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Bye-Bye, July!
It’s the last day of July and that means that summer is that much closer to being over. Yay!
You’ll Have This
This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes. ~Hannah Arendt
What I had planned to accomplish at work this week went right out the damned window.
Oh well, you’ll have this. It will get done, one way or another.
I’ve long held that I should “Expect nothing so that whatever comes is a pleasant surprise.” Well, maybe not always pleasant, but the fact that it’s a surprise is somewhat pleasant in itself. It presents a challenge either way.
If only challenges didn’t make me so freaking tired that I have neither the time nor the energy to get myself back on track.
Getting old sucks.
Flights Of Fantasy
A Guide to Fantasy Subgenres
Okay, I guess I’m old-fashioned. I haven’t gotten into most of the genres that Shaelin mentioned in the video above. It’s interesting to know that there’s a “lid for every pot” in the literary world.
My imagination was primarily shaped by the genres I’ve mentioned before.
Space Opera: Sitting down on a Saturday afternoon and watching the adventures of Flash Gordon with Mom and Dad is one of my favorite childhood memories. Pretty much anything with a spaceship was guaranteed to keep my attention. Spaceships, aliens, ray guns and all of the techno-niftiness grabbed my attention and kept it. Beam me up! Fire the Wave Motion Gun! Use the Force! All of these catch-phrases create a visceral reaction in fans of this genre and I’m no exception.
Fantasy (High or Epic): From Grimms’ Fairy Tales (particularly Hansel and Gretel, I mean, a cannibalistic witch who lives in a candy house? Epic!) to the world of Tolkien and all the derivative works, you could always grab my attention with swords and armor. Disney’s Robin Hood, The Black Shield of Falworth, The Vikings and Monty Python and the Holy Grail stoked my imagination just as much as Dad’s vintage castle and knights playset. Once I discovered D&D, fuhgeddaboudit… I was hooked for life. Along came Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian, The Dark Crystal and Dragonslayer just to seal the deal. Later came Willow, Dragonheart, The Sword and the Dragon and (while not technically fantasy) Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible (Parts One and Two, I haven’t seen Part Three since it was never actually finished). Swords and armor? Castles? Dragons? Goblins? Elves? Dwarves? Yeah, you’ve got my attention.
Superhero: I think you got the idea by now that I was, am and shall continue to be a nerd. Comic books were a perfect bridge from childhood picture books to more complex readers. The comic books actually became more complex in the Bronze Age of Comics when I was first learning to read, so the plots were already pretty complex. Even though people might like to dismiss the medium, comic books had already had decades to mature in their storytelling, subject matter and artistic style. Golden and Silver Age comics tended to look as if they’d been drawn by me. From the Bronze Age forward, they had anatomically correct musculature, realistic perspective and more dramatic layouts. There was a trend in the 90s toward surrealistic mushiness, but it didn’t catch on (thank goodness). Between The Joker and the Green Goblin, green and purple have always been some of my favorite colors. As special effects began to become more convincing and less expensive, bringing superheroes to the screen (both small and large) has become more prevalent. From the campy Batman series of the 60’s to the lackluster Spider-Man and Wonder Woman series of the 70s, superhero media did its best to present comic book adventures in live action with mixed results. The Incredible Hulk presented the tortured character of Dr. Banner as he is forced to drift from place to place because the Hulk always wrecks things for him. The TV Hulk was not even a tiny bit as strong or powerful as the comic book Hulk, but they really brought a new dimension to the character in this series. I think that this approach to comic book media showed a unique maturity and emotional realism that I’d like to emulate in my novel series.
Christmas Movies: Of course, the crowning moment of every single year was when the Christmas specials started rolling out. Frosty, Rudolph, Scrooge, Charlie Brown and so many others helped to make the holidays merry and bright. In later years, I got hooked on sappy holiday stories. From the redemptive tale of Ebeneezer Scrooge to the ludicrously formulaic but guiltily pleasant Hallmark Channel holiday romances (yeah, we know they’re going to get together, we just don’t know all the wrinkles in their path to happiness), there’s just so much to love about holiday movies and shows. My own Holiday Season Serial Romances are a union of these quaint holiday movies and how they’d play in a world where superheroes exist. I think that’s been going reasonably well so far. Unlike The Sentinels series, the superheroes aren’t the main characters. They’re just there to add a bit of mad action to the story and remind you that you’re in the Sentinelsverse.
If you’re not into speculative fiction as much as I am, Shaelin also talks about the non-fantasy genres in the video below.
A Guide to Literary Genres | What genre is your book?
More, More, More!
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
I’ve been branching out a bit. All this talk about the various genres I’m interested in writing in has gotten me thinking about what I’m going to do when I switch gears.
I’ve still got a lot to do with The Sentinels, but I’m trying to start seeding my mind with story ideas for the fantasy and space opera genres. I’ve got more concrete notions for the fantasy stories but I do have some vague notions of what I’d like to do in the Sci-Fi arena.
I enjoyed The Expanse immensely. I have no desire to crib from that show but I really like how they handled a near-future version of space adventure. One of the big criticisms of sci-fi is that they deliberately sidestep science in order to tell a story.
Well, duh. The -Fi in Sci-Fi is Fiction! We’re making stuff up. Get over it.
Sure, Star Trek invented Warp Drive in order to get around relativistic time dilation problems and the transporter to get around the cost of doing an expensive shuttle launch and landing sequence in the show. What was done for the convenience of storytelling has inspired generations of scientists to try to create those technologies. 3D printers emulate the Replicator and there are more incredible inventions to come based on people being inspired by Star Trek.
I’m also interested in the future timelines described in a lot of the RPGs I have had over the years.
Traveller describes a galactic empire spanning thousands of years and a large swath of our galaxy. Traveller Interstellar Wars focuses on a portion of that expansive history when humans of Earth met humans from another world who had already explored and settled most of the star systems around us.
Traveller 2300, despite the name, isn’t related to the original Traveller role-playing game milieu at all. The scenario, the alien species and the timeline are completely different. Vive la différence! This game had a much more detailed star chart and some interesting ideas of how the future would pan out. This game and Traveller: Interstellar Wars have a vibe that reminds me of Star Trek: Enterprise and The Expanse.
There was also the Star Frontiers game. This one was set at the intersection of space between a variety of species. The humans in this scenario were not specifically from Earth and there was no mention of a specific location or galaxy. Could have been any old where, like Star Wars. The space travel was very much an afterthought but the character development and technologies were handled in an interesting way.
Getting back to TV and cinema, I found Battlestar Galactica (both old and new), Starship Troopers, Aliens, Star Blazers, Wing Commander, Farscape and Robotech to have some interesting things to offer, but I also come back to classic B&W space opera standards like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers (this was a lot different from the TV series in the 80s), Tom Corbett and Rocky Jones.
So, for sci-fi, I envision some stories that take place in the near-ish future and some that take place in the distant future and in distant star systems. All of the things i’ve watched and read over the years will inform my ideas but I’m hoping not to resort to blatant fanfic. This is going to take a while to percolate in the ol’ subconscious.
Auringia, on the other hand, has already been simmering for years. It started off as an AD&D campaign for some friends from work, but I felt it merited fleshing out and being used in a high or epic fantasy milieu. In an effort not to make it “fake medieval Germany“, I’ve been pursuing the now discredited Altaic Hypothesis for the purpose of giving the setting a Joseon–Wuxia–Chanbara–BaltoUralic–Slavic feel. A tall order but I think I can make it work. That’s just the humans.
The goblin races of Auringia are different from those in D&D and in Tolkien lore. In Tolkien’s works particularly, goblins and orcs were elves who were tortured and maimed to make evil minions for Sauron and his boss, Morgoth. I don’t have a Satan/Lucifer character like Melkor/Morgoth. I don’t have a Dark Lord character like Sauron. I don’t have a gaggle of wizards who are actually angels like the Istari. If you don’t have a Satan/Melkor, you don’t need angels/Istari to thwart him.
No, my goblins have been affected by the Bloodwood, but they’re not inherently evil or malicious. Well, no more than the average Joe in the Dark Ages. Some are relatively friendly. Some are xenophobic and unremittingly hostile. The thing that sets my goblins apart is the effect that the Bloodwood has had on their physiology. The different varieties have an innate ability to camouflage themselves, effectively becoming invisible. Water Goblins disappear in the water. Wood Goblins can vanish in the forest. Stone Goblins can disappear against rock faces and in their tunnels. Hobgoblins can transform their appearance to pass for whoever they’re infiltrating. More on that later…
That’s all for the month of July. We’ll see what August brings us.