It’s not uncommon for a fantasy work to take a crack at how racism is bad. The way this is often done is to have elves or orcs or goblins or trolls and find out they are just “people” just like you and me with thoughts and fears and feelings, they love their children and … Read more
I wanted to share with you that I now write about Magic: the Gathering at Goonhammer.com, specifically the variant of the game called commander. I’ve played magic for a long time, and I think it has some interesting philosophical worldbuilding that mostly flies under the radar. In 1993 Wizards of the Coast premiered a game … Read more
On December 10th, 2009, Red Letter Media published on Youtube a 7 part review of The Phantom Menace. It’s harsh, brutal even, and somewhat gross. There’s a sub-plot in the reviews about who the reviewer is that is quite dark, but it’s also a genius review. In fact, I would argue that this review of … Read more
What exactly are they rebelling against? This post contains affiliate links, which if you click and buy a product through, I get a kickback. The whole notion of punk inherently lies in rebellion. Punk rock was a rejection of the excesses of mainstream rock (according to Wikipedia), but after some time it simply became a … Read more
I think that in the genre of Fantasy, sub-genre Epic in particular, there has been something of a revolution in the last couple of decades, a growing focus on what is referred to as worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is not new. Ancient myths, and legends, and epic poems, built worlds. They defined boundaries and told human beings … Read more
Or any sort of Fiction In statistics, there’s a useful concept: the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is that we didn’t find anything, nothing statistically happened, we have no real result. I use this concept a lot in my writing, and my reading and I apply it like this: if you don’t tell me differently, … Read more
Magic should be Strange and Wondrous, not Mundane and Prosaic Ancient scientists lacked the scientific method, but they still attempted to explain the world around them. In this sense they weren’t scientists, rather they were seers and sages, and it is worth noting the distinction. People want explanations for things, and they often see purpose, … Read more
Having a specific or set lexicon for a work of fiction, especially speculative fiction, can be a highly useful tool. It can provide clues to setting, characterization, motivation, and emotion subtly. It can provide a sense of strangeness, distance or closeness, as well as time, simply through choosing words. You can also unearth old words, … Read more
I love fantastic and wondrous stories. Since I was very young, I was entranced by stories of chivalrous knights and fair ladies and slaying dragons. Stories about spaceships whizzing about and people shooting lasers and blasters. These stories enabled me to escape the dreary circumstances of my life into a world where anything seemed possible, … Read more