A Review of Writing Fantasy Heroes

Writing Fantasy Heroes Jason M. Waltz, ed. Rogue Blades Entertainment trade paper, $14.99, ebook $ 7.99 Kindle (There is no other electronic version available that I’m aware of.) Okay, class, today we’re going to have […]

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JACK VANCE: VISIONS OF A DYING EARTH

After the last few S&S works of the early 1940s, such as “Dragon Moon” by Henry Kuttner and the short-lived Unknown, Sword & Sorcery lost steam. With Robert E. Howard dead for five or more […]

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Realistic Fantasy: an Oxymoron

oxymoron (n) a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction fantasy (n) the faculty or activity of imagining impossible or improbable things realistic (a) representing things in a way that is […]

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You Got Grit in my Fantasy Story

(Cue stoner voice) “You got grit in my fantasy story, man!” “Nah man, you got fantasy in my gritty story, dude!” Convergent evolution is the acquisition of the same biological trait in unrelated lineages. The […]

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Fantasy as History

Author’s Note – it has been said that we should ‘write what we know’ and, in that spirit, for my first outing here at Amazing Stories I have decided to crib a little from my […]

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Crossroads: Tripping the Noir Fantastic

Last week, we talked about some of the tensions between science fiction and noir. Fantasy, which relies on metaphor even more than science fiction, has an even more challenging time of it. Its traditional themes […]

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