Metaplanetary Stew

Metaplanetary's initial conception was a lot like sailing on a pitching boat in the midst of a mental storm for me. I had always wanted to do ...

William Shatner

Plot Summary:
This, William Shatner's first attempt at writing science fiction, is an action/adventure story of the pursuit to find a cure for the most heinous drug of the future, tek. The ...

Story beginnings - Ten pitfalls to avoid

In the same way that editors don't want to see an ending they've seen before, equally, there are some story beginnings that have been done to death. Here are ten you shouldn't use.

"It was a dark and stormy night."

The "weather report" gambit. Not only is it a lazy way to start a story, but this one was voted "Worst story opening of all time." ...

A reading of the heroic relationships in

J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings



In his 1953 essay "Ofermod," J.R.R. Tolkien addresses the subject of the leader and the subordinate in the northern heroic epic. Of the subordinate's place in the Old English poem "The Battle of Maldon" he says that he was one: "...who had no responsibility downwards, only loyalty upwards. Personal pride was therefore in him at its lowest, and love and loyalty at their highest." The leader, in his role as provider "may indeed receive credit from the deeds of his knights, but he must not use their loyalty or imperil them simply for that purpose." Part of the heroic relationship, therefore, involves unswerving loyalty by the subordinate and the mastery of pride by the leader.

In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien develops several relationships in keeping with the ideas on loyalty he expresses in "Ofermod." These ideas can also be applied to the famous Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, and thus a reading of Beowulf reveals many parallels to the leaders and subordinates in Lord of the Rings. Like Beowulf and Hrothgar, the dominant figures in the many quests and battles of Middle-Earth have characters who support them and follow their lead. While none of the individual participants in these relationships is depicted as perfect, the relationship itself is shown to stem from an ideal conception of the leader and servant dynamic, and the degree to which the relationship approaches this ideal helps to define the characters ...

Oh, we've seen him or her. Deadly cool hard-as-nails, unflappable. Juke boxes start when he hits them right, people back down when they see that fire in her eyes. Focused as a laser, immovable like the core of the world; James Bond, Batman, Shaft, Black Canary. The badasses.

We know them, of course. Now the problem is writing them.

Earlier, I addresses the heroic paradox of the violent hero, and noted a particularly egregious archetype I called the Unlikeable Heroic Badass (UHB) - the borderline sociopath that some authors assume people should ...