Geek's Guide to the Galaxy The Haunting of Hill House Is 90 Percent of an Amazing Show And now I look back and see that that was nothing but utterly bizarre.” Once a black person came as a visitor and sat alone in the sanctuary during a church service, and a few people said hello and greeted him after the service, and then everybody congratulated themselves about it for the next five years, so remarkable was this. Batesburg had its black churches and its white churches, and my United Methodist congregation was absolutely a white church. “Batesburg was at the time this utterly segregated town, and as Martin Luther King argued a few years before, the hour of church services every Sunday was probably the most segregated hour in American life. And one of my friends of many years, who is much more Catholic than I am anything in terms of religion, heard me reading from this story not long ago, and sidled up to me later and said, ‘Just for the record, you realize that to many, More is a saint?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ So we will see whether this story strikes people as blasphemy, or as merely silly, or as something in between.” There’s a great deal of almost literal skullduggery going on in the story eventually, with the severed head of Thomas More. “There’s a vivid scene where the agent meets Thomas More, and then I’m pretty much done with More, except of course for the matter of More’s head, because More’s head turned into a character all its own. And check out some highlights from the discussion below.Īndy Duncan on his story “An Agent of Utopia”: Listen to the complete interview with Andy Duncan in Episode 336 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above).
“As Tolkien well knew, the war is never quite over, and it has a tendency to show up right there in your own hometown when you’re least expecting it,” he says. “We have seen the forces that he has tapped into on the ascendency before.”ĭuncan believes that these reactionary waves come in constant cycles, so it’s important for the response to be cyclical as well. “In many ways President Trump is unique, but in many ways we have seen his like before,” he says. Duncan says that’s because the story deals with themes that are, unfortunately, timeless. “Senator Bilbo” first appeared in 2001, but its references to border walls and a “Shire First” policy make it seem more relevant than ever. “And this seems to me-in the long term, if you embrace this too much-it has dire consequences for yourself and for society.”
“It’s hard to miss the repeated notion in Tolkien that some races are just worse than others, or that some peoples are just worse than others,” Duncan says.
The story, which appears in Duncan’s new collection An Agent of Utopia, was also inspired by Michael Moorcock, who has criticized Tolkien for depicting creatures such as orcs, trolls, and goblins as intrinsically evil.