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| SFReader Forums > SFReader > Ask The Expert > Breaking new ground in S&S | Forum Quick Jump
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crystalwizard
Forum Moderator
      
Date Joined Nov 2006
Total Posts : 4420
| Posted 4/4/2008 5:00 AM (GMT -4) |   | | | |
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darkbow
Rabbit lord
Date Joined Oct 2005
Total Posts : 1500
| Posted 4/4/2008 5:05 AM (GMT -4) | | | | |
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Lane
Neophyte
Date Joined Jul 2007
Total Posts : 111
| Posted 4/4/2008 5:11 AM (GMT -4) | | The premise is actually better than I make it sound. I use two fantasy nations vaguely similar to feudal Japan and China. The mock-Taoists in China have their familiar philosophy about duality, which has led some of the monks to create a sword from meteoric iron. The magic they've put into the sword makes it useless against flesh, but capable of cutting spiritual beings.
The McGuffin firmly established, we turn eastward, where the Japanese Imperial Court is under siege by a demon, and none of the Imperial geomancers are able to bind the spirit or exorcise it. In desperation, a young female geomancer turns to her father, the leader of a distant mountain community of assassins (I purposefully avoid using the word ninja because it's a creation of the 1980s, and since I've decided to stay away from using Japanese or Chinese terms in the story, I simply use the word "assassin" or "spy"). Her father consults the lore of his tribe, and finds mention of the Demon-Sword in the writings taken from the mainland. He sends his mute foster-son, a highly-trained and ruthless killer, with his daughter (along with a hired Chinese guide and a Westerner who was marooned in the mock-Japan, a nebbishy scholar) across the mainland to retrieve the Sword.
The problem, however, is that with the beneficial properties of the sword come the problems (dual nature). It can destroy spirit, but its proximity corrupts nearby material flesh. The monks have all become cannibalistic undead (zombies) and lure our Intrepid Heroes into a trap. They escape, with the Sword, but are now torn between a duty to use it in defense of king and country and a very real desire to preserve themselves.
The subtext of this all is the mute foster-son's unexpressed (maybe inexpressible) love for the daughter, but she has affections for the Westerner, who shares her love of learning and scholarly pursuits. However, the foster-son is close friends with the foreigner, and this leads to personal strife between them. To make matters worse, the Chinese man hates Westerners, and the foster-son hates the Chinese. It's a giant, Jerry-Springer-ish mess of love, betrayal, racism, sexism, and blind nationalism.
But it's also about ninja and zombies.
-L. | | Back to Top | | |
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DAWaverly
Quirky Weirdness
Date Joined Jul 2006
Total Posts : 190
| Posted 4/4/2008 10:35 AM (GMT -4) | | erazmus said...
And if you want a new take on elves and dwarves, try eliminating the humans entirely for starts. Outside of some media tie-in fiction, I can't recall a "young dwarf warrior comes of age" tale anywhere.
On second thought, don't. I think I may use that one.
Mike
I have a partial outline for one (dwarf coming of age). However, I have humans and my setting is...well, very different.
I also think that setting can have a powerful impact on character, plot, etc. Instead of Nathan's view that it is just one spoke of a wheel, I guess I would prefer to think of it as the hub that supports the other six spokes. Not more important than the rest, mind you, just a different role. Setting supports, and can help define, character, plot, etc.
- Deven
Blogtide Rising
published
"The Journey" at Every Day Fiction
forthcoming
"An Awakening of Shadows" in The Infinity Swords anthology from Carnivah House
"All That Glitters" at Every Day Fiction | | Back to Top | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4464
| Posted 4/4/2008 1:21 PM (GMT -4) | | You guys are such a bunch of writers!
And I don't think you got the point of my dwarf coming of age proposal.
You don't have to make everything brand new to be original. You don't need to set things in space or what have you. To have a new angle on an S&S or any fantasy tale you just have to have _one_ thing that is new, and build off it.
"Yound Dwarf coming of age" doesn't require any change of setting over "generic fantasy realm" to work, though it would be a very different view of that "generic famtasy realm" because you'd be showing through a dwarfs eyes. Very similar to what Jim Hines does with his goblin, though you needn't do it as humorously.
You get the dwarf perspective right and you don't have to change a damn thing elsewise, you have an original take.
On a tangent to this, I think it implies that the whole "elves and dwarves a'la Tolkien have been done to death" is an overstatement. What it is, they've been glossed over to death. You can't use them as strange and exotic two-dimensional props for your fantasy stories anymore, that is more true. But done to death?
Elvish ennui, the dreary day-to-day sameness of immortality and the lengths a society would take to combat it as barely gotten lip service. The fierce clannishness of a society where the males outnumber the females twenty to one has never been explored. Only Hines has even looked at the realities of being cannon-fodder in a world of howitzers. There is enourmous potential for storytellers in the standard fantasy world setting.
And the same is true of the standard S&S troupes.
The lone barbarian, last of his race and/or far from home may be cliche and trite from over use, But what about those barbarians en mass? The one place Conan never seems to spend much time is in Cimmerea, with his peers. A writer could spend a lifetime chronicling the adventures of a barbarian with his own people, dealing with his own kind, facing hardships and magic and gods and war and migration with brothers at his back.
And that is just one thing. There are so many.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com
"Dutchman Rescue"in Continuum SF #6
www.continuumsciencefiction.com/orders.htm
"An Incident at Black Tongue Tavern" in _Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy_ from Fantasist Enterprises:
www.fantasistent.com/books/anthologies/BASH.php
"Stains" in Tales of the Talisman 3-1 www.zianet.com/hadrosaur/index.html
"Morning Coffee" in Every Day Fiction
www.everydayfiction.com/morning-coffee-by-michael-d-turner/
"The Jewel Below" in Flashing Swords
flashingswords.sfreader.com/issues/issue8/vol2-iss8-05.htm
"Happy Landings" in Every Day Fiction
www.everydayfiction.com/happy-landings-by-michael-d-turner/
"Teller of Tales" in Every day Fiction
www.everydayfiction.com/teller-of-tales-by-michael-d-turner/
Read "Silver Shells" In Every Day Fiction
www.everydayfiction.com/silver-shells-by-michael-d-turner/ | | Back to Top | | |
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nathan
Sage
Date Joined Mar 2006
Total Posts : 2111
| Posted 4/4/2008 1:44 PM (GMT -4) | |
erazmus said...
The one place Conan never seems to spend much time is in Cimmerea, with his peers. A writer could spend a lifetime chronicling the adventures of a barbarian with his own people, dealing with his own kind, facing hardships and magic and gods and war and migration with brothers at his back.
And that is just one thing. There are so many.
Mike All I can think off off the top of my head (when it wasn't inserted by Carter/de Camp as filler between stories) where Conan is home he isn't even home. He's with the Aesir raiding in Frost Giants Daughter.
One of the semminal points in Conan's life that's never told is how as a 16 year old he climbed the walls of the Aquilonian outpost with a "milling blood mad mob" (or something) and slaughtered the garrison--forming a Goth/visigoth and Roman parralel as the world went from Imprerial Age to Dark Age. --so good point.
Okay, okay, I know I just inserted a thread hijack but it was a Conan one.
VIEW IMAGE"Writing the wet dreams of teenage boys" - Lindsey Llyod, Tangent Reviews
Tarantino himself has been forward and unapologetic about his influences. In a 1994 interview with Empire magazine, he said, "I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages." | | Back to Top | | |
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James Enge
Maker
Date Joined Jan 2006
Total Posts : 205
| Posted 4/4/2008 2:13 PM (GMT -4) | | It's probably a mistake to think in generic terms, anyway: a Dwarf, an Elf, a Wizard, a Mountain Range, a Forest. When Tolkienian fantasy works (that is, in general, when Tolkien is writing it), the entities are particular, not fuzzy abstractions. (The Fuzzy Abstractions: a great band name, though.) It's not just any Dwarf who shows up on Bilbo's doorstep unexpectedly: it's a particular, vividly realized one. The Misty Mountains aren't just any old range of mountains; they are distinctive ones, fresh in the eyes of a p.o.v. character who's never seen mountains before. Mirkwood isn't just any forest; it's the Mirkwood. The books are weakest when they rely on generic identities (especially elfiness and orciness) rather than particular ones (Glorfindel, Shagrat).
One reason that we don't see many barbarian-at-home stories is that S&S has typically focused on outsiders. Conan, Elak, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Elric, Cugel: they are all displaced from their background somehow. A partial exception is Charles Saunders' Imaro (except that he was born out-of-place).
James Enge
http://jamesenge.com/
"A Covenant with Death" in Flashing Swords
"The Lawless Hours" in Black Gate 11
"The Gordian Stone" in Every Day Fiction
"The Red Worm's Way" forthcoming in Return of the Sword
"Payment in Full" forthcoming in Black Gate | | Back to Top | | |
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nathan
Sage
Date Joined Mar 2006
Total Posts : 2111
| Posted 4/4/2008 7:18 PM (GMT -4) | |
Rober E Howard said...Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph. Robert E Howard wrote the first S&S story it's generally admitted. He wrote something whose trappings have been done over and over to various effects. But when he was writing S&S he was also writing to a certain theme.
That theme--summed up above--was intricate to the framework he put Conan against. But that theme itself was not that commonly reproduced or pastiched. I don't think it was taken up with much vigor by any one other than REH in fact, off the top of my head.
Do the rest of you think this is a theme that might seem exotic if applied to high fantasy or fantasy stories of today and is it so underreported as a component of S&S that a return to this most pivitoal of Things Howard would constitute a "fresh" attempt in the direction of fantasy and not just S&S?
Or has barbarism become linked not to vikings (pick iconic image of choice)in the collective mind but to car bombs in market places and say, Somalia-esque failed states to try and write from a "noble savage" viewpoint?
VIEW IMAGE"Writing the wet dreams of teenage boys" - Lindsey Llyod, Tangent Reviews
Tarantino himself has been forward and unapologetic about his influences. In a 1994 interview with Empire magazine, he said, "I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages." | | Back to Top | | |
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darkbow
Rabbit lord
Date Joined Oct 2005
Total Posts : 1500
| Posted 4/4/2008 10:40 PM (GMT -4) | | Just my opinion, but I'm not sure too many authors since Howard could write as strongly about the dichotomy between barbarism and civilization. For one thing, I think Howard was a tad "out there" (not saying he was crazy, just eccentric). For another thing, at least for most modern American writers, I'm not sure there's that emotional link to a more barbaric world (and I'm not meaning "barbaric" in a negative way, just saying what it is). Sure, lots of guys think they're cowboys, but most (keep in mind I said "most") are at best urban cowboys. Goin' huntin' a couple times a year and drivin' a pick-up isn't anywhere near what Howard would consider rustic, let alone barbaric.
I think, basically, most of us are too ingrained in a civilized world. There are obviously some Westerners/Americans with experience in what might be considered uncivilized regions (U.S. soldiers overseas, for example, maybe even a handful of people in certain small regions of the U.S., some immigrants' experiences), but my instinct is that that's not the norm, or at least not the expected norm, for most modern writers and readers.
"Steven Spielberg and The Magic Box" upcoming at The Ranfurly Review.
"Peter Piker the Pankin Man" upcoming at Big Pulp
"Walking Between the Rain" at Every Day Fiction
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4464
| Posted 4/4/2008 11:18 PM (GMT -4) | | I'm not certain, but you may be right, Ty. My own recent conversations lead me to believe I might be one of the last generation to spend a great deal of time in the wilderness, even for recreation.
I once went camping for a summer-- seventy-three days with what I and two friends carried with us. We ate a lot of fish. We lived in the woods a two day walk from a road. We checked in with a live-in ranger at a near-by scout camp every few days, we weren't out of touch. I was fourteen.
My grandfather taught me to track, hunt and trap. Starting when I was three or four. I didn't exactly live in the woods, I was a city kid who liked the outdoors.
But I'm not one of those people who, when told that before the invention of the light bulb, most people slept ten hours a day, but since the invention people average only seven hours, go "why?". But this perspective on nature and man's place in it might be effectively gone in the english speaking USA of today. I can't speak for recent immigrants or migrants, but what soldiers do in the field is a little different, especially when the field is a city street. The idea of living a three day walk or one day horse-ride from your nearest neighbor, and trying to wrest a livelyhood from crops and animals is just about totally alien even to rural peoples these days. Yet it was almost normal in North America for a hundred years and more.
Even more important is the idea of individualism. This idea is under concerted attack in our educational system and in our urban culture-- though not in our entire culture. In order to be able to write classical style S&S in the howard vien, you have to embrace this or a similar point of view on the place of man in society, with the individual firmly on top of the relationship and the loner lionized at the epitome of achievement-- self reliant and admirable. Not a marginilized outcast.
For most people today, a man living in a house built by his own hands on land he owns and gets a living from is seen at best as a poor hermit in need of social services and at worse as a crazy crack-pot who should be lock up, his land taken for a nice development that will add to the tax base. People who think like this probably won't "get" S&S.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com
"Dutchman Rescue"in Continuum SF #6
www.continuumsciencefiction.com/orders.htm
"An Incident at Black Tongue Tavern" in _Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy_ from Fantasist Enterprises:
www.fantasistent.com/books/anthologies/BASH.php
"Stains" in Tales of the Talisman 3-1 www.zianet.com/hadrosaur/index.html
"Morning Coffee" in Every Day Fiction
www.everydayfiction.com/morning-coffee-by-michael-d-turner/
"The Jewel Below" in Flashing Swords
flashingswords.sfreader.com/issues/issue8/vol2-iss8-05.htm
"Happy Landings" in Every Day Fiction
www.everydayfiction.com/happy-landings-by-michael-d-turner/
"Teller of Tales" in Every day Fiction
www.everydayfiction.com/teller-of-tales-by-michael-d-turner/
Read "Silver Shells" In Every Day Fiction
www.everydayfiction.com/silver-shells-by-michael-d-turner/ | | Back to Top | | |
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darkbow
Rabbit lord
Date Joined Oct 2005
Total Posts : 1500
| Posted 4/4/2008 11:41 PM (GMT -4) | | | | |
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cussedness
Adept
Date Joined Apr 2005
Total Posts : 788
| Posted 4/5/2008 1:28 PM (GMT -4) | | Uhm, I'm coming into this late, but actually there is no such thing as a barbarian. Cultures that are considered primitive by other cultures are no less complex than one regarding them with disdain. The Romans, in their way, were just as barbarous as the visigoths.
I'm currently working on a new Cullen Blackwood story, The Wolf in Moon's Clothing.
"Yah gotta be joking." Cullen Blackwood looked up, way up, to see their faces as two large Sharani guardsmyn seized his arms. Standing a bare five foot four inches, Cullen found his face practically jammed into their substantial breasts and, while it was not an unpleasant view, he would rather have gotten a better look at their expressions as he tried to figure out what was going on.
In Shaurone, the women outnumbered the men by roughly four to one. Their viragoes averaged well over six feet in height, muscular and broad-shouldered, and had no difficulty in manhandling the small lycan military courier. A leather patch covered his dead left eye and a day's growth of stubble on his weathered face lent him a general unsavoriness that failed to impress them.
"Getcher damned tits outta my face, ya bloody f**kwits. I ain't done nuthin'."
They hoisted him up between them, leaving his short legs dangling.
"Hey! Hey. Put me down."
It's S&S, it has the overall feel of a Western, and I like to think it's different.
Janrae Frank
I have no skeletons in my closet, they are all hanging from the yardarm.
Once there were three brothers, Brandrahoon the vampire, Isranon called the Dawnhand, speaker to spirits, and Waejonan the Accursed, first of sa’necari. Isranon defied his brothers and was destroyed, his descendants forced into the darkness.
The Shadowed Princes
www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook64690.htm?cache
website
www.janraefrank.com
Darkzone
darkzone.yuku.com/ | | Back to Top | | |
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Bruce Durham
Crom's Administrator & Drinking Buddy
Date Joined Jan 2005
Total Posts : 581
| Posted 4/5/2008 1:41 PM (GMT -4) | |
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