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Gerry Canavan is chair of the English department at Marquette University and the author of Octavia E. Butler.

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Gerry Canavan is the author of the book, "Octavia E. Butler (Modern Masters of Science Fiction)", not the author of the author. :-)

John Campbell safely dead, maybe they thought that a reasonable conclusion?

I am however surprised because leftists have historically criticized Tolkien for his black and white views, which I always thought was the point. Another English professor (who defends this view) notes:

> It has just become the tale that middle-to-high brow critics tell--ever since Edward Wilson was saying his own manifestly untrue things about Tolkien in the New Yorker fifty years ago--that Tolkien's fictional world is morally simplistic and rigidly Manichaean. It may be true that the story of the Ring is less morally ambiguous than the average realistic novel, but that's primarily because Tolkien wasn't especially interested in the problem of knowing right from wrong. His concern was to explore the psychology of the moment when you know right from wrong but aren't sure whether you have the courage and fortitude to do the right thing.

> Modern liberalism likes to think that all our problems are epistemological: we are afflicted by never knowing with sufficient clarity what we ought to do. Our fictions tend to reflect that assumption. Tolkien, not being a modern liberal, thought it more interesting to explore situations when people know what they need to know but may lack the strength of will to act on that knowledge. He might say, and with some justification, that contemporary literary fiction is not simplistic in regard to such problems but oblivious to them.