tags: fantasy

2010

February

2010 Feb 17

fairy stories

There is a trend in the fantasy genre that I kind of wish never took root: the multi-book series. Every author seems intent on publishing ten-thousand page epics, each one longer than the last, with no end in sight. The most egregious of these seems to be The Wheel of Time, by the late Robert Jordan. The twelfth book in the series just came out in October of last year, nearly twenty years since the first book came out, and there are still two books to go. And despite the fact that since the sixth book, I've felt that I've just been strung along on a wild goose chase, I still plodded through the monstrous volumes, still wanting to at last reach the end of that gargantuan tale.

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April

2010 Apr 11

fantasy genre mashup

Because I read all four existing books of A Song of Ice and Fire right before I started playing Final Fantasy XIII, I keep wanting to call one of the characters in the game "Jon Snow" instead of just "Snow".

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2012

July

2012 Jul 14

systems of magic

Ever since I heard of Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law—any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic—I've often found myself thinking of how magic would end up being studied in a post-scientific revolution civilization. I know a lot of fantasy authors don't like making their systems of magic explicit, because it inevitably makes it magic less magical (and not making it explicit is also incidentally in line with Tolkien's thoughts on how magic should work: internally logically consistent the way logic in fairy tales and dreams are internally consistent, no matter how weird.)

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