I agree with Dan'l in that Tolkien and Wolfe are very different from other fantasy and constitute something outside of the easy categories of science fiction and fantasy we use today. Tolkien and Wolfe are both primarily philosophical authors. I think Wolfe succeeds in some places where Tolkien failed, but Tolkien is not exactly a novelist. He has one true novel, and it is debatably a romance. He was more interested in the construction of artificial languages and prose narratives to explain their cultural evolution. In that he is unique. Wolfe and Tolkien share the idea of imaginary history, Tolkien used this term, because besides thinking of Ea as a possible world he also thought of the the histories of Middle-earth as a possible and this is important, cultural and linguistic, history of this world, specifically a possible narrative and linguistic root of Indo-european culture as I mentioned before. For Tolkien it is an imaginary past and for Wolfe a future. Tolkien in some ways is trying to write about real events which have been mythologized over time. Morgoth did steal the Silmarils but it was communicated to humans through poetry and the imperfections of language. Wolfe seems to be starting with Christians myths and transforming them into future events. Tolkien is making analogues to Christian events. I think the Catholic narrative is stronger in Wolfe, and so it is to a certain degree more allegorical, but it uses more science. What are we to make of techno-myth? I think Wolfe is a better novelist than Tolkien, but as I said Tolkien is not exactly a novelist, but they both do the same work. I do think Wolfe is Tolkien's successor, perhaps, and not his rival, they use similar subject material as well as the same philosophical questions, and I think medieval Catholicism has a lot to do with it. However, and this may seem strange, but I think a lot of *science fiction* is in the category with Wolfe and Tolkien than most *fantasy*, specifically Arthur C Clarke, and anything that has Tielhard de Chardin, Omega Point, Hegelian history, which is a move to a deChristianized godhead, and there is a lot of it. Tolkien did not like to talk about the divine for fear of blasphemy and so direct speculation on Christ is conspicuously absent from his work, even if there is a god. But they both a feeling of cosmic otherness, and an reality which is realer, and more complex than the one we know. Even the heirodoles are the product of evolution. C S Lewis loved Childhood's End. I don't know if Tolkien ever read it, though. When they gave him the grandmaster's Nebula he thanked them but said he had never written any science fiction. Other work includes Dune and The Left Hand of Darkness, these aren't omega point or next step in human evolution novels, they are about world building, which I think is also at the forefront of Tolkien's work. This is a rule Clarke forgot to make about science fiction. Any complex worldbuilding author after 1955, has read The Lord of the Rings. Besides Clarke, I think a lot of cyberpunk is in the same as Tolkien. What Neal Stephenson is doing in Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle is a kind of imaginary history, he even talks about Lord of the Rings in Cyptonomicon, not that mentioning Tolkien is enough, but he seems to be trying to practice the same restraint Tolkien used. I am less sure about William Gibson's work, but we is a world builder and an omega pointer. The difference between Tolkien and other scifi writers is the difference their ideas of entropy and is that where in Ea there was a glorious past and elves, in the future there will be things like elves, though it may not be all that glorious or good, for humans there is a level of increasing order and complexity even as the universe at large winds down. However, Ea is not alwys winding down at all levels from its creation, but only after Morgoth ruins the spring of Arda, and destroys the lamps. The peak of complexity has been attained and now the world is in decline. Id like people's ideas about who they think is working in the same vein as Tolkien. EOT;