Tag Archives: fantasy

my urge to paint is rising

I played Blood Bowl on Saturday and it was more fun than I remember it being back a decade ago. The big difference for me was not playing Lizardmen, which I’ve since learned are a tough team to play well. There are so many interesting decisions to make in a Blood Bowl game, even if you don’t care about the score.

On Saturday I was using a Norse team (sans werewolves) against a team of dwarves. My players got pulped because they don’t wear armour, but I managed to shove a dwarf into my own end zone so he couldn’t keep running down the clock and mauling my players. Then I pulled off an amazingly lucky passing play to score and end the first half. The second half saw me score again, but just a bit too early so the dwarves had time to rumble down the field and tie it up in the last turn of the game. My opponent was really nice and didn’t show too much impatience with my figuring out which order to make blocks in so as to maximize my chances of not failing.

All in all it was pretty fun. I like playing fragile guys who have a chance at making plays. I don’t think I’ll continue with a Norse team though. The passing game has too much allure.

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book review: wicked

Okay, so I’m some years behind the times (when was it that Dave and Andrea wanted to do up their front walk in emerald for Halloween?), but I just read Gregory Maguire’s Wicked. Which is what the musical was based on, not the other way around. There are no songs in the book. But it is about the Wicked Witch of the West and how she got that way.

It was a fairly fun read. There were many different points of view and interesting things happened, but it never really did what it claimed to on the back. There wasn’t any reappraisal of good and evil (I know, that seems like a big topic, but the back of the book claims that’s what this’d do). I mean, Elphaba, the wicked witch is sympathetic because she’s the main character. She’s misunderstood. All the stuff you’d expect her to be in the book about her instead of insipid little Dorothy.

I think there was room for it to be better. The last chunk of the book, which is what happens once Dorothy arrives, is very disappointing. There is no big climax. There’s the recap of a drunken discussion on the nature of evil, not even the actual discussion, just the aftermath of a dinner party in which everyone restates their opinions of what evil is. This was the thing that disappointed me most. It felt like here was the whole reason for writing the book and then it gets elided away. Then the Witch goes home and gets a bucket of water thrown on her. The End.

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book review: a feast for crows

I quite enjoy George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. I don’t read a tonne of fantasy naymore, but this stuff is good. Brutal, political, with characters you quite enjoy every time you see them, especially since you know they could die at basically any moment. A Feast For Crows is interesting in its slightly frustrating way. It focuses on half the characters that one would think would be grabbing the spotlight from the last book. There are huge swathes of the realm that we’re used to reading about that just aren’t present. The rest of the story is promised in A Dance With Dragons, which it amusingly says in the afterword will come out next year. The book was published in 2005. There is no Dance With Dragons. Yet. I want to know what’s been happening with the rest of everyone, but I can’t.

Earlier in 2009 there was a big kerfuffle online about the delays in this next book. It led to an interesting discussion on some of the blogs I read about fan entitlement and how authors aren’t content-producing machines built to churn out what you want on a 12 month schedule. I mean, there are writers like that but that’s called television. Even though I’d love to have the next book in the series right now please, there are loads of other books I can read while I’m waiting.

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book review: the enchantress of florence

The Enchantress of Florence is Salman Rushdie’s latest. It tells the story of that enchantress in a fragmented way and the story of the person telling the story in, dare I say a more fragmented one? Machiavelli is a character as is Amerigo Vespucci’s cousin and Argalia the Turk who fights with four albino swiss giants at his side. The Argalia part of the story reminded me muchly of The Baroque Cycle with its derring do and Barbary pirates and such. But there’s also an imaginary queen and a very wise advisor and a lot of very canny whores. I liked it, but wished the story hadn’t been tied to periods of history I know so little about. It felt like there were a lot of things that were fictional alongside the historical, and I wish I knew a bit more about which was which. So yes, my main complaint was about my own ignorance. Selah.

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i sure didn’t

Who knew that Pushkin wrote poems about holding a midget in a bag and forcing it to roar like a lion to scare off the herd of oxen that had been sent to gore you? Did you? But it happens in Ruslan and Ludmila. The midget in question has an extremely long beard (as in he has attendants carry it for him) which is the source of his power.

That’s been two crazy Russian fantastika films in as many nights. And it makes me want to write something crazy in that vein. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow I am a “young prophet.” And will probably do a bit of painting.

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just a little uterless

Here’s something I worry about sometimes, especially the day after my friends and I spent a day playing with toys and dice: if fantasy is immature, if there’s something I should be doing to be more of an adult. And then my favourite fantasist points me to this article by Ursula LeGuin.

There should be a word – “maturismo”, like “machismo”? – for the anxious savagery of the intellectual who thinks his adulthood has been impugned.

To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizeable error. Rational yet non-intellectual, moral yet inexplicit, symbolic not allegorical, fantasy is not primitive but primary.

It doesn’t address exactly the same issues, but it’s a good read.

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