history inspires the best fantasies
The first roads were little more than game trails. Early infrastructure focused more on stopping travel than facilitating it. With civilization, though, came a need to transport information, and history...
One of the problems with the news summaries I read hammering home the point that 200,000 people have died of COVID-19 is that most people can’t put that into context,...
Writing to formula using an outline that follows pre-canned benchmarks like in the hero’s journey is like using a compass to draw a circle.
Elissa of Carthage (commonly known as Dido, the wanderer) is one of the more fascinating examples of history becoming myth. History is rife with examples of strong women dismissed as mythology...
As I mentioned in my review of Earth 2, I books like Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonfall and television shows like Terra Nova inevitably catch my eye. As a teacher of history...
Creating a myth cycle is one of the hardest and most exciting parts of worldbuilding. I’ve written previously about how to frame a myth cycle around a war, but another...
There’s an idea floating around that roads, aqueducts, and other large-scale civil engineering projects required Roman-era engineering. This is a false narrative. A fantasy world doesn’t need iron-age technology to...
In trying to come up with a fictional example of prison, I was reminded of a discussion I had with one of my professors in college. The topic was determinism...
Henry Olsen wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post about removing monuments in which he claimed: Knocking down or defacing statues of national founders or heroes not only displays ignorance...
I recently started reading The Rogue Retrieval by Dan Koboldt, creator of the wonderful Science in Sci-Fi, Fact in Fantasy blog series. The protagonist is a Vegas magician strong-armed into accompany...
