The "Lord of the Rings" novel is that way too to anyone not steeped in fantasy. It might be hard to imagine for many people these days that "elves" and "dwarves" strictly meant children's fairytales before Tolkien. Magical rings, wizards, dragons with tunnels of gold ... seems so cliche now it is easy to see why someone would wonder what the big deal about Tolkien is.
Elves and dwarves didn't strictly mean children's fairy tales prior to Tolkien. There's plenty of semi-popular prior art where they feature, like the Worm Ouroboros or The King of Elfland's Daughter. Poul Anderson also published The Broken Sword the same year as LOTR, which shows a lot of the same influences as written by a very different author.
Tolkien's importance is that the specific kinds of creatures he wrote became the default for virtually all subsequent authors and the popularity/quality of the works were pivotal in establishing fantasy as a "proper" genre.
I have to disagree with both. I help a colleague teach a class in which students often read necromancer, and it often has a deep impact on them. The cloned ninjas and laser weapons are uninteresting to them for the reasons mentioned above, but the Necromancer + Wintermute dynamic and central plot is fascinating to them.
I think it’s slightly different. Tolkein made fairy tales grow up, but people already had some familiarity with these things. Tolkien gave them a new way to think about those things.
Gibson’s strength was that he could describe—in an accessible way—concepts that were quite foreign to most people at the time.
