Possibilities in Space

It's Wednesday again...

Any good SF world must be understood as a possibility space. A universe which is characterized first and foremost by its physics:
By what is and isn't possible, and by how easy (or difficult) each of these non-impossible things are to do.

Once you have created the possibility space, you must extrapolate how the people in the world will exploit the possibilities. Because, you know, they're people. They are going to exploit it. Some of them, at least. That's what people are like.

I'll mostly be talking about science fiction in this post, but the principles I refer to are eminently applicable to fantasy as well.

Two ways in which a world can be high magic

So, it has finally become Wednesday again

For reasons I won't go into here, a weekly schedule is not possible as of now, so I'll strive for a new post every 2^nd week for now.

One definition - but not the only one - of "high fantasy" is that it's fantasy taking place in a magic-rich world. More on high fantasy and other subgenres in this blog post, though. Here I'll look at high magic, by contrasting two very different fantasy worlds that, in spite of their stark differences, can both reasonably be said to be high magic.

2011/04 Best reads 2/2 The Dawn Palace by Helen M. Hoover

It's Wednesday again...

In this blog entry, I'm going to talk about the other best read of April 2011, "The Dawn Palace: The Story of Medea" by YA science fiction author Helen M. Hoover. The first novel was le Guin's "A Wizard of Earthsea".

2011/04 Best reads 1/2 A Wizard of Earthsea by le Guin

It's Wednesday again...

In this kind of blog entry I'll write about the best novel or novels I've read or re-read in a past month, usually the month immediately previous, although sometimes I'll go back some months or a year or two, to highlight something really good that for whatever reason I haven't wanted to re-read. Or if it is a really long work, like the May's Pliocene Exile or Turtledove's Tosev timeline series.

In any month I might write one, two, three or zero such entries (often zero, I'd expect). If it's a series novel, just one long story told in multiple volumes, it'll get one entry although it may be longer.

This first is about the 1968 YA fantasy, "A Wizard of Earthsea" by Ursula K. le Guin. The second April 2011 entry, to be posted later, is about "The Dawn Palace: The Story of Medea" by Helen M. Hoover.