Acetio | Blogma

In the 90s, Russian scientist Kirill Yeskov began to write a story based on the following premise: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy is based on real events. Just as history over time becomes myth, the fantastic elements in LotR can be seen as metaphors for the social dynamics of the time (the year 3019 of the 3rd age).

The story is from Sauron's perspective and Mordor is a haven for the ugly and the deformed. The evil west depicts these poor creatures as hideous monsters and uses that as justification for an unwarranted invasion.

The book was published in Russia in 1999 and recently Yisroel Markov translated the book into English and you can download the PDF.

The style is somewhat as if John LeCarré had written "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead":

"Chapter 35
Close to evening a stranger visited the Mordorians’ barrack where the Engineer Second Class was being wracked by a consuming fever. He was wiry and quick in his movements, his swarthy Southerner’s face marked by decisiveness – most likely an officer off an Umbarian privateer who by a quirk of fate wound up at Mindolluin rather than dangling off the yardarm of a royal galley. He stood for a minute over the bloody mess already presided over by hordes of fat flies and grumbled to no one in particular: “Yeah, prob’ly a goner by morning…” Then he disappeared, only to re-appear a half an hour later and, much to the surprise of Kumai’s fellow inmates, begin treating him. Ordering them to hold the patient down, he started rubbing a yellowish ointment smelling sharply of camphor right into the bleeding welts; the pain was enough to jerk Kumai back from wobbly unconsciousness, and had he not been so weakened, his fellows would not have been able to keep him pinned down. Pirate (as the prisoners took to calling him) kept working calmly, and just a few minutes later the wounded man relaxed, melting with copious sweat, and sank into a real sleep like a stone in a pond."

And from the epilogue:

"Our narrative is based entirely on Tzerlag’s tales, however incomplete, that are preserved by his clan as an oral tradition. It should be stressed that we have no documents that might attest to its veracity. The one who might have been expected to leave the most detailed account – Haladdin – had not recorded even a word on the subject; the other participants in the hunt for Galadriel’s Mirror – Tangorn and Kumai – remained silent for obvious reasons. Therefore, whoever would like to declare the whole thing to be the old-age ravings of an Orc who wanted to replay the finale of the War of the Ring is free to do so with clear conscience. After all, that’s what memoirs are for: to let veterans recast their losses as victories after the fact."

Publication seems unlikely given the tight copyright controls that Chris Tolkien manages - and it is, after all, derivative work (remember the controversy around, "The Wind Done Gone"?)

If this interests you, you may also be interested in this brief McSweeney's detailing an imagined audio commentary track for "The Fellowship of the Ring" DVD as recorded by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn.

Cartoonist Adam Watson is imagining what a Dr. Seuss Star Wars would look like.

The Wikipedia entry for the Codex Seraphinianus states: "The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978.[1] The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing."

The book is truly fantastic, full of animals, inventions, customs, cities, and other aspects of a fantasy world. The idea of an encyclopedia of a wildly different fictional place created in a mad-up language reminds me of the Voynich Manuscript but while that seems to have been a hoax, the Codex Seraphinianus seems to be 'merely' an art piece.

The look is quite similar to the movie "Fantastic Planet" from 973.

From CraftZine (the online descendant of the now-defunct Craft magazine), an MIT student project that uses conductive paint and thread inside a pop-up book. Opening and closing the pages not only slides tabs of paper around, but also activates switches that can then activate lights.

matchstick kidbooks: children's literature, emphasizing books that promote child development

This is a list I began compiling years ago, when I knew several families with children ranging in age from 2 through mid-adolescence.

It's essentially all the books that won at least one award.

The categories correspond to a range of children's ages.
For younger ages, the higher number is the average age of child who would enjoy reading the book, while the lower number is the age of the child who would enjoy listening to the book being read.

Pop-up books have changed a lot since I was a kid.
Maybe it's because the ones I saw were from the library and were already all torn to pieces, but I had no idea that pop-up books had gotten as elaborate as they are now.

There is one 'paper artist' named Matthew Reinhart who has created a retelling of the traditional Cinderella tale.