Week 3: Progress!
Beyond the weekly 500 words at 100 Word Stories (which is a really neat site that's always looking for fresh voices, by the way), I've broken through the blank page and written about 1000 words worth of a short story, as well as getting in my head a fairly decent outline of what the whole thing is going to look like. I think it's going to be about 8000 words when it's finished, but I could be wrong.
There's also a stirring toward the start of a new Lexicon game on the rpg.net wiki, which would be excellent if it happened.
Anyhow, onward with the ongoing ruminations on the Fantasy Genre. It's occurred to me, recently, that one of the more common uses of Fantasy (and certain subgenres of Science Fiction) is to tell stories about particular events in history without being forced to confront the flaws (from a modern perspective) of the people and nations that lived in that history. The bog-standard epic fantasy is, essentially, World War II without the need to dwell on man's inhumanity to man, replacing it with the much less troublesome orc's inhumanity to man. The time-displaced community story, a modern favorite (Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time, Flint's 1632, Birmingham's Axis of Time), can be seen as a story of colonization in which most of the evils of colonization are removed. (They're doing it unwillingly, not for profit; they aren't bringing slaves; they're careful to try and avoid exploiting the indigenous peoples who, by and large, are mostly white/European/western this time around...) And, of course, there's a long tradition of re-casting the American Revolution in space, where the colonists are often not burdened with either slavery or any indigenous population at all. I don't have a problem with this; far from it; but am interested in seeing if there are any historically interesting conflicts or situations that haven't already had a formula established for wiping away the historical sinfulness, and if I can come up with the right kind of tweaks. Lately I've been thinking a bit about the Crusades: specifically the First Crusade. I have some vague ideas on what to change around to make it work, which will have to wait until the short story is finished before I get back to them.
There's also a stirring toward the start of a new Lexicon game on the rpg.net wiki, which would be excellent if it happened.
Anyhow, onward with the ongoing ruminations on the Fantasy Genre. It's occurred to me, recently, that one of the more common uses of Fantasy (and certain subgenres of Science Fiction) is to tell stories about particular events in history without being forced to confront the flaws (from a modern perspective) of the people and nations that lived in that history. The bog-standard epic fantasy is, essentially, World War II without the need to dwell on man's inhumanity to man, replacing it with the much less troublesome orc's inhumanity to man. The time-displaced community story, a modern favorite (Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time, Flint's 1632, Birmingham's Axis of Time), can be seen as a story of colonization in which most of the evils of colonization are removed. (They're doing it unwillingly, not for profit; they aren't bringing slaves; they're careful to try and avoid exploiting the indigenous peoples who, by and large, are mostly white/European/western this time around...) And, of course, there's a long tradition of re-casting the American Revolution in space, where the colonists are often not burdened with either slavery or any indigenous population at all. I don't have a problem with this; far from it; but am interested in seeing if there are any historically interesting conflicts or situations that haven't already had a formula established for wiping away the historical sinfulness, and if I can come up with the right kind of tweaks. Lately I've been thinking a bit about the Crusades: specifically the First Crusade. I have some vague ideas on what to change around to make it work, which will have to wait until the short story is finished before I get back to them.