Kirill Yeskov explains, for Salon, what led him to write The Last Ringbearer, his parallel version of Tolkien's classic.
From the story...
"The Last Ring-bearer" was written for a very specific audience, too – it’s just another "fairy tale for junior scientists" of which I am one. It is meant for skeptics and agnostics brought up on Hemingway and brothers Strugatzky, for whom Tolkien is only a charming, albeit slightly tedious, writer of children’s books. Those were the people who got the biggest kick out of the novel; theirs were the reviews that used the expression "sleepless night," dear to any writer’s heart, most often.
On the other hand, I can somewhat understand the feelings of "professional" Tolkien fans who foolishly parted with their money to buy this… this… whatever. This is not unlike some teenager, besotted with pirate fiction, tricked by the "Corsair" title into buying a book by a certain G. G. Byron, and then inveighing on the net: "Total baloney – loads of stupid love stories and not one decent boarding! The name must be there to trick the readers, otherwise who’d buy this crap!" Guys, please understand that this was not written for you! If you do grab something not meant for you – which ought to be obvious after reading about three paragraphs, n'est-ce pas? – then don’t whine like an Arkansas bumpkin who got taken by "The Royal Nonesuch."
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