One of the things I’ve always enjoyed in the realm of fantasy has been the sword. There’s just something so pure about a good blade at your side, and if that weapon is somehow touched with magic or fate then all the better. Something so ancient and primal is attached to a sword, and even when the world has outdated their use they still find their way into science fiction just because of the nostalgic power they evoke. Space pirates…
I read some bad news earlier this week: Richard Carpenter died. Carpenter, 78 at the time of his death on February 26, was an actor and television writer. He created several shows; he’s probably best known for his children’s series Catweazle, the animated Dr. Snuggles, and the show that I want to talk about here, the ITV-broadcast series Robin of Sherwood. It’s easily my favourite interpretation of the Robin Hood story, and perhaps my favourite filmed piece of sword-and-sorcery. Robin…
Last week, I described the neo-classical attitudes of the Age of Reason, which dominated English literature through most of the 18th century. This week I want to take a look at how and when things changed. In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poetry that some critics have pointed to as the start of Romanticism in English literature. In fact, you can fairly easily find precursors to one aspect…
So as it often happens here a BG L.A., John O’Neill issues a challenge and then we beat writers have to find a way to make it happen [Ok, so that only me and Ryan, but still]. John was looking over stories that got good hits from various sites around the internet and then phones me to say that I should do a piece on ‘Top 10s’ because people seem to really like top ten lists. Ok, so after hanging…
I am in my mid-thirties and my wife is in her mid-twenties. The eight-year difference between us can be jarring at times, especially because I am a pop culture junkie and she grew up without cable television (and rarely watched the network television she did have access to, as I learned when I discovered she’d never seen an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard, even in rerun). Recently, this generation gap has became particularly evident. A close friend of hers…
This post is the latest installment of an ongoing discussion in the fantasy blogosphere, which I think has raised some interesting questions about fantasy and the fantastic tradition. It began when Leo Grin put up a post at Big Hollywood arguing that modern fantasy writers, specifically Joe Abercrombie, were inferior to J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other past writers; the inferiority, argued Grin, was a function of modern writers’ desire to tear down heroic ideals of the past. Abercrombie…
Arisia is one of three prominent SF/F/H conventions held each year in the Boston area (Boskone and Readercon being the other two). This year was Arisia’s 22d edition (January 14-17, 2011) and my 18th consecutive Arisia. Each of these three conventions has its own distinctive focus. Readercon, usually held in July, is devoted entirely to the reading, writing, editing and publishing of SF/F/H. Its Dealers Room is unashamedly devoted entirely to books and other genre related printed materials. Readercon does not stage an…
Don’t Look Now: Stories By Daphne du Maurier, selected by Patrick McGrath NYRB Classics (368 pages, $15.95, October 2008) I have recently started an immersive journey through Cornwall, although not of the physical variety, since economically I don’t have the luxury of taking myself there. After a few years of vague fascination with the tip of the southwestern peninsula of Great Britain, which reaches out into the Atlantic to terminate in the pincer claw of Lizard Point and the Penwith…
Who was the first person to write high fantasy? It seems like a simple enough question. By “high fantasy” I mean a story set in a world that is not this one. John Clute, in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, defines high fantasies as stories “set in otherworlds, specifically secondary worlds, and which deal with matters affecting the destiny of those worlds.” In this definition, ‘Secondary worlds’ is Tolkien’s useful term for a fictional, self-consistent world with its own geography and…
Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. — William Faulkner Because this series about riding about the dragon called Publishing is geared at writers just starting out writing fantasy stories and novels, I thought I’d pull together another list (I love lists!) that include all the helpful stuff I wish I’d known back in 1995, when I was just starting out. Ten Things I Know Now That I Wish I’d…