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I don't know where I found Dan Koboldt's site but Google didn't find the site name here, so I'm guessing it was somewhere else. There are a lot of articles--over 60--on everything from viruses to the history of warfare and medieval occupations open to women. They're not very deep, but they seem good enough to make the writer smarter. And it looks like a new article is added every few weeks.
I don't know where I found Dan Koboldt's site but Google didn't find the site name here, so I'm guessing it was somewhere else. There are a lot of articles--over 60--on everything from viruses to the history of warfare and medieval occupations open to women. They're not very deep, but they seem good enough to make the writer smarter. And it looks like a new article is added every few weeks.
I just googled his name and had no trouble finding the site you link. If you go to his home/blog/etc. page, there is a link at the top of the page to the site you link here under science in sci-fi. All the same links are at the top of the page you link here. Looks like a good site btw. Take care. Vern
I read a few. These should prove useful for getting oriented in a field of study so as to at least be able to ask intelligent questions. Nice find. Thanks, NJC.
I meant to say that I did not find a link to his site on this site, thus I wasn't duplicating info. But I might have done something erroneously.
Thank whoever left the link for me to find. Might have been the Blogfather, Glenn Harlan Reynolds.
Take a look over at The Mad Genius Club. It's a blog by a group of established SciFi/Fantasy writers. They straddle the line of indie/traditional, have sometimes strong opinions, and give a lot of good advice.
edit: I forgot The Passive Voice--a writer and lawyer--yes, one person!
Excellent find, njc. I read a few of the articles and they're really useful. It's cool somebody takes the time to support authors in this way.
Kiss,
Gacela
On marketing and Amazon. This guy has occasional articles on the business of writing. Cover design. Covers. Keywords and categories. Big Misc.
By Dave Freer: For those of us writing about pre-industrial world(s).
Not reading, exactly, but about dramatic technique: Video on Hitchock's blocking technique, see through one scene in Vertigo.
Mad Genius post on going Indie
One writer's analysis of the Kindle Scout program. Summary: not worth it for most authors.
Independent bookstores on the rise, Esspresso POD at The Passive Voice. (Original, full article at the Wall Street Journal, where it's outside the paywall right now.)
I don't know where I found Dan Koboldt's site but Google didn't find the site name here, so I'm guessing it was somewhere else. There are a lot of articles--over 60--on everything from viruses to the history of warfare and medieval occupations open to women. They're not very deep, but they seem good enough to make the writer smarter. And it looks like a new article is added every few weeks.
By the way, given that 'fantasy' means : "imagination unrestricted by reality" who needs the fantasy world to be realistic? Or debunking those things in 'fantasy' as impossible, but in which people may believe nevertheless, is pointless, right? So that, in reality, a world suffering from 'climate change' going from catastrophe to catastrophe a century hence is 'fantasy' and not sci-fi, and the sci-fi on the same subject of climate events a century hence is a story of how it is now, and no catastrophe, pretty much the same.
Yes well, Gulliver's Travels was Fantasy. It also made a number of points. The same could be said of Dante's Inferno.
Fantasy that has no rules and no boundaries doesn't go over well. The rules must be made, and any changes must be reveals of things already heralded. At some point, I'm going to have to explain how Kirsey does at least some of the things he does. But I've established that there is a mechanism to sorcery in my story and I have to stick with that, even if it means that certain things go unexplained. These must serve as the axioms of the system.
The nearest thing to 'anything goes' is probably the arguably SciFi Dr. Who, in which each story (and especially the novels) seems to select a different subset of rules. But the stories did sell.
Yes well, Gulliver's Travels was Fantasy. It also made a number of points. The same could be said of Dante's Inferno.
Other than Tolkien, who has written fantasy since?
Fantasy that has no rules and no boundaries doesn't go over well. The rules must be made, and any changes must be reveals of things already heralded. At some point, I'm going to have to explain how Kirsey does at least some of the things he does. But I've established that there is a mechanism to sorcery in my story and I have to stick with that, even if it means that certain things go unexplained. These must serve as the axioms of the system.
The nearest thing to 'anything goes' is probably the arguably SciFi Dr. Who, in which each story (and especially the novels) seems to select a different subset of rules. But the stories did sell.
Dr. Who is just dumb, campy sci-fi as much as Superman is. Not that that is not entertaining, but so are pratfalls and fart jokes. What do you guess has happened since the 17th century that has made writing fantasy impossible. Tolkien, or perhaps Christian medievalism generally, is in category on its own- in many ways also not real fantasy, too.
That will depend on your definition of Fantasy, and of your standards for writing. Do you consider George MacDonald's novels Fantasy? What about Zelazny's two Amber series? The multiple modern reworkings of King Arthur? How about LeGuin's EarthSea series? I'm partial to Elizabeth Willey's three-volume series, but it's out of favor and out of print. Still, for anyone who's read it: is it Fantasy?
How about Dracula? It's horror, but it could also be called Fantasy.
By the way, given that 'fantasy' means : "imagination unrestricted by reality"
What do you guess has happened since the 17th century that has made writing fantasy impossible
According to the definition you provide, exactly how is writing fantasy impossible? Take care. Vern
That will depend on your definition of Fantasy, and of your standards for writing. Do you consider George MacDonald's novels Fantasy? What about Zelazny's two Amber series? The multiple modern reworkings of King Arthur? How about LeGuin's EarthSea series? I'm partial to Elizabeth Willey's three-volume series, but it's out of favor and out of print. Still, for anyone who's read it: is it Fantasy?
How about Dracula? It's horror, but it could also be called Fantasy.
I thought of Earthsea as fantasy when I read the books as a teen, but I'd have to read them again to judge as I do today. I remember an implausibility factor like Gulliver's Travels and Tristram Shandy and relation to satire/social commentary that today's "fantasy" does not have. Stoker, Lovecraft - horror, and I would put Lovecraft in fantasy/horror but with no relation to satire/social commentary (that is to say: entertainment with little literary merit beyond excellent use of words). To answer my own question as to why modern writers do not write fantasy is to say commercial fiction is now bound too tightly to scientific materialism and naturalism to be real fantasy. In this latter sense, Atlas Shrugged is "fantasy" but also not because Rand made the fiction too plausible, but her deliberate literary style to reject naturalism (in favor of a neo-romanticism) makes it closer to fantasy than contemporary 'fantasy' is. Of MacDonald and Zelanzy which single book I could read do you suppose makes your point?
Charles Bell wrote:By the way, given that 'fantasy' means : "imagination unrestricted by reality"
Charles Bell wrote:What do you guess has happened since the 17th century that has made writing fantasy impossible
According to the definition you provide, exactly how is writing fantasy impossible? Take care. Vern
I did not say or imply what you say I did. I consider my Remembrances and Reconciliation a romance-fantasy to a degree beyond what I have read on TNBW in "romance" and "fantasy" categories, though John Hamler is making an undisciplined approach to fantasy. The question I asked is more in tune with "why do not writers and readers today, for the past two centuries or so, appreciate fantasy?" Or even better - why isn't Homer's Iliad to modern readers the best 'fantasy' ever written? Why is the commercial genre "fantasy" - magic and dragons? Even if magic and dragons is to most people "of imagination unrestricted to reality"-- that they do not actually exist -- authors and readers want them very nearly plausible. The plot premise of Remembrances and Reconciliation is not only implausible but impossible and for that it is likely to be condemned rather praised for being fantasy.
Science Fiction and Fantasy both rest on the writer's creation of an alternate world, different from our own in some of the machinery, but nonetheless inhabited by humans or human-like beings. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness would seem to push that latter part to extreme (no, I haven't read it, sorry) since a foundation part of the animal element of human nature is changed. Works that involve viewpoint characters or their foils as vampires, werewolves, or quasi-human species (elves, dwarves, faries, ...) usually preserve those elements, at least in some measure.
Within these 'sub-created' worlds, the characters, with such burdens and powers as they may have, are human enough that stories about them can be understood and appreciated with the same facilities and faculties that are employed when reading stories about human beings.
Science Fiction and Fantasy both rest on the writer's creation of an alternate world,
All fine. But my objection is to the co-opting of the word 'fantasy' to mean something that it is not and thereby leaving no place for writers of fantasy, as it really means, no place to go to sell their stories. One may suggest that such stories of fantasy -- perhaps we might mean something along the lines of Jacobean farce, but updated, Gulliver's Travels, Alice in Wonderland, etc. -- are of an extinct art form or even that books and art have little to do with each other any more, but culture which has settled into set genres is itself a dying culture
Within these 'sub-created' worlds, the characters, with such burdens and powers as they may have, are human enough that stories about them can be understood and appreciated with the same facilities and faculties that are employed when reading stories about human beings.
And I suppose that is what I object to most. It's dressing up the same boring plots and themes.
njc wrote:Science Fiction and Fantasy both rest on the writer's creation of an alternate world,
All fine. But my objection is to the co-opting of the word 'fantasy' to mean something that it is not and thereby leaving no place for writers of fantasy, as it really means, to go to sell their stories. One may suggest that such stories of fantasy -- perhaps we might mean something along the lines of Jacobean farce, but updated, Gulliver's Travels, Alice in Wonderland, etc. -- are of an extinct art form or even that books and art have little to do with each other any more, but culture which has settled into set genres is itself a dying culture
njc wrote:Within these 'sub-created' worlds, the characters, with such burdens and powers as they may have, are human enough that stories about them can be understood and appreciated with the same facilities and faculties that are employed when reading stories about human beings.
And I suppose that is what I object to most. It's dressing up the same boring plots and themes.
Then you should like George MacDonald.
Then you should like George MacDonald.
Still, the subject of contemporary fantasy and its state of actual nothingness is avoided. Any Christian apologetics written a century and a half ago is not on point. You might as well suggest C.S. Lewis Narnia which also rests upon an established doctrine of already accepted principles - not truly what I mean by 'fantasy' which must exist within an aether of incomprehensibility composed by a rational author-guide.
Science Fiction and Fantasy both rest on the writer's creation of an alternate world, different from our own in some of the machinery, but nonetheless inhabited by humans or human-like beings. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness would seem to push that latter part to extreme (no, I haven't read it, sorry)
LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven and its effective dream is close to what I mean by fantasy that is really 'fantasy' by a contemporary writer - alternate universes created by something which is absolutely impossible, and yet the novel is erroneously called sci-fi. When a universe is imagined by a concept of the possible [quantum teleportation; Cmdr. Data-like AI] that is sci-fi and thus a distinct genre of its own - until and unless it resorts to magic and monsters and fodder for entertainment purposes only, the sort of rubbish on the SyFy channel. I rather think dungeons-and-dragons medieval fantasies, for example, come across as a kind of propaganda ever as much as Tolkien and Lewis were essentially Christian-socialist propagandists because the fantasy is so closely tied to what they thought was possible (or had been possible) in real life. LeGuin, on the other hand, is cautiously anti-socialist, at least of the scientific-materialist-progressive-Fabian kind, but she seems more an advocate of a nebulous 'third-way' politics between socialism and 'capitalism' probably just another kind of utopian anarchism that the later Heinlein believed in. When an author steps away from fantasy into fantasy-sci-fi, mixing the scientifically possible with the known impossible, he is advocating something which cannot work.
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