Recent content by Graham J. Darling

"Picaresque novel" might be what you're looking for. The Wikipedia article of that title lists many examples to learn from. To those, I add George MacDonald Fraser's "Flashman" novels 1969-2005, in which the protagonist's only redeeming features are "humour and shameless honesty as a...

Besides polyaramid (commercial name Kevlar), the "other" bulletproof fibre these days is UHMWPE (Ulta-High Molecular Weight Polyethylene; commercial name Dyneema). It's lighter than Kevlar and doesn't degrade as fast in sunlight, but doesn't resist flame or even boiling water very well. The...

The most plausible draconic firebreathing I've ever seen was in the movie/miniseries "Stanley's Dragon" (UK 1994): a spray of oil (like neatsfoot oil, which is an animal product that's liquid at room temperature) that's lit by an unspecified organ in the mouth (involving friction at the teeth...

All that said, controversy can be good--gets people talkin', gets people thinkin', even gets people readin'...

Like I said, I think Buffy fit Dracula and classic vampire lore where Twilight did not. Look, if you were writing an urban fantasy where your human characters realized they'd be facing a "real" undead bloodsucker, and you gave them a chance to prepare themselves with one book, wouldn't you or...

Stoker's Dracula was a good adaptation because it at least addresses what most people thought about vampires who thought about vampires at all, whether as storybook figures or something more. What most people thought or think about angels, good or bad, doesn't generally include them having...

Dracula wouldn't be the first apparent human who was in fact a whitewashed tomb, in which superficial beauty concealed the stench of the ravenous grave. Even in English literature, Dracula (1897) was long preceded by the equally alluring and destructive Lord Ruthven of Polidori's "The Vampyre"...

On the contrary, whatever the author did or did not worry about, I would've picked Stoker's Dracula as an example of mining of myth and legend done right, for that literary character's powers, limitations and cruel character are quite consistent with major streams of Eastern European...

I'd argue exactly the same about elements recognizably out of Hinduism, Norse mythology or traditional Native American folklore, whether anyone alive believes in them or not. Anansi in his base form has 8 legs, not 6. Even a fiction author has a professional responsibility to get things right...

Just as actual science is thrown out the window in many a so-called science fiction story ("my husband the klingon"), that similarly leaves the reader more ignorant about the source material than when they started. Some readers (including, young ones) might want more out a story. Some writers...

Perhaps one should take a poll first before such a declaration? And even then, that would be a fallacious argument ("argumentum ad populem" = "appeal to the people"), because a minority opinion can still be right--such as about how angels are supposed to work in the particular mythos that's...

This thread's title is "Is it controversial having a demon being and angel being mate?" Controversy can arise on technical grounds as much as ethical or aesthetic ones, at least for readers who enjoy hard spec fic that bothers to get the invoked universe's science/mythos right. See also what...

Mortals have the power and inclination to reproduce because they'd otherwise all die out. A naturally-immortal being would have no use for the practice and conceivably no understanding of it. Also, in most of Judaism and Christianity (ex. in St Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologica"), unlike a human...

Dragon Ball! Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light" (1967; Hugo Best Novel 1968) is based on the Hindu-Buddhist mythos, and Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969) on the Ancient Egyptian. The Finnish Kalevala influenced Tolkien (especially in Tom Bombadil and The Silmarillion) and was retold as SF in...

It's worth remembering that when C.S. Lewis talks about "allegory", more often than not (being an English prof, and indeed a leading scholar in this specialized field: see his "The Allegory of Love", 1936) he means it in the strictest formal sense of the personification of abstract concepts...