Kajira is the term used for the eternally youthful, eternally hapless, eternally helpless slave girls found in John Norman’s Gor series. Gor, for those not in the know, is a Conanesque planet superficially similar to Earth and sharing the same orbit, but on the opposite side of the sun so it remains undiscovered. The first …
Crests of modern cities in Germany. Top row, left to right: Stuttgart, Nurnberg, Tubingen. Middle row: Atzelgift, Honigsee, Nachtsheim. Bottom row: Falkenfels, Trechtingshausen, Flogeln. The production designers for George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones TV series have done a smashup job creating a fantasy world like Medieval Europe (in spite of those ice-zombies …
Making up things for characters to wear can be tedious sometimes, especially for a culture that has no earth analogue. Do we default to Medieval-normal (which wasn’t very normal at all), stick to the faux-Medieval we are most familiar with from endless movies and illustrations, or strike out on our own into new territory? Sometimes …
Because it’s the Fourth of July, my mind turns to other versions of the United States of America. Perhaps, if some butterfly was crushed on the dirt paths of time, this country would be the United Provinces of America. Or still part of Britain and called the United Colonies. Maybe Amerigo Vespucci’s name was never …
Gems and jewels often serve as a Macguffin in fantasy stories. Recovery of the myserious gray Arkenstone is what motivates the dwarves on their quest in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and in his Silmarillion, the Silmarils that embody the light of the great tree. Similarly, the theft of the rose-colored diamond called The Pink Panther motivates …
When writing fantasy, which is a genre that must be larger than life, your villains should be larger than life, too… and that means an evocative name, something to let the reader know they are, indeed, the villain, in whatever made-up language or naming system you’re using. Let’s look at a few. In the Harry …
In the early 1960s James Bond was the coolest fictional character ever. He weathered life-threatening situations with humor and aplomb, handled fisticuffs as well as martinis and expensive suits, and was always able to bed beautiful women. Dr. No, released in 1964, inspired a whole trend of spy movies and parodies of spy movies, like …
Anne McCaffrey wrote a long-running series of books about the backward planet of Pern and its giant, telepathic dragons used to combat “thread” – an invasive space spore that filtered down from an adjacent orbiting body — by burning from the air with their fiery breath. Pern had a pseudo-Medieval culture and the dragons a …
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