With the new Star Wars movie hitting big, people unfamiliar with fantasy and science fiction may feel out of their depth. For you normal folks, I offer a short introduction – a non-nerd primer so to speak – of accessible examples from fantasy and science fiction in four different media. Movie: Star Wars Recently my […]
A TV series has a potential advantage over a movie in that a series affords the chance to follow a story over an extended time. Events are able to unfold into broad plots and themes. Characters can be developed in depth. This is a potential but not an inevitable advantage. Problems happen when a series […]
A fantasy author discussing The Andy Griffith Show seems a bit odd, but this TV series is an out-genre masterpiece of characterizations, which a fantasy or science fiction author would do well to learn from. You’ll notice that my top ten are from the black and white episodes. Once The Andy Griffith Show went to […]
This week I’ve invited my daughter Lucy Wright to take a swing for us in the fantasy and science fiction world. Lucy revisits the topic of the pill to swallow in fantasy and science fiction. In our first installment on this subject, I sited some examples where the pills went down easy and the stories […]
A fantasy or science fiction author chucks out one or more real physical laws in order to construct an imaginative world where magic and dragons coexist, where starships can exceed the speed of light, where heroes still look good even with blue skin. But there’s danger in straying too far from this real universe where […]
Face it: As genres go, fantasy and science fiction do not lend themselves well to romance. Now before you protest by citing examples of book covers, let me say that romance is more than a buxom vixen next to a muscle man riding a dragon. That’s not romance; that’s just sex. Sex is not romance. […]
Recently on Netflix I caught a Canadian TV series called MythQuest. Its first and only season was shown in 2001. As a science fantasy, MythQuest falls within the purview of our consideration as fantasy and science fiction fans. Let’s look at the concept, the writing, and the acting. Concept Any fantasy or science fiction dispenses […]
Invincibility is a story killer. The magic in fantasy or the technology in science fiction can be so awesome that nothing is able to stand against it. For storytelling, this is bad. Story needs conflict, a way to endure or overcome, a real chance of failure. If the hero is so endowed with greatness that […]
In reality and fantasy, individuals act out of differing motives and backgrounds. But all people have a core they are striving for, an inner itch they seek to scratch. Villains Our contemporary culture has given us some amazingly complex fictional villains, ones with overlapping motives and obtuse back stories. This is because real villains of […]
In any fantasy or science fiction story, whether literature or film, there’s always at least one premise… One pill to swallow, if you will. Too many pills forced down the reader’s throat and they’ll choke. A person can take one, maybe three, premises, but too much more than that and the story simply gets silly. […]
