SFFWorld Members big Blog thread

Bestertester said:
It's hard to write a peace story that isn't dull. A plot needs a conflict. A conflict needs a fight. Dull stories don't survive.
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There are plenty of great stories without any literal "fights," of course. Conflicts and struggle, sure. I don't remember fights in Huck Finn, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Martian, etc.
 
Tim Craire said:
There are plenty of great stories without any literal "fights," of course. Conflicts and struggle, sure. I don't remember fights in Huck Finn, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Martian, etc.
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I remember vast societal conflicts in the first two. The third... it was man against nature, a barely adequate (IMO) mode of conflict.

No peaceful worlds in any of them. The protagonists all come close to premature death multiple times.

Peace is a snooze. Fistfights and set piece battles are exciting at first but become monotonous. A sophisticated reader wants more sophisticated conflict. A plot must have twists.

I could go on, but already veering off topic. So I'll cut it short. Maybe I'll do a blog post about it.
 
Bestertester said:
I remember vast societal conflicts in the first two. The third... it was man against nature, a barely adequate (IMO) mode of conflict.

No peaceful worlds in any of them. The protagonists all come close to premature death multiple times.

Peace is a snooze. Fistfights and set piece battles are exciting at first but become monotonous. A sophisticated reader wants more sophisticated conflict. A plot must have twists.

I could go on, but already veering off topic. So I'll cut it short. Maybe I'll do a blog post about it.
Click to expand...

I don't think you're disagreeing with me, with this comment. Yes, there must be conflict, I agree. Societal conflicts, yes. And yes, fistfights and battles become snoozes. Yes, plots need twists.

Here's another example from a SF movie (maybe the book too, I haven't read it): In Children of Men, the hero [spoiler alert] delivers the mother and child to safety without ever picking up a gun himself, although he is surrounded by them. (He does hit someone with a cinder block . . . but nevertheless, I found his negotiating of his world without going all Tarantino on us, remarkable.)

And I realize now I may be selling folktales short in that I've ignored Trickster tales; there are plenty of those in which smaller, wily characters preserve their own skins by avoiding fights but still outsmarting their adversaries.

Peace. (heh)
 
I'm probably not disagreeing. I'm not sure I understand what everyone here is trying to say, however.

Here's my attempt to analyze it all:

deepdark103.wordpress.com

A conflicted post

So I was on this online forum about genre fiction, and someone complained that there are no peaceful fairy tales. They’re all violent. Jack doesn’t play pattycake with the giant. Hansel…
deepdark103.wordpress.com deepdark103.wordpress.com
 
Changing gears: Rotoscoped orcs (from the 1978 LOTR movie) resembling Tusken Raiders.

(If you don't feel like clicking: They look similar, to me, and since Star Wars came out first --by about eighteen months -- I wonder if Ralph Bakshi took a cue for his rotoscoped orcs from the Tuskens. And in writing this, I learned there were ties between George Lucas and Bakshi; both Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels did work for both of them around the same time.)

timcrairebooks.wordpress.com

Rotoscoped orcs vs. Tusken Raiders

You know what post of mine in the last few years gets a lot of hits? Rotoscoped orcs, from Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 Lord of the Rings movie. Here are more of them: It occurs to me — they res…
timcrairebooks.wordpress.com timcrairebooks.wordpress.com
 
More on conflict in fiction:

deepdark103.wordpress.com

Bambi versus Goliath

Scene: With an air of mindless contentment, a young faun brazes in the meadow, butterflies flitting about his head. Then a giant lizard foot stomps him. The end. The audience snickers and then walk…
deepdark103.wordpress.com deepdark103.wordpress.com
 
My publisher, Pulp Literature Press, is offering a 20 per cent discount on my magnum opus, What The Wind Brings, if you buy direct from the PLP store.

When you get to the checkout, enter this discount code: XMAS2020

WTWB, a historical novel with magical realism elements, is in my qualified opinion, the best work I’ve ever done. It’s the book that gestated in the back of my head for more than forty years, the book I want to be remembered for.

pulpliterature.com

Matthew Hughes Archives - PULP Literature

Matthew Hughes writes science-fantasy and science fiction. An alter ego, Matt Hughes, writes crime fiction. A personality fragment, Hugh Matthews, writes media tie-ins. He has won the Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada, and has been short-listed for the Aurora, Nebula, Philip K...
pulpliterature.com pulpliterature.com
 
I've received a typeset of Barbarians of the Beyond, the authorized sequel to Jack Vance's The Demon Princes quintilogy. I'm going to get ARCs made up and send them out for blurbs and word-of-mouth buzz-creation.

I think this is going to be an event in the SFosphere.

More to come.
 
Yesterday, I spent a half-hour talking about What the Wind Brings and writer stuff with Matt Nappo, for his Minddog streaming show. It’s now up on YouTube:

 
My friend and fellow author Ed Willett has now launched a Kickstarter campaign to support Shapers of Worlds Volume II, the second in a series of anthologies that collect stories (originals and reprints) from folks he has interviewed for his Worldshapers podcast.

I will have an original story in the antho. “The Ghost Wrangler” is a 6500-word capper to the Baldemar series that has been running in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction for a couple of years.

The story also introduces a necromancer named Nachecko. I’m now 32,000 words into a novel about him.

Ed is setting out to raise $15,000 (Canadian) and the Kickstarter campaign is studded with tasty rewards. It will run until April 8.

Check it out here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edwardwillett/shapers-of-worlds-volume-ii
 
This news came in yesterday, just after I’d sent out my April newsletter: The first story about Cascor the discriminator, "The Forlorn," is scheduled for the September/October issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Cascor will be remembered by readers of the Raffalon stories as a freelance detective in a Dying Earth setting. He got involved with Raff’s troubles in a few stories. In the last of those, “The Vindicator,” he ended up having to flee the city of Wal after he and Raffalon pretty much wrecked the civic center.

“The Forlorn” takes up the action not long after the bug-out, and finds Cascor establishing himself in the city of Gephrire, where the scholarly wizard Ifgenio and his girl-genius acolyte Ioveana involve him in some dangerous stuff.

I’ve also been told that the second in the Cascor series,, “The Mule,” is a sale to F&SF, but the magazine is reworking its standard contract so nothing is official until that process works out.
 
Dear sci-fi readers:
I just autopublished my book
Tesai: Resurgence of the Farasi People
I'm sure you'd like it, in case you give it a chance. It includes the short story "Crab's walking". I'm an Spanish independent author and I'm trying to announce my sci-fi books. I've written four more of them: "Einstein's mistake" (El Error de Einstein), "Rodents" (Roedores), "Insects" (Insectos) and (I'd rather don't talk about this last one), but they have not been translated into English yet.
Thank you very much for your time, and I'd love your advice an comments.
 
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