And on to part two. Remember the rules: we're after High Concept Fantasy here. Creativity verging on holiness or madness, the type of thing SF revels in when so much fantasy wallows in the tried and true. Let's do it! Let's go! Hup!

In no particular order...

Gollum from Lord of the Rings. Creator: J.R.R. Tolkein.
As dangerous and vile as all lovers of ( Read more... )

High Concept Fantasy

Yeah, yeah, I know. Every forum under the sun has a thread about this. But this one is mine. Every world on the list has felt solid enough to be real -- full of the right kind of detail. None of the buildings wobble when you open doors in these places. But their creators have gone far further than that. Each setting is high ( Read more... )

I always come back to this, I can't help myself, can't leave it alone. Pick, pick, pick.

I'll try again.

Original is when you make things up. Invent things. The more you create from scratch, the more original it is.
90%* of fantasy books are set in quasi-medieval European worlds. About 5%* are quasi-Asian and 5%* quasi-classical civilisations. If I ( Read more... )

World-Building bit

I was minding my own business on a thread about world-building yesterday when it became frighteningly obvious that art is often -- maybe even always -- imperfect. As we say on the intertube, ZOMG!!!

Tolkien left out commerce, Bakker forgot women*, Jordan thought everybody spoke American and so on. Some writers take no account of ( Read more... )

After yesterday's post, wherein I did mock what I called "off-the-shelf" Ikea Worlds... I just wanted to point out that while I love great world-building, it's not the be-all and end-all for me. Many of my favorite reads of the last few years have used easily sourced components, but that became totally irrelevant when the books excelled in other ( Read more... )

I have written here before about my love of good world-building and will probably do so again. This wild hobby-horse needs a regular gallop if it's not to get too restless in the stables.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of hearing a wonderful radio documentary on RTE about tribal music. All of the segments were interesting, but one in particular, ( Read more... )