Babel Clash

So alien lifeforms. They come in all shapes and sizes in SF:

So what do you think?  Will they be cute, scary, attractive, or revolting?

To dance from Ann’s topic on Steampunk: I get a lot of worldbuilding questions. Some of them are a little bit trippy. I once got an email explaining to me that the author of the email was writing an urban fantasy and could I please point out to him which elements of my worldbuilding I considered as mine. The answer is I consider everything I write mine, odd duck that I am.

But back to worldbuilding, sometimes people want to know how to create a world that is fantastic but doesn’t stretch the reader’s capacity for suspending belief. In reality, you can stretch the reader’s capacity for disbelief to colossal proportions. You can build a most fantastic world, if you take care to make it logical and follow its own rules. See Terry Pratchett

I typically come up with the world first, and let the characters grow from it; but you can do it the other way around as well. Start with a new character and build the world around him or her, as long as everything you do has a reason. Every thing you stick into your world will affect your characters. If the character lives in the desert, the water will be precious. If he lives on an archipelago, he probably can swim. But making a kick-ass swimmer hero in the middle of Dune-like planet presents a bit of the problem. Where is he going to go to dazzle us with his swimming mojo?

Sometimes people throw a bunch of cool elements into the setting, but the elements make no sense together. Like adding steampunk or vampires or whatever is hot at the moment into a storyline clearly not designed to accommodate them. I once saw an aspiring writer on one of the writing-related boards state that she was writing an urban fantasy and she was loading it with sex because that’s what sells.

First of all, assuming that sex is necessary to sell is a mistake. I’m up to three books in my first series and nobody had sex yet. Doesn’t seem to be hurting me. Second of all, a UF with a lot of sex is likely (but not necessarily) to edge into the territory of paranormal romance: different agents, different publishers, different book buyers. PRN is not UF and vice versa. The new series, which you see on the sidebar, basically sits exactly on the line between uf and PRN and everyone from agent to the reviewers had kittens trying to figure out how to classify the thing. And third and most important, if you don’t like writing sex and you’re just sticking it in there so the book will “sell”, chances are you’re writing bad sex and there is nothing more cringe-worthy than a bad sex scene.

If you put it into your draft, make sure the story can’t survive without it.

So this week is a release week for me, and I want a computer game. What I would really like is a computer game like Caesar IV, because I can have absolute power over the world and if I want to spend five minutes deciding how to arrange my aqueduct, I can. Muhahaha.

Except I played Caesar to death.

My choices are, at the moment, Mass Effect, yet another run through Oblivion, latest Fire Emblem (which ever installment that it, I can’t keep them straight) or something else that I don’t know about.

I’ve gone through Oblivion about three times; my main issue with Mass Effect is that I can’t make a cool looking female Shepard - why are all the women in the game look like they had too much Botox? - and playing Fire Emblem requires the children to actually give up TV time from their Spectrobs. Chance of that happening? Slim to none.

I miss the old games. I really like Arcanum, probably the first steampunk game I’ve ever played. That was fun. But what I miss most is games like Might and Magic V, where you have an off screen party and battles are turn-based. I suppose that makes me old fashioned, but I really miss that set-up. Of course they hammered the Might and Magic RPG side of the franchise into the ground with cringe-worthy MMIX. Most of that stuff won’t even run on Vista, and replaying Wizardry 8 with its endless look-alike enemies isn’t exactly satisfying.

So what games are you looking forward to? What’s your addiction?

Ann brought up an awesome point regarding the frequency of sexy vampires.  Urban Fantasy is an extension of folkloric tradition, a more modern interpretation of the old fairy tales.  I think the vampires in UF and Paranormal are the natural extension of the Prince motif we see so much in European folklore.  The Prince that we so often see in fairy tales is noble, both in spirit and in manners, brave, often quite violent (chopping off dragon heads, etc), attractive, and let’s not forget loaded.  If he wasn’t rolling in riches at the beginning of the fairy tale, he can usually give the millionaires from Dragon’s Den a run for their money by the end of it.

The vampire fits into this stereotype beautifully.  Handsome, check (Thank you, Anne Rice).  Violent, check (bloodsucker, after all, must suck).  Rich, check (well of course he is rich, since he’s been alive for years and years.)  And because the Prince must be noble, our vampire comes with built in moral conflict: he hates what he must do to survive and he acknowledges the fact that he is, indeed, a monster.   That Prince-monster motif is old, too, starting from Beauty and the Beast, of which there are tons of versions. Below is a Russian one. Fast-forward to about a minute to see the Beast, or you may have to sit through a bit of singing.

George Sand built on this trend to bring us Consuelo in late 18oo’s and opening the era of the Gothics, which took the idea of Prince-monster and twisted it in a million different ways.  Now the idea of anti-hero is once again re-surging.

I like the antihero.  He’s never boring.

I also do enjoy an story of an elegant vampire once in a while.   But if we move away from European mythology and dip our toes into other folklore, we come up with a whole slew of different creatures.  Russian upiri - while occasionally hot and often suffering from a terminal weakness for the ladies - are also know to literary devour dead bodies, to the point of raiding churches where the dead were laid out for burial.  Manananggal from the Philippines grows wings, detaches its upper torso and flies around looking for victims, preferably pregnant women, so it can suck their organs.  Tibetian vampires, the Wrathful Deities, attacked the newly dead, not the living.  And the list goes on.

So here is my questions to you: Anti-hero, yes or no and which myths would you like to see explored in UF?