Warfare amongst the Kinden changed irrevocably after the Apt revolution, and continues to change with each artificer's refinements. In the Lowlands the main model for an army is that of the Ant-kinden, who hold themselves supreme in the field of mass combat ;(1). The other major Apt model is that of the Wasp Empire's many […]
Adrian Tchaikovsky, fantasy author, due to be published in July 2008. A journal to plot a course through the writing and publication process, to help up-and-coming writers, to give an insight into the industry and, let's face it, to publicise the book, just a little? The novel is "Empire in Black and Gold", and has been picked up […]
A brief diatribe on the Hollywood Fight Not some choreographed wrestling spectacular (1) but the way that your traditional action movie lumbers through its climactic hero/villain confrontation. Fantasy fiction has far, far more than its fair share of fighting. From duels to running skirmishes to vast set-piece battles and sieges (2), the genre is a fundamentally […]
When I was a young lad the fantasy writing landscape was different to today's. Certainly, my fickle memory suggests there were fewer authors about, or certainly that were widely-enough published in this country to leap to the general attention. Terry Pratchett was a new development, for example, and aside from the obvious Mr T (1) there were a few […]
A very brief interlude to say that I have found the name of horror, and it is “dried, sweetened pineapple”. In a somewhat halfhearted attempt to be healthy I decided that, to snack on at work, I would purchase some dried fruit. Dried fruit – is there anything more wholesome and natural? (1). It comes in packets that […]
So the call comes at last that I should meet with my agent and my editor in London for lunch. The publisher’s lunch is rightly famous, to the extent that the name graces a trade magazine for the industry, and Douglas Adams incorporated a homage to it in Life, the Universe and Everything (1). In a world gone mad for […]
The roots of fantasy are rural. This is true whether one considers the original medieval romances, or the nineteenth century ‘lost race’ type fantasies of Haggard, pulp fiction like Howard or the fantasy resurgence following Tolkien. The landscapes are wild, populated by villages, castles and evil towers. The plots tend to be travelogues (1) with […]
It might seem that the Beetle-kinden of the Lowlands are the only force for progress and Aptitude in the world, set against a tapestry of the ignorant and the superstitious: Moths, Dragonflies, Mantids and Spiders being dragged kicking and screaming into the world post-revolution. If only. The Lowlanders are not alone. Although the overthrow of the […]
I used to engage in a certain amount of amateur dramatics, back in the day, and after a while I became sufficiently unwise as to get involved in committees and the like, and become something of a Figure in the Community, thus descending into the traditional pit of tribal politics and mud-slinging that these concerns always seem to involve […]
In The Night Garden would be a perfectly acceptable title for a certain type of fantasy novel, probably featuring a proud female protagonist hampered by a restrictive society who finds freedom and emancipation by way of her discovery of a supernatural plotstick that manifests via the aforementioned nocturnal allotment, probably some part of the palace that she all-unwillingly lives a life […]
© 2008-2024 Pan Macmillan