attempts often seem paltry, or off-key...
Sci-fi, on the other hand, was not encountered through the best of the best, and it has not captured my heart the way "Ye Olde Days" have. As a result, I can sit down and read a less than perfect book, and not be bothered by how it fails to compare with the great master(s).
Perhaps it was the somewhat the same for Tolkien. He was, after all, the one to whom his Legendarium was most dear- whatever some of us may feel. He had put decades into his work, and as his written results can attest, he had a pretty good feeling on what made a good yarn and on what made a good yarn memorable, even if it was only an instinctive knowledge. With all this behind him in the fantasy field, is it any wonder that he was dissatisfied with the then-current offerings in fantasy?
What I find interesting in the context of this is Tolkien's famous statement to C.S. Lewis, back in the earlier 1930s, about not being able to find the books they liked, and so they must write them themselves. And they did- they set out to write science-fiction. Lewis got the space travel novel, which became
Out of the Silent Planet, and its two sequels, while Tolkien got the TimeTravel novel, which ended up getting sucked into the Legendarium, and ultimately coming to rest in the
Silmarillion as the "Akallabeth".
My point in bringing it up though, is that Tolkien obviously liked Sci-Fi from fairly early on, but was unable to find "the books he liked". Perhaps Isaac Asimov finally filled that need in the 1960s.