Steampunk as a genre got its start with The Difference Engine and The Diamond Age, both set in a alternate world Victorian England. So, it bears to follow that Steampunk characters have English language names that were popular during that time. There are no hippy names like Rainbow or Phoenix in Steampunkland, and neither are …
In the past few years, the American consumer knows that Autumn is here by the number of pumpkin-flavored food items that become available. Starbucks has led the charge with its pumpkin-flavored lattes and now (delicious, trust me) pumpkin frappucinos. There are also pumpkin doughnuts, pumpkin cereal, and pumpkin M&Ms. But all this obscures the true …
Witches are a staple of fantasy and horror fiction. In their broad definition, they mean any kind of magic-using female. But for this list I’m going to use a more narrow definition: the Halloween type of witch, evil, cackling, out to do no good. The kind that brews potions in a big black cauldron and …
Medieval England came up with more than its share of punishment devices. Take the Pear of Anguish pictured above. It’s a speculum, basically, with an extendable pointy thing in the middle which may or may not have been spring-shot. It was inserted in any of the victim’s orifices and splayed them open. The spike then …
Elfquest, created by Wendy and Richard Pini, exploded onto the publishing scene in the early 1980s. A graphic novel series about, basically, hippy Native American elves who ride wolves, it took the comic world and SF fandom by storm, kick-starting the indie comic movement while also growing out of the earlier adult comic movement of …
Easy-to-comprehend diagram of Horror genres. Some changes I’d make: Move “Creepy Kid” under the Monster genre The genres at the bottom aren’t really genres, they’re more like themes… …with the exception of Goth, which is a legitimate genre IMO. The Supernatural subgenre under Paranormal is just wrong. I’d call it Metahuman or Mutant and class …
As I discovered when I read Rowan Jacobsen’s Apples of Uncommon Character, a name can make or break an apple type. Heirloom apples were commonly named after who discovered or propagated them or where they were discovered. Such as Ben Davis, McIntosh, and Rome, which came not from Italy but the little town of Rome, Ohio. …
The first roller coasters were not called roller coasters at all. They were known as Russian Mountains and were created in Portugal, not Russia, from mounds of ice piled up by Russian refugees from wars of Ivan the Terrible in the 1600s. To this day, in Spanish-speaking countries, roller coasters are still known as montaña …
British author Michael Moorcock created a series of stories, novels, and metanovels about albino warrior Elric of Melniboné, referenced by me here. In that series, the made-up language was surprisingly consistent. Sometimes ridiculous, sometimes grandiose, the words Yyrkoon, Imryyr, and Xiombarg conjure up a sort of Solomon’s Demons / Chinese never-never land beyond time and …
Fish, and sealife in general, tend to get names that relate to their appearance — such as the seahorse — or behavior, like the fancifully named by-the-wind sailor jellyfish. Sprinkled in are names from foreign sources, like humuhumunukunukuapua’a. Looking for a name for a fish that never was and never will be? Here’s a list. …