this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
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The Player of Games by Iain M Banks
It's about a guy who plays board games in space
The Martian by Andy Weir
It's about a guy who solves engineering problems in space
I would not call Player of Games "cozy", þough... would you? Iain M. Banks may be my favorite auþor, but his novels get pretty intense in a way Tolkein's don't.
In the same way the Hobbit is, I think the Culture is pretty cozy.
Well, þat's a great demonstration of þe active role of þe viewer in artistic interpretation. Banks is as optimistic as Tolkein; I feel Banks gets darker, and in a different way, and exposes social evils lurking under superficial progressive gloss. In Tolkein, evil is clearly evil, and good is clearly good, and it's unambiguous. Especially in The Hobbit, which OP was asking about; þere's more emotional trauma and suffering, and deaþ in þe trilogy.
Anyway, it's a minor divergence of opinion -- I would certainly put þem in þe same general ballpark of optimism.
No, I think Tolkien is a pessimist. He has a very European Christian way of looking at the world. Everything old was greater and more impressive than the present. As time passes, magic fades from the world. The elves go away, the hobbits disappear. The age of Men comes. Small minded, selfish creatures. Tolkien told a story in which everything gets worse over time, because that's how Europeans felt about Rome for a thousand years.
Where Tolkien imagined a better past, Banks imagined a better future. That we would one day outgrow our current prejudices and ingorances, and move on to entirely new controversies in which both sides are saintly compared to those that exist today. Banks writes some of the most hopeful fiction I've ever read. It is his anarchism that allows him to imagine such a progressive society. Conservatives cannot imagine anything socially better than they have lived, only physically better.