Not only did ancient peoples look to the night sky’s constellations as cultural touchstones, they also looked to individual stars. The star Thuban helped the Egyptians align their pyramids, and Sirius, when it rose at dawn, let them know the flooding of the Nile was soon to come. The stars of the Pleiades star cluster …
In a pre-industrial society, stars and constellations had more impact on the viewer because there was less light pollution. Pictures could be traced, paths, and stories, all providing a commonality among members of a tribe or society. One common example is the constellation of the Big Dipper, or Ursa Major, imagined by many ancient cultures …
There are all sorts of fairies, elementals, grues, demons, devils, angels, nature spirits, and the like in fantasy. Often they serve a purpose in the story, and just as often they are there for window dressing, like the offhand mentions of pookas or kelpies causing trouble. In fact, things wouldn’t be the same if …
Fantasy writing published in English-speaking worlds relies heavily on Medieval England as a setting. I suppose it’s because most early fantasy writers were, in fact, English, and then there’s the influence of the Inklings that included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. It’s a heavy base that has only gotten heavier over the …
So many of them sound like video games, don’t they? Probably because both are designed to take their users to a strange, disoriented world full of action and violent motion. With a dozen lists and a randomizer, here’s what I came up with, to create your own travelling carnival or Midway. Nausea-inducing fairground rides …
You’re driving along in the English countryside on your way to the next bed-and-breakfast. Villages and towns appear as you turn a bend or crest the hill, then disappear as the road steers you away. Or you’re reading some cozy mystery book set in the British Isles, or a tale of Eldritch horror where innocent …
They are the things that make children wake screaming, blind with fear, in the middle of the night. They are the things that slip through the cracks under bedroom windows, the things that turn the knobs of bedroom closets and push them open with agonizing slowness, while the children cower under their blankets and pray …
Geisterbahn is German for ghost train, the popular amusement park ride that carries thrill-seekers into dark, eerie tableaus designed to thrill and shock them. The most elaborate of these are found at Munich’s Oktoberfest. In the US, these rides are known as Spookhouses, or Haunted Houses. Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion is an example of the best …
Science fiction writer Joan D. Vinge wrote a fairy tale/space opera mashup in the early 1980s called The Snow Queen, which borrowed from the Hans Christian Anderson tale of the same name. Most of the action took place on a frigid water planet named Tiamat, where humans were split into two clans: Summers and Winters. …
World mythology is full of fabulous beasts, beings, spirits, and creatures. There are the ones everybody knows, like gryphons, dragons, and unicorns; then there are those that are semi-familiar, like the harpy and thunderbird; and lastly, some that are truly obscure, like the grootslang, the ahkluyat, the senmurv. Here’s a list of randomly generated creatures …