Let’s face it. Most of the food in a typical Medieval European kingdom wasn’t very exciting. This is better than most, folks. Historically, the peasant staple in Europe and the Near East was porridge, which is, basically, a form of oatmeal — whole grains boiled in water or milk, decanted into a bowl and eaten …
Jungle Girls are the female counterpart to Tarzan, Sabu, and countless other wild men and boys clad in flapping loincloths swinging through the trees. Modern interpretations of her began with Rima the Bird Girl, a character in the 1903 novel Green Mansions, which makes her older than Tarzan who debuted in 1912. Like Burrough’s creation …
No other creature is as evocative of the contemporary fantasy genre as the dragon. They combine snakes, lizards, dinosaurs, large mammalian predators, and human intellects into one massive, armored, fire-breathing package. (Their drives, however, are their own.) The current version of the dragon dates from within the last 100 years. Tolkien gave us a deadly …
Fantasy organizations are not limited to the grandiose and world-shaking. Scores of bureaucratic organizations run silently beneath the surface, serving to frustrate and stymie your characters in pursuit of their goals. Terry Pratchett, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Stanislaw Lem, and J. K. Rowling all used them to good effect. Often they also serve as …
Fantasy fiction (and science fiction, for that matter) is full of secret societies, thieves’ guilds, Hellfire clubs, and other associations for like-minded individuals. Often these are major drivers of the plot. Frank Herbert’s Dune would not be the same without the Bene Gesserit, or The Wheel of Time series the Aes Sedai. H.P. Lovecraft had …
Let’s talk about spells. One of the things I loved about Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series, and some of his other works, was the naming of his spells, magical items, and magic practioners. Iucounu the Laughing Magician; that has a certain ring, doesn’t it? Or the Walking Boat, which has legs, and, naturally, clambers over …