Recent content by Steerpike

Heh. Which anime music do you like most Devor? I can't understand what they're saying in a lot of my music either!

Coraline too.

I've been lucky in avoiding it. I tend to start writing with a fairly basic idea of the world and its parameters, then flesh things out as they become necessary according to the story.

It's not a bad attempt--certainly better than anything I could put together. But to me it immediately identifies the work as self-published. You're competing with everything else that is available, including from big publishers. I think having a professional cover is very important, and given...

Moorcock is great. And a nice shout out to Mervyn Peake, who was brilliant.

This is certainly doable. You don't have to have battle or violence to have conflict, or to resolve conflict. It's just a matter of writing it and seeing whether the execution works.

High Fantasy is where the halflings hang around the dispensaries all day. Low Fantasy is when the elves all wear apple bottom jeans.

Guy Gavriel Kay probably does historical fantasy best. Read The Lions of Al-Rassan, for example. He writes a lot in this subgenre.

@FifthView -- that's fairly close to my view, I think. I have this discussion with respect to SF quite often, because I feel if something in a work contradicts known science, and isn't bolstered by a plausible (even if theoretical) scientific explanation for doing so, you're outside of science...

I suppose the next question is how you define fantastical elements. Is the sprawling, creaking castle of Gormenghast, within which generations live out their lives a "fantastic element?" How about a fictional world largely ruled by an empire controlled by an engineering guild that has...

Is it Black Sun Rising? Or are we thinking of two different books with a similar name. If it is, I agree. That's an excellent book, and straddles the line between SF and F. I suppose I consider horror to be a subgenre of Fantasy, but at some point if I make everything a subgenre of fantasy...

Very cool. Congratulations, Malik.

@glutton I think that falls squarely into the realm of fantasy. To take another example--is there magic in Beowulf? I can't remember any but it has been a long time since I read the entire thing. I think that is certainly a fantasy story, even if it has no magic (and ostensibly takes place in...

Read Guy Gavriel Kay's "historical fantasies." The Lions of Al-Rassan is a good place to start. It is based on true historical events, but he renames the countries and people, placing them in a fantasy world that is essentially a loose analog of our own world.

I don't want to derail the high v. low fantasy thread, so I'm creating a new thread for my thoughts on this topic. It is interesting to me, as both a reader and writer, to understand how other people view the boundaries of the genre. In the other thread, I mentioned works like Gormenghast...