Fantasy and Our Modern World
Fantasy and Our Modern World: A Few Observations The first truly modern fantasy work was The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien. That’s not a statement that very many critical theorists can dispute. But what is fantasy, and how did Tolkien make it “modern” and what does it mean for us today? Fantasy is […]
Notes from the Editor
Recently I was asked to join Baen Books, a major speculative fiction company, as a consulting editor. In order to save time for both me and for authors, I’d like to tell you what I’m searching for.
Why Write Fantasy?
A hundred years ago, if a writer were discussing and writing fantasy, he would have used the term fantasy that way. Today, when discussing fantasy as a literary genre, we often are discussing a branch of literature.
One Impossibility
If you write a novel set in the real world—whether it is historical or modern—you don’t have to worry so much about “creating” a world as “researching” your setting. But if you are writing science fiction or fantasy, you very often “create” a world from scratch. There are a couple of approaches that you can […]
Creating a Sense of Wonder in Fantasy
There are all kinds of fantasy novels. If you’re a genre writer, the first one that you might think of is Sword and Sorcery, or perhaps High Fantasy. Typically, these are fantasies set in some sort of medieval world, much like Tolkien’s, but the authors may have very distinctive voices. Yet there are lots of […]