My wife cannot stop laughing every time she sees this video.
Author: Joe Vasicek
Joe Vasicek is the author of more than twenty science fiction books, including the Star Wanderers and Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus. He claims Utah as his home.
“What is a year?”
A year? What is a year? All time is relative. One day may be a lifetime, a year can be forever. It is not the number of days, but what goes into those days. —Louis L’Amour, The Warrior’s Path.
Fantasy from A to Z: E is for Epic
What is the ideal length of a fantasy novel? Of a fantasy series?
Fantasy, as a genre, is known for being big. Big stakes, big emotions, big battles—and big books. It isn’t unusual for a single fantasy novel to run well over 200,000 words. Authors like Brandon Sanderson regularly turn in doorstoppers, with Words of Radiance clocking in at over 400,000 words, longer than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy combined. And of course, there’s J.R.R. Tolkien himself, whose influence looms large over the genre. The Lord of the Rings helped establish the idea that a fantasy story needs room to breathe—and to expand.
Series length is no different. Some of the most beloved and influential fantasy series are also some of the longest. Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen spans ten main volumes and several more side novels. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time ran for fourteen massive books (fifteen, if you count the prequel). These stories require commitment, but for many readers, that’s part of the appeal. Once they find a world they love, they want to spend as much time there as possible.
But not all fantasy needs to be long.
Robert E. Howard, one of the foundational voices in the genre, wrote mostly short stories. His Conan tales, often published in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, rarely ran longer than a few thousand words. Yet they endure. David G. Hartwell, in “The Making of the American Fantasy Genre,” points out that Howard and Tolkien were arguably the two most successful fantasy authors of the twentieth century. Before The Lord of the Rings took off in the 1970s, most fantasy readers thought of the short story as the natural format for the genre. That pulp tradition carried strong into the mid-century, where fantasy shared shelf space with science fiction in magazines and anthologies.
That clearly isn’t the case anymore. In today’s market, a 90,000-word fantasy novel is often considered short. Readers are more than happy to put up with a bit of filler or extra padding if it means they get to linger in the world a little longer. And to be fair, there is something immersive about a book that takes its time. When done well, it can feel less like reading a story and more like living inside another world.
That said, I still believe in the value of economy of words. Economy of words doesn’t mean writing short—it means writing lean. It means using only as many words as the story needs. Louis L’Amour is a great example of this. His prose is tight, clear, and evocative. Most of his novels are quick reads, but they pack a punch. He could sketch a character in half a page and make you care about them. That’s not to say all of his books were short—The Walking Drum is a long and sprawling novel—but even there, his style is efficient. Every scene does something. Every word earns its place.
So why does epic fantasy run so long? Does it always have to be padded with extra filler? Not when it’s done well. One of the defining features of epic fantasy is that the world itself becomes a character. Tolkien mastered this. Middle-earth isn’t just a setting; it has a history, a culture, and an arc. The long travelogues, the deep lore, the songs and genealogies—they help build a sense of depth that makes the final conflict in The Return of the King resonate on a mythic level. You’re not just watching Frodo destroy a ring; you’re watching the curtain fall on an entire age.
And when the world has that kind of weight—when it grows, transforms, and carries the burden of history—it’s no surprise that a single book often isn’t enough. That’s one of the reasons epic fantasy so often stretches into multi-volume series. If the world is a character, it needs space for its own arc to unfold. A hero might only need three acts to complete their journey, but a world? That can take a bit longer.
Still, there’s more than one way to structure a series. Take Louis L’Amour again. He wrote mostly short standalone novels, but many of them followed the same families—like the Sacketts or the Chantrys—so that readers who wanted more could get it. You didn’t have to read them in order. You could pick up whichever one you found first and still get a complete story. That’s a far cry from most modern fantasy series, where the series itself is a single, complete work that must be read in order. After all, try starting The Wheel of Time at book five or A Song of Ice and Fire at book three, and you’ll be utterly lost.
My copy of The Lord of the Rings is a single-volume edition, the way Tolkien originally intended it. The main reason it was split into multiple books was to save on printing costs (Tolkien himself split the book into six parts, but the publisher turned it into a trilogy). Frankly, I think it works better that way. When a series beings to sprawl, the middle books often sag, and readers can definitely feel that. Just look at Crossroads of Twilight (Book 10 of The Wheel of Time) and how much the fans hate that book. I also remember when A Dance with Dragons first came out, with a 2.9-star average on Amazon that held for several years. (That rating has since improved, but I suspect that a large part of it is due to review farming by the publisher.)
Another risk inherent in writing a long, sprawling series is that the author will never finish it. George R.R. Martin is the most infamous example here—fans have been waiting for The Winds of Winter for over a decade, with no firm release date in sight. Patrick Rothfuss has faced similar criticism, with readers growing increasingly frustrated over the long delay between The Wise Man’s Fear and the long-promised third book in the Kingkiller Chronicle. And Orson Scott Card has yet to finish his Alvin Maker series. Seventh Son was published when I was just four years old, and though I enjoyed the first two books in that series, I refuse to read the rest of it until Card finishes the damned series.
I’m not alone. Many readers, burned one too many times, now refuse to even begin a new fantasy series until it’s complete. I can’t blame readers for feeling this way, but it does create a real challenge for new and midlist authors trying to break into the genre. Without the benefit of an established readership, it’s hard to convince readers to invest in book one of a planned trilogy or longer series. And if readers don’t start the first book, the rest may never see publication.
Right now, I’m writing an epic fantasy series based loosely on the life of King David. According to my outline, it’s a seven book series, but I’ve decided instead to split it into two trilogies (each with a complete arc) and a bridge novel (kind of like what Frank Herbert intended for the Dune books, though he died before he could finish the final book of the second trilogy). My plan is to wait until the first trilogy is totally written, publish the first three books within a month of each other, and promote that trilogy while I write the bridge novel and sequel trilogy.
In the meantime, I’ve been having a blast writing short fantasy novels in the Sea Mage Cycle, in-between drafts of my larger books. With The Sea Mage Cycle, I’m following a series structure that’s much closer to what Louis L’Amour did with his Chantry and Sackett books. Each book is a standalone, and the books can be read in any order, but they all tie together with recurring characters/families. As with all epic fantasy, the world itself is something of a character, but each book is more like a single thread in the tapestry of that wider story.
Not every epic needs to be long. Not every story benefits from being part of a massive, sprawling series. But when done well—when every word pulls its weight, when the world itself becomes a living character, when the structure supports the arc instead of smothering it—epic fantasy becomes something truly special.
It becomes epic, in every sense of the word.
How I Would Vote Now: 1990 Hugo Awards (Best Novel)
The Nominees
The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson
Prentice Alvin by Orson Scott Card
A Fire in the Sun by George Alec Effinger
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Grass by Sheri S. Tepper
The Actual Results
- Hyperion by Dan Simmons
- A Fire in the Sun by George Alec Effinger
- Prentice Alvin by Orson Scott Card
- The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson
- Grass by Sheri S. Tepper
How I Would Vote Now
- Hyperion by Dan Simmons
- No Award
- Prentice Alvin by Orson Scott Card
- The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson
Explanation
Hyperion is, in my opinion, the best novel to ever win a Hugo Award. Absolute top S tier, no question. IMHO, the top three Hugo award-winning novels are Hyperion by Dan Simmons, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, and Dune by Frank Herbert, in that order. Dune is probably the most perfect science fiction novel ever written, but Hyperion and Ender’s Game surpass it because even though they have some minor flaws, there was something about them that I connected with on a deep emotional and intellectual level, more than almost any other book.
For Hyperion, that was the story about the father whose daughter is chosen by the Shrike to age backwards, so that with each new day, she gets younger, losing a day’s worth of memories and becoming progressively dependent on her parents. That part of the book just absolutely wrecked me. After weeping profusely for about an hour, I went onto Amazon and bought all the other books in the series, because I absolutely had to know what happened to this guy. Just incredible. Very few books have made me feel anything so deeply and profoundly as that.
As for the other books on this year’s ballot, I wasn’t too impressed with them. But two of them I’d be willing to vote affirmatively for, though I’d still rank them below No Award. I enjoyed the first two books of Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series, and would probably enjoy the third book, but I refuse to read it until he finishes the damned series. Seriously—I was four years old when the first book was published, and he still hasn’t finished the damned series! What the heck?
Poul Anderson writes the kind of sprawling galactic space opera that is right up my wheelhouse, but for some odd reason, I have never been able to finish anything he’s written. I’m not sure why. Either he spends way too much time exploring or describing some aspect of his world that utterly does not interest me, or he glosses over the parts that are crucial to understand in order to make sense, and for whatever reason I just can’t make sense of them. Also, his characters are all very forgettable. I tried The Boat of a Million Years, and found it to be less bad than his earlier books, but I still couldn’t follow it. So I’ve come to the conclusion that Poul Anderson is just one of those authors I’m going to have to skip.
The last two books I rejected after my AI assistant Orion screened them for me. According to the AI, both of them have lots of explicit content (sex, language, violence) and woke themes.
Here is what Orion said about A Fire in the Sun:
🔞 Explicit Content
- Violence & Body Horror
- Graphic and brutal: victims sometimes brutally gutted, including dismembered prostitutes and child victims .
- Prison-style brutality and organized crime violence permeate the story.
- Language
- Widespread use of profanity—especially the F-word—fits the harsh, noirish setting .
- Sexual Content
- Includes depictions of prostitution and sexual violence; explicit sexual content is not graphic, but the tone is decidedly adult and uncompromising .
- Body modifications include gender-swapping and personality modules, adding mature and cyberpunk themes.
✊ Social Themes & “Woke” Elements
- Identity & Selfhood
- Use of “moddies” and “daddies” to modify gender, mood, or skills raises themes around engineered identity and societal roles.
Sorry (not sorry), but I am not going to read a book that has explicit violence against children and characters who change gender. Either one of those things is enough to make me DNF, but combined together with all of the other explicit sex and language makes me never want to touch this book, or this author.
And here is what Orion said about Grass:
“Woke” Elements: Tepper’s work often explores feminist themes, and Grass is no exception. The novel critiques patriarchy, religious dogmatism, and humanity’s environmental exploitation. These themes align with progressive ideals and are deeply woven into the narrative. Tepper’s exploration of gender roles and societal hierarchies may be considered overt, depending on the reader’s perspective.
“Patriarchy,” “feminism,” “environmental explotation,” “religious dogmatism,” “gender goles,” “social heirarchies…” hey, I just got a bingo! So yeah, I’m not gonna read that one—or at least, you’re gonna have to make a really solid case in order to change my mind.
Gearing up for another family road trip
We’ve spent the last couple of days getting ready for another cross-country road trip as a family, this time to Arkansas. My side of the family is going down there, mostly because my youngest sister works at a national park, so it’s more convenient for us to come to her (and it should be fun as well).
The plan is to drive to Omaha, spend a couple of nights with my brother-in-law and his wife, then drive down to Arkansas and spend the week with family. Once we’re done, we’ll just drive straight back to Utah, hopefully in two days, but more likely in three. After all, we’ve got a five year-old and a two year-old with us.
This is the first big road trip we have this summer. The second one is at the end of July, and we’ll be going up to northern Alberta for a reunion with my wife’s side of the family. Her grandmother passed away earlier this year, and this was the soonest everyone could get together (getting passports for the kids was a little tricky).
I’ve already schedule blog posts through the next week and a half, so those should be coming up each day. I’ve also been writing more Fantasy from A to Z posts, and I hope to write the rest of them while I’m out there, though I’m not stressing out too much about that. If they get done, great, if not, I’ll just finish them when I get back.
The big reason why I’m blogging daily now is because of some major problems I’ve been having with my email list. I used to send out a newsletter approximately every week, but over the last couple of years, my open and click-thru rates have been creeping ever lower, until just last month they suddenly dropped by more than 50%. Turns out there’s a whole lot of backend stuff that changed in the last year, most of which I barely understand.
But ChatGPT has been a huge help in figuring out what’s wrong, and how I need to register DMARC and SPF and all the other stuff that I still don’t understand. My wife has also been a huge help in sorting through it all. I think it’s all set up properly, but I haven’t sent out a newsletter yet, and probably won’t until I get back from Arkansas. I also need to update my newsletter template. ChatGPT should be really good for that.
So the email newsletter is turning into a monthly thing, and the blog is turning into a daily thing, at least for the forseeable future. All of that might get thrown out the window when the new baby comes along, at least temporarily.
In the meantime, I’m working on Fantasy from A to Z and the rough AI draft of Lord of the Falconstar, both of which are coming along quite well. I’m going to experiment with having one human WIP and one AI WIP active at the same time, because ChatGPT suggested that this would be the best way to maximize by writing time and productivity.
I fed ChatGPT my accountability spreadsheet and the daily project journals I’ve been keeping for the past year, and it came back with some fascinating insights into my writing process. It’s amazing how you can feed it a bunch of raw, barely-formatted data, and get a genuinely insightful analysis.
Is this taking away jobs from a data analysis / writing coach? Not really, at least in my case, because I doubt I would have hired one. But the results sure are useful. I’m also experimenting with feeding my entire book into ChatGPT and asking it to write a book description or generate a cover. It’s amazing how it can “read” a whole novel in a fraction of a second, and spit back answers that show (or at least simulate) a genuine understanding of the material.
But one thing ChatGPT can’t do is convert a short story into a screenplay—at least, not without significant human input. I tried uploading “What Hard Times Hath Wrought” and told it to turn it into a screenplay, and the results were hilariously bad. Maybe Sudowrite has a plugin, though…
Interesting discussion of the ideal roles and partnership of husband and wife
I’ve been watching a lot of Malcolm & Simone Collins’s videos lately. They are a pair of super odd ducks, but they are both super intelligent and have some very unexpected insights into our world. On some issues (particularly the issue of Mormon fertility) I think they are off-track, but on others I think they are spot on, and earlier than most of the rest of the culture. They also love trolling crazy leftists—in fact, it’s how they built up their channel.
This is the best one I’ve listened to so far. You should ignore the clickbaity title, because what it’s really about is the way that men and women complement each other as husbands and wives, especially in our current post-industrial world where the corporate 9-5 job is becoming a thing of the past. I particularly enjoyed how Malcolm compares the role of husband and wife to the characters in the game Shovel Knight. Very geeky, and also very insightful. Worth a listen.
WIP Excerpt: Bloodfire Legacy (Chapter 1)
I am happy to report that I finished the final draft of Bloodfire Legacy earlier this month. It is now in the capable hands of my editor, Josh Leavitt, and if all goes well, it should be out in ebook, print, and audio sometime in July.
In the meantime, I thought I would share the first three chapters here on my blog. While I used AI to write the rough draft, everything you will read has been totally rewritten to be in my own voice. This is not the AI draft; it is the final draft I sent to my editor. If you find any typos or errors, they are entirely my own, and will (hopefully) be caught before the book is published.
A Dagger in the Dark
Lord Arion
Lord Vaughn Arion hurried down the long, dark corridors of Castle Caravelia. The dim torchlight flickered behind him, casting a long shadow as he turned the next corner. His court magician’s robes rustled and swayed, but he made no effort to muffle his steps, even as he plunged into the shadows. Speed was of the essence now.
He ran his hand along the wall as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The wall stones were rough, unlike the smooth marble floors and towering granite pillars of the throne room. He passed a narrow window, little more than an arrow slit, and heard the distant rumble of thunder rolling over the city below. Outside, the wind began to howl.
Not since the Time of Troubles nearly a century ago had the kingdom faced so great a threat to its very existence. The wise understood that the Dark Brotherhood had not been totally rooted out of the lands beyond the Azure Sea, but if Lord Arion’s divinations were correct, the true threat lay much closer to home.
The king must know, he told himself, the thought lending wings to his feet. It was not a coincidence that he’d learned this just as the threat of war loomed over the kingdom. Tensions had long been mounting on Caravelia’s eastern frontier, but if the Valmarian Empire was truly in the thrall of the Brotherhood itself…
Lightning flashed as he rounded a corner, briefly illuminating the passageway. He stopped suddenly, his skin prickling. He was not alone.
“Who goes there?” he demanded. “Show yourself!”
Thunder rolled as a tall figure emerged from the inky blackness. Lord Arion recognized the gaunt face and piercing blue eyes of Dorian Blackwood, a minor lord in King Leander’s court. His midnight-blue robes whispered across the floor.
“Lord Arion,” Dorian greeted him, his thin lips curving into a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I did not expect to encounter you here at this late hour.”
“I could say the same thing of you, Lord Blackwood,” Lord Arion replied. “What brings you to this part of the castle?” Though he occasionally saw Dorian in court, he knew little of the man. He now regretted that oversight.
Dorian chuckled mirthlessly. “The business of the court never sleeps, my lord.” He took a step closer, making Lord Arion step back. Something deep within him screamed of danger.
“Indeed,” Lord Arion replied carefully. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
Blackwood’s hand suddenly shot out. The gleam of a blade caught Lord Arion’s eye, and he jerked back just in time. The dagger slashed the fabric of his sleeve.
“What treachery is this?” Arion shouted.
“The kind that ends in your death,” Dorian answered.
With lightning speed, he lunged again—but this time, Lord Arion was ready. He thrust out a hand and uttered a word of power, unleashing a torrent of swirling energy as he dodged the would-be assassin’s blow.
Dorian stumbled back, his hands moving in a series of quick, sharp gestures. Inky tendrils of darkness coalesced around him. To Lord Arion’s utter astonishment, his magic parted harmlessly around Dorian, who stood untouched.
“You always were too predictable,” Dorian sneered. “Did you truly think I wouldn’t come prepared to face you?”
Arion’s mind reeled with the implications of what he had just seen. Only an acolyte of the Dark Brotherhood would dare to practice such forbidden magic in Caravelia.
“You—you’re a practitioner of the dark arts?”
“Oh, I’m so much more than that,” Dorian laughed. “But you’ll die before you learn the full truth of what I am.”
The two opponents circled each other warily, Arion’s wards pulsing as his opponent probed them. He drew a sharp breath, his mind racing. How could he have been so blind? Dorian had seemed nothing more than just another silver-tongued courtier—a favorite of the ladies and an obnoxious fixture at the king’s banquets. But this spoke of a far deeper treachery.
“Why, Dorian?” Arion demanded as lightning flashed outside. “What has driven you to betray your king?”
A sneer of contempt twisted Dorian’s lip. “Leander is no more fit to be king than you are fit to be his court magician.”
Thunder rolled as he launched his attack, unleashing a maelstrom of dark magic. Arion deflected it and countered with a powerful riposte, the clash of their energies illuminating the corridor with a burst of blinding light.
“Your power is formidable,” Arion growled through gritted teeth, “but your soul is corrupted. I cannot permit you to live.”
Dorian laughed. “You will never know the full extent of my powers.”
Before Arion could gather his energy, Blackwood surged forward, his dagger a blur of silver that sliced through Arion’s wards like feeble threads. A searing pain erupted in his chest as the dagger plunged deep into his heart.
Lord Arion stumbled to his knees, the metallic taste of blood filling his mouth. “How?” he gasped.
“Silver, my lord,” Blackwood answered coolly. He twisted the dagger and wrenched it free. “The bane of all magic—even yours.”
Lord Arion’s legs buckled, and he collapsed. Blood gushed from his wound as the edges of his vision began to haze over. He fought in vain to maintain consciousness against the looming darkness. Dorian crouched over him.
“Hush now,” he whispered, his voice a sibilant caress. “It will all be over soon.”
With the last of his strength, Arion tried desperately to rise and fight. But his limbs simply refused to obey. He watched as Dorian Blackwood carefully wiped the blood from his dagger before he melted back into the shadows.
“No!” Lord Arion groaned, thinking of the message he had failed to deliver. If only he hadn’t been so blind!
The world titled and spun all around him. The pain faded, and a numbing cold spread throughout his entire body. Then darkness claimed him, and Lord Arion knew no more.
Lord Arion
A strange, all-encompassing lightness filled Lord Arion’s being. He suddenly felt liberated from all the aches and pains that he had come to take for granted over the years. It almost felt invigorating at first. But then, he looked down at his lifeless body, eyes glazed and mouth still open in shock.
“No,” he muttered, his voice echoing strangely. “This… this can’t be real.”
He reached out, but his hand passed through the corpse without any physical sensation. Slowly, confusion gave way to awful certainty. He was dead. Murdered. His spirit had been violently sundered from his body. His life’s work, the kingdom, his family—
Lyra.
“Oh no,” he groaned, his heart sinking at the thought of his now-orphaned daughter. “Lyra—I can’t leave her. Not now—not like this!”
But the dim corridor was now tinged with an otherworldly glow, its edges blurred and its colors muted. He took a hesitant step forward, expecting to feel the stone beneath his feet, but felt no sensation at all.
He drew himself up and set his jaw, willing himself forward. Slowly, he glided down the hallway, tensing as he passed through the wall at the end of it. He came out into the corridor on the other side, near a tapestry and a suit of armor. The only sensation he felt though all of this was a slight tingle.
A pair of guards were walking toward him. Eagerly, he waved his hands.
“Hello?” he called out. “Can you hear me?”
But the sleepy guards were oblivious to his presence. As they passed him, Lord Arion reached out, his finger passing through the nearest man’s arm.
“Please,” he begged. But he was merely a shade. If the guard felt anything, he made no sign of it.
Lord Arion’s thoughts turned again to his daughter. What would become of her? Would his murderer try to take her life as well? The thought filled him with a fear that propelled him upward, into her bedchamber. Thankfully, she was safe.
“My darling girl,” he whispered as he gazed upon her sleeping form. She was only eleven years old—little more than a child. Her raven hair spread across the pillow, her features serene.
Lord Arion’s ghostly fingers hovered over her cheek. How he longed to hold her one last time! Next to this, all else seemed utterly trivial to him now. But of course, he could not—and in the morning, her heart would be shattered as she learned of her father’s awful fate.
“Oh, Lyra,” he moaned, wishing that he could brush away the tears that would surely come. “I’m sorry, my child. So sorry.”
Arion closed his eyes, reaching out with his magic to touch the very fabric of the world around him. This, at least, had not been denied him. He could still sense the ebb and flow of magic, the pulsing ley lines that crisscrossed land and sea. Yet without a corporeal body, he could not tap into that power.
One shimmering thread stood out above the others. His daughter’s own nascent abilities, the untapped potential that lay dormant with her. He opened his eyes to gaze upon her again.
“You have a gift,” he murmured, though he knew she could not hear him. “How will you use it, now that I am gone?”
In that moment, a soft, melodious voice filled the air.
“Vaughn.”
He looked up at once, searching for the source of the voice. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
“Who’s there?” he called. “Show yourself!”
“Peace, noble spirit,” the angelic voice answered. “Your time in the mortal realm has come to an end, but your journey beyond the veil is only now beginning.”
A shimmering curtain of light appeared before him. As he watched, the gossamer curtain parted, revealing a realm of unimaginable beauty. Lush fields stretched to the horizon, dotted with ancient trees. The scene was bathed in a beautiful golden light that cast no shadows.
“Stars above,” he whispered, his voice barely louder than a breath. “Is this… the Immortal Realm?”
An overwhelming sense of peace washed over him, dulling the violence of his death. As his eyes adjusted, he began to see familiar faces. His grandparents, long since passed, smiled and beckoned at him to come. Childhood friends and comrades-in-arms appeared next—many of whom he had only recently mourned. They stood before him now, whole and radiant. And then…
“Elara,” he breathed, his eyes widening at the sight of his beloved wife. She stood radiantly before him, appearing exactly as she had on the day they had both been wed. Her emerald eyes looked so much like their daughter’s.
“My love,” Elara answered. “How I’ve missed you.”
“And I you,” Arion said, longing to embrace her. “But Lyra—”
The angelic voice sounded again, gentle yet firm. “Your journey through the mortal realm is over, Vaughn. It is time to rest in eternal peace.”
Lord Arion hesitated, his heart torn as he met his wife’s gaze.
“I can’t,” he answered. “My daughter—our daughter—needs me. Without me, she’ll be alone.”
“She has to walk her own path,” the voice told him. “You cannot walk it for her.”
“I know,” he said, his eyes never leaving Elara’s. “But I can’t abandon our daughter.”
“You choose a difficult road,” the angelic voice warned. “As a ghost, you will have no effect upon the Mortal Realm. Your unseen presence may give her some small degree of comfort, but she will never know for certain that you are there.”
“I know,” he said, his voice ragged. “Forgive me, my love. Our reunion must wait a little longer.”
Elara nodded sadly. “I understand. Watch over her, my darling. Until we meet again.”
The angelic voice spoke again, its tone solemn. “Your love for your daughter is a testament to your noble spirit. For this, you shall have one gift. At a time of your choosing, you will be granted the power to part the veil and speak to her directly. Choose wisely, for you will only have one chance.”
“Thank you for this boon. I shall use it when Lyra needs me most.”
“Then go, Vaughn. Watch over your daughter, but remember that her choices must be her own.”
The curtain of light began to close, veiling the glory of the Immortal Realm. When the light had dissipated, Lord Arion found himself drifting in the air above his own lifeless body. His eyes lingered upon his mortal shell, now lying in a pool of blood.
“Oh, Lyra,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry, my darling girl. I never meant to leave you like this.”
Just for fun: Retroflow 1985
So the YouTube algorithm recently recommended this channel to me called Retroflow 1985. It’s a guy in Germany who puts out these synthwave music videos, with AI-generated artwork (and probably AI-generated music) that feels like it could have come out of the 1980s (hence the term “synthwave”).
I’m not a huge synthwave fan, but I do like this guy’s stuff. More than that, though, I’m fascinated by the fact that he’s put out something like 250 videos since he started his channel six months ago. In fact, he puts out something like 3-5 videos per day, so that the algorithm is constantly recommended new ones to me. Most of them only have a couple of hundred views, but a handful have more than a thousand. As of right now, he has <2k subscribers.
As a fellow creative who is also dabbling with AI, I am really interested to see how this strategy works for him, and where he (or she, I suppose) goes from here. Because we do live in an age where the algorithms determine a lot about what art & entertainment we are exposed to, and how we consume it—and it appears that in many domains (including books, to some extent) you have to churn out a lot of content in order to feed the algorithm.
Or maybe this guy isn’t human at all, but an AI agent creating and publishing this stuff? In which case, it will be even more interesting to see what he/she/it comes up with…
Thinking about switching Gunslinger books to J.M. Wight
Right now, I’m a science fiction writer who occasionally writes fantasy. I want to transition to being a fantasy writer who occasionally writes science fiction. But I also have a pen name (J.M. Wight) for more religious-themed books, since there are a lot of science fiction readers who have a serious ick with that.
As I set things up for this transition, I’ve been looking at the books I’ve already published and trying to decide what to do with them. The Gunslinger Trilogy is one series I’ve been looking at particularly hard. It’s kind of an edge case, because the religious themes become more pronounced as the series progresses. One of the more consistent themes in one-star reviews is that people don’t like the “Mormon” stuff in the later books, such as the part where the main character meets with the missionaries (and ultimately gets baptized), or the alien twist in the last book that’s pulled right out of the Books of Enoch/Jasher/Moses.
If I’d planned out the whole series before I wrote the first book, I probably would have published them under my J.M. Wight pen name for that reason. But the first book was a straight-up space opera, with minimal religious themes. It was only after I’d published the first book (under my main Joe Vasicek name) that I wrote the next two books and decided to throw in the more religious stuff. And while I was careful to write it in such a way that the books never come out and say whether all that religious stuff is actually true, the fact that it’s in there at all has turned off some readers who weren’t expecting it.
The trouble is that the first book has a lot of profanity in it, and religious readers tend to be just as icky about profanity as sci-fi readers are about the religious stuff. Even more so, in fact. So before I make the switch, I will probably have to make an extensive rewrite to tone down the swearing and make it more palatable for that audience.
It’s a fairly common mistake, especially among inexperience writers: you write the first book for a certain audience, but as the series progresses, the later books appeal to a different audience, betraying some of the expectations of the first audience. When taken to extremes, it’s the sort of thing that torpedoes careers and forces writers to reinvent themselves. So given that fact, I’m kind of surprised that these books have done as well as they have.
What do you think? Should I switch them to my J.M. Wight pen name, editing them to remove the profanity and lean into the audience that isn’t turned off by religious themes in their science fiction? Or should I keep them as they are?
Fantasy from A to Z: D is for Dragons
If you were expecting a post about dragons, I hate to disappoint you. but that’s not what this is going to be. I think dragons are fine, and there are lots of fantasy books with dragons that I’ve enjoyed (Jane Yolen’s Dragon’s Blood comes to mind, as does The Hobbit, which is, after all, a classic for a reason), but I’ve never read a dragon book that made me go crazy for dragons.
(And yes, I’ve read the Dragonriders of Pern books by Anne McAffrey, or at least the first two books. I can appreciate how other people like them, but frankly, the dragons are just way too OP for me. I mean, come on: not only can they teleport anywhere on the planet, but they can also travel through time? That’s just too much.)
Rather, I want to explore the idea of “here be dragons”—specifically, how it was that before the modern age, every civilization’s map of the world had a huge part of it that was dark and unexplored. Until that period ended, I don’t think it was possible for the modern fantasy genre to emerge.
Some people think that fantasy is an old genre, with roots that go back at least as far as the Roman Empire (some lists include The Golden Ass by Apuleius as the first fantasy book) and possibly much longer. But I think that fantasy is a much more modern genre, and as such has much more in common with science fiction than it does with the ancient myths and legends from which the genre often draws inspiration.
It all comes back to this idea of “here be dragons.” Until the modern age, it wasn’t possible to write fantasy fiction because for all anyone knew, there might actually be dragons, or hobbits, or elves, or dwarves, or unicorns in some unexplored part of the world. Indeed, the medieval world was full of fanciful stories that many people actually believed, such as the mythical tales of Prester John that motivated so many crusaders, or the rumors that prima nocta had been forced upon the people just over the next mountain range (as far as we can tell, prima nocta was never actually practiced, but almost all European cultures thought that it had been enforced somewhere else).
If you went back in time and tried to write a fantasy novel for these people, they probably would have read it the way we read some of our more elaborate and creative conspiracy theories today. Part of the reason we enjoy fantasy is because we know that it’s fictional. The suspension of disbelief allows us to enjoy the story without constantly asking ourselves “wait—is this real?” or excitedly shouting “nuh-uh—no way!” Instead, we can just cozy up in our reading nook and let the story carry us away to another world, knowing that it only exists in our head.
The modern era began with the fall of the Roman Byzantine Empire and the Age of Exploration in the 14th century. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, though, that the Europeans had fully explored the world, filling in those parts of the world map that said (in one way or another) “here be dragons.” It’s not a coincidence that proto-fantasy writers like Lord Dunsaney and William Morris came onto the scene at this time. At first, people didn’t know what to make of these mythologies and adventure tales set in fictional worlds, but they paved the way for later writers like Howard and Tolkien to forge the fantasy genre as we know it today.
Science fiction and fantasy may seem like opposites, but they are really more like two sides of the same coin. Both are essentially modern genres, but where science fiction broadly looks to the future, fantasy looks to the past. Indeed, a large part of fantasy’s appeal is this sense of nostalgic longing that it gives us for a world that never actually was. Tolkien was a master of this. Howard was too, though he was a little more explicit about it in his worldbuilding: his Hyborian Age is supposed to be set in our own world, many thousands of years ago in the prehistoric era, as evidenced by the maps he drew up, and the way his Picts carry through all of his stories, including the Roman-era tales of Bran Mak Morn.
All of this is to say that while we read fantasy for very different reasons than why we read science fiction, we read both genres as children of the modern age, and the genres would make very little sense to us otherwise. If you took Lord of the Rings back in a time machine to the middle ages, it wouldn’t give them that nostalgic sense of yearning for a simpler time. Frankly, it would probably leave most of them feeling confused (and wondering why there’s a distinct lack of religion—even though, to our modern sensibilities, Lord of the Rings has lots of subtle Christian symbolism).
Every book is a product of the culture that created it, and as such, modern fantasy has far more in common with its brother genre science fiction than with its great-great grandfathers: pagan mythology, Christian allegory, epic poetry, etc. Fantasy certainly draws from all of these, but until the world was fully mapped—until “here be dragons” had been fully excised from our understanding of the world—the fantasy genre as we know and love it today was still gestating in the womb.