Worldbuilding: Why It Ain’t So Easy
So, I appeared at an event at the San Marcos Library on Sunday where I’d been asked to give a talk about research. During the question and answer section, someone asked me why I would go to all the trouble of setting a fantasy in the real world? “Why do that when you can just make stuff up? That’s easier, after all. It’s a short cut!” Yeah. Um. Not so much. First, writing isn’t easy, nor is making up stuff. Worldbuilding is hard work — very difficult, detailed work. If you’re not thinking about the worldbuilding aspects of your story that much, then what you’re doing is probably derivative, and that’s not good. It’s far easier to work with environments with which the reader is already familiar than it is to make up a foreign world and make it plausible. There are certain cues
177. Nick Mamatas — Love is the Law (An Interview)
http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/SandFEpisode177NickMamatas/SandF%20–%20Episode%20177%20–%20Nick%20Mamatas.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSPunk, the occult, and punchy literature, oh my! Nick Mamatas returns for a proper interview! Stina and Shaun tackle the politics of his work, the world of crime fiction and that dirty word, “genre,” and much more. We hope you enjoy the episode! Note: If you have iTunes and like this show, please give us a review on our iTunes page, or feel free to email us with your thoughts about the show! Here’s the episode (show notes are below): Episode 177 — Download (MP3) Show Notes: Nick’s Website Haikasoru You can also support this podcast by signing up for a one month free trial at Audible. Doing so helps us, gives you a change to try out Audible’s service, and brings joy to everyone. Our new intro music is “Time Flux” by Revolution Void (CC BY 3.0). That’s all, folks! Thanks for listening. See you next week.
LitBits: The Politics of Author/Work Separation
I’ve been thinking about this problem a lot recently, firstly for some obvious reasons (a certain movie) and secondly because of some of the things I’ve been discussing with my students in my American Literature course. And one of the questions that keeps coming up for me is this: how do we know when we have crossed the line by holding a writer accountable for the controversial things they write? As an example, I am currently teaching Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Wild Meat and Bully Burgers. This particular novel is not all that controversial, though it certainly has its issues, but her later book, Blu’s Hanging, was the cause of much controversy in 1997/1998. The Asian American Studies National Book Award she received was later annulled after public outcry; many critics and academics have written about the incident since.[1] One of the problems Asian American (and other) critics had with the book was its representation of Filipinos in Hawai’i (they are dirty, morally questionable, violent, and/or pedophiles) and the complete absence of indigenous Hawaiians in the novel. Effectively, critics charged Yamanaka with failing to self-censor herself in a stereotypical context; in
174. Cassandra Rose Clarke at Worldcon (an Interview of Sorts)
http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/SandFEpisode174CassandraClarkeAtWorldcon/SandF%20–%20Episode%20174%20–%20Cassandra%20Clarke%20at%20Worldcon.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSMad scientists, assassins, and publishing, oh my! Cassandra Rose Clarke joins Jen and Shaun in a mysterious San Antonio restaurant to talk about her novels, writing, the fantasy genre, galactic empires (well, Shaun talks about that), and much more! Plus, there may be a few half-truths in here. We’ll leave you to figure them out! We hope you enjoy the episode! Note: If you have iTunes and like this show, please give us a review on our iTunes page, or feel free to email us with your thoughts about the show! Here’s the episode (show notes are below): Episode 174 — Download (MP3) Show Notes Cassandra’s Website Angry Robot Books You can also support this podcast by signing up for a one month free trial at Audible. Doing so helps us, gives you a change to try out Audible’s service, and brings joy to everyone. Our new intro music is “Time Flux” by Revolution Void (CC BY 3.0). That’s all, folks! Thanks for listening. See you next week.
Out-Brutalling the Last Guy: “Grim and gritty, yes … but make sure it’s doing some honest work” by K.V. Johansen
I’ve written some reasonably grim stuff. The hero of Blackdog does tend to go for the throat on the battlefield and the assassin hero in my forthcoming series, Marakand, has a past that is decidedly Not Nice (his present just gets worse). Violence, horror, fear, pain, death — these are all part of epic fantasy, which almost by definition is going to deal with war at some point along the way and will certainly throw its characters into nasty situations, both as active doers of deeds and as suffering victims. Sometimes detailed physical description is what you need to do what the story needs done. Sometimes it isn’t. When it is, the detailed physical description alone shouldn’t be the point of the exercise. I was talking about this just last night with the Spouse, and then, while procrastinating on Twitter this morning, I wandered into a conversation with Juliet E. McKenna and Tom Lloyd that touched on the same ideas. This led me to wonder if, as we see the increased brutality inflicted in books praised as some kind of standard that is supposed to be achieved, we fantasy writers don’t sometimes get the feeling that we’d
Feed the Machine: A God Named Higgs
Standard Model So the Higgs Boson was confirmed last year was it? I can’t remember. Anyway, it won Mr. Higgs and that other guy who also theorized it a truckload of krona. Meanwhile, the men and women who actually discovered the damn thing got no love. But fear not, you honorable CERN employees, because you still have the best jobs in the world. The article above theorizes about the Higgs particle/field creating an entire particle landscape with its influence. If you could control the Higgs field, could you turn raw energy into whichever particles — both mundane and exotic — that you’d like? Wormholes would become practically commonplace if one could
