Recent content by bjza

I'm looking for representations of university life and academia in fantasy literature. This is more late medieval to renaissance than most fantasy, but I know of a handful of examples and I'd like to have more on hand. I'd also be keen on representations of the birth of scientific thinking, even...

This may be a personal preference and others will certainly disagree to some extent, but the direct Christian parallels with the virtues and sins is off-putting. Not only in that it feels like cheating at world building, but that I suspect it will make it difficult to write the Vaiisks and their...

Create the worlds with the work's major themes in mind. Each one can be a reflection or variation on the topic at hand. If you've read His Dark Materials, as 2WayParadox mentioned, consider how the main alternate worlds all present a picture of authority and its abuse and/or the good and the bad...

If we're talking about a middle to high school aged writer, then as an English educator I'd actually recommend not focusing on spelling and grammar in this situation. Briefly mention that it's a distraction, sure, but a young writer - one who is writing for fun - needs to tackle problems that...

There are maybe as many ways of defining mythology as there are critics who write about it. My stance is that mythology is a set of interconnected stories that provide the listener with a cultural framework for understanding the world. What are the conflicts of a society, what is the role of the...

I reread The Last Unicorn a few years back, and though I enjoyed it, I was struck by the style. Full of mixed-mythologies and anachronisms, both narration and dialogue are a little more playful, like a parody, than the novel's themes would suggest.

Except for the part of her argument claiming that women are being objectified. The out-of-proportion rape threats maybe kinda count as evidence there.

I just finished Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. About to start a Banks novel, either The Player of Games or The Algebraist.

For an example that better fits the OP's world, I recommend looking into the Pirahā people of the Amazon. They've been studied in depth by Daniel Everett. Here's the transcript from a talk he gave to the Freedom From Religion Foundation in 2009. According to Everett, the Pirahā don't believe in...

Well, a culture is a way of codifying experience that's transmitted non-genetically. So anywhere members of this species congregate, they'd be able to share a culture. But I'm confused by this: The knowledge that they start with: this is akin to instinct: flight or flight, this smells tasty...

Try viewing it from the other perspectives, like Feo is suggesting, and remember that people can be at their most creative when it seems (to outsiders) that their beliefs have been definitively proven wrong. The facts may be black and white, but not everyone has an identical interpretation of...

I would be hesitant to use such favoritism if it's so perfectly split and so unlike the way knowledge works in our world. No one is correct all of the time. It is not that rare to find scholars who disagree, citizenry who disagree with the scholars, merchants and aristocrats who interpret things...

For learning languages, this would require a great deal of plasticity and connectivity, not just size. These are things an individual typically loses as we age. For added fun, language production in the brain is connected to other abilities which might be influenced. Broca's area is involved in...

Looks like you're on your way to solving this, but I wanted to add... Some people say its a lack of editing in general, but I think what early drafts benefit from specifically is a lack of cutting. Unless what's written is beyond all hope, having more on the page will be useful at a latter...

It seems like this letter must be the basis for a short story anthology by now...