Recent content by Mad Swede

Some of you have felt that Pratchett was generalising too much in that quote. I suggest that perhaps he was guilty of oversimplifying what is a very complex argument, one discussed by JRR Tolkien in his essay On Fairy Stories. Tolkien pointed out that many people (he had in mind certain...

Yes, that is a very good historical account of the Third Reich. William Shirer was a US journalist working in Germany between 1934 and 1940 (when he fled an impending Gestapo arrest on false accusations of espionage) and witnessed many of the events and developments he described.

As a published author, being asked to read other people's unpublished stories is something I get asked sometimes and I always refuse. In my case it's because I'm dyslexic so I really don't have time to do the reading. Most people are quite happy when I explain. I also don't comment on works by...

Might I be awkward and challenge your suggestion that most fantasy settings are medieval in style. There are quite a few novels and series set in the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, although I must admit that many of these date back to the 1970s and 1980s. Authors you may want to look for include...

You realise, don't you, that some of us learnt to program in PL/1 on IBM mainframes running OS/360 and MVS with CICS. Later I used PDP 8s, PDP 11s and VAX 11s, programing in FORTRAN 77 and ALGOL 68. I can remember sitting in front of IBM 3270 terminals and later DEC VT220 and VT241 terminals in...

Or worse still, bitch about books they haven't read and don't intend to read because they think they're a "middlebrow cult of the popular", to quote art and literary critic Jonathan Jones. That same critic dismissed the Discworld books and wrote that "In the real world, as opposed to the...

"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one." Discuss!

In another thread skip.knox wrote the following: The thread here reiterates for me the dialectic between discovery and planning. Plot drives setting and setting drives plot, and character informs both and is in turn informed by both. Trialectic? And this for me raises an interesting question...

What you seem to want to do is make a joke about the so-called Aerith and Bob trope. It's been done before, in various parodies. Readers may get the joke, but it won't be new to them so you've quite a bit of work to do to make your version of the joke original. This is always the danger with...

I've never thought about my writing in terms of something like "discovery writing". I think the story through then write, and the setting for whatever I'm writing just seems to apperar in my mind as I write. I don't ever think (or dare to think) about how that works, I just let it happen. That...

We often think that stress and stress related illnesses are somehow unique to modern times, but there is research which suggests that stress and its treatment were recognised several hundred years ago: BBC: What the Middle Ages can teach us about preventing burnout So how many of us think to...

Cafeteria is Mexican Spanish in origin, and it means the same thing as the British English expression coffee house (or coffee-house or coffeehouse, depending on period and spelling). In other words, a place where people (usually men) met to drink coffee, hear news and conduct business. These...

The fantasy and SF genres were moving on and expanding within 15 years of the Lord of the Rings being published. Authors like Michael Moorcock, J G Ballard, Ursula K LeGuin, Norman Spinrad and Brian Aldiss were pushing the boundaries through the 1960s, challenging writing conventions and...

The idea of a "sea of data" as a reference to the internet (or similar systems or even planes of existence) isn't new. As an example, Iain M Banks used the concept and a whole series of terms for it in his 1994 novel Feersum Endjinn. There are quite a few things you can do with the concept as a...

You can make similar comments about some SF stories, where the characters eat food as opposed to taking some energy pill. The thing about comments like that is, what else would the characters do differently if they weren't (to take this example) using knives, spoons and forks to eat? How would...