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Errish — A Vertical City
Generally speaking, I don’t do bizarre worlds. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate worlds that are carried through space by a turtle, or whose inhabitants are giant insects. Occasionally, I even create a bizarre setting for an individual short story. My main secondary world, though, is very much in the “exactly like ours except…
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What Do I Call the Place Where My Characters Live?
The characters you create have to live somewhere. Well, unless they’re chronically nomadic, that is, which includes many of my main characters, but even they are probably going to visit communal dwelling-places at some point. So what do you call these places? If you’re writing about a real place in the real world, it…
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Five Things “Everyone Knows” About the Pre-Modern World
Most fantasy secondary worlds tend to be inspired by pre-modern society in our own world. In theory, that shouldn’t be a problem. The trouble is that, whatever in-world details you put in, someone will object that it’s wrong — because everyone knows it wasn’t like that in the old days. Well, it’s a useful…
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The Middle Ages That Never Were
There seems to be a fixed idea that, at least until very recently, most fantasy has been set in a mediaeval-type setting. This is almost an article of faith to many people, in the face of all evidence, and shows that they have very little understanding of what mediaeval1 really means. Some fantasy authors…
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A Fantasy World That’s All Grown Up
There’s a very clear traditional idea of what a fantasy world is supposed to be like. It has warriors riding horses and wielding swords and axes. It doesn’t have them travelling on planes and operating computers. It just doesn’t. But why not? After all, our world has had all that and much, much more,…
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The Aryan Fallacy
Note: This is an updated version of a post on my old blog from 2015. Recent events suggest that it may need saying again. In 1938, J.R.R. Tolkien received a letter from a German publisher who proposed to publish a translation of The Hobbit. According to the laws under the Nazi government, they requested…
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Empires, Evil and Otherwise
You don’t have to travel far within either fantasy or science fiction before you trip over an empire. If anything, in fact, they’re even more prevalent in SF than in fantasy, from the empire of the Klingons and the one that strikes back to the enemies of the Foundation and of the Atreides. Most…
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What’s in a Surname?
It used to be simple enough. Fantasy names were Conan the Barbarian, Elric of Melniboné, Aragorn son of Arathorn. That even applied to sophisticated SF races: Vulcans and Klingons made do with a single name each, for instance. No self-respecting fantasy character would have such a thing as a surname — unless, of course,…
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Not a Prologue
When I began writing seriously, I was a prologue skeptic. Too many fantasy novels I’d read or browsed in the bookstore/library had unnecessary prologues, often prologues with a poorly written poem-cum-prophecy or with a dump of worldbuilding informatio…
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Silk Betrayal: timeline
While I have no plans to do a massive George R. R. Martin style multi-book history of the Eghsal Valley and all its twists and turns, the book does include a broad timeline of the major events of the past 600 years. This is, to be clear, the timeline a…