[Rec] 11 Recs for Essays
What's up with the three act structure? by nebulos
Excerpt: Letâs talk about the vaunted âthree act structureâ, spectre of much beginner writer advice. It posits that you must have âsetupâ, a âconfrontationâ, and âresolutionâ. Or wait, maybe itâs âsetupâ, âbuildâ, and âpayoffâ? Or maybe âsetup,â âbuild,â and âclimaxâ? Wait, is the biggest baddest moment in act 2 or act 3?
Breaking Out of Capitalist Realism by Juliet Kemp
Excerpt: Science fiction and fantasy are uniquely positioned to give readers (whether deliberately or accidentally) a vision of possible alternative futures; an imagination of what could be, good, bad, or more complex. But inevitably those stories are also a reflection of the now: writers in conversation with whatâs around them, growing ideas in the substrate around our rooted feet. If we as writers want to envisage, to create, an anti-capitalist, socially just future, how do we get there from here, and just how limited are we by where we are now?
the biggest threat facing your team, whether youâre a game developer or a tech founder or a CEO, is not what you think by Doc Burford
Excerpt: If you are running a business, your goal, generally, is to make money. A lot of people go to business school to learn how to do it, and those people â maybe youâre one of them, takes those newly found lessons to work at large corporations.
The Science, Fiction, and Fantasy of Genre by Alexandra Erin
Excerpt: Itâs been said that whoever writes in the field of science fiction stands on the shoulders of giants, the towering titans of yesteryear. Their hard work built the playground; we just play in it.
Dogmatic Positivity and the Terrible Neutrality of Hope by osteophage
Excerpt: Across metacommentary on several different genres of fiction, I've noticed some commentators taking a dogmatic approach to hope, happiness, and optimism as morally and politically good. This piece you're reading now is an effort to analyze that pattern. My aim here is not to define or degrade particular fictional works, genres, or themes in and of themselves as much as it is to identify a particular strain of argument, followed by some real-world points of comparison, leading into an invitation to consider (if not necessarily relate to) other possible relationships to fiction.
"mean, cynical, hopeless" by Yoon Ha Lee
Excerpt: I don't think it's a surprise to anyone who's ever read my works that my primary theme is war/violence. (The secondary one is sex, as distinct from romance, although for obvious reasons it doesn't show up in, e.g., books for younger readers.) Why war/violence? I don't have a good explanation; I don't have a military background. My mom thinks it's hilarious. I usually write stories centering on warfare or violence in some form. When I'm drawing/painting personal work, it often touches on that theme. I know this is what I want to do over and over because it's what I actually do over and over. I'm sure art-wise people would rather see winged kittens or teacup still lifes or whatever, but really my heart longs to blow things up. I don't naturally come up with "pretty" or "cozy" or "heartwarming" or "optimistic" art/stories, and I can't actually sustain those themes/affects. (See above regarding the two months of tranquil watercolor landscapes.)
Dance the Exotic Dance for Me! by Yoon Ha Lee
Excerpt: Yet the science fiction and fantasy Iâd grown up reading, the games I grew up playing, never featured people like meâKorean-American by way of Texasâor the Korean foods I grew up eating. I would have murdered to see one single consarned character eat space gimchi instead of space steak and space potatoes. Years later, when I walked into Gencon and saw an enormous wall banner with an Asian-inspired game character named Yoon (Pathfinder), I almost cried. It was the first time Iâd seen a fantasy setting that had a character with my name.
What Really Happens After the Apocalypse by Arkady Martine
Excerpt: In science fiction, apocalypse and what comes after is an enduring theme. Whether itâs pandemic (like in Emily St. John Mandelâs Station Eleven and Stephen Kingâs The Stand), nuclear (such as Theodore Sturgeonâs short story âThunder and Rosesâ or the 1984 BBC drama Threads), or environmental (Octavia Butlerâs Parable of the Sower, Kim Stanley Robinsonâs New York 2140, and a slew of brilliant short fiction, including Tobias Buckellâs âA World to Die Forâ (Clarkesworld 2018) and Nnedi Okoraforâs âSpider the Artistâ (Lightspeed 2011), disaster, apocalypse, and destruction fascinate the genre. If science fiction is, as sometimes described, a literature of ideas, then apocalyptic science fiction is the literature of how ideas go wrongâan exploration of all of our bad possible futures, and what might happen after.
Orc is Man To Orc by Asher Elbein
Excerpt: The orcs are on the march. Up they come from mine and dungeon, the sunlight glinting on their crude blades. They come hideous and deformed, bent of limb and snarling of mouth, their skin scurvy-yellow, corpse-gray or bright rot-green. They come singing deep-throated, piratic and (letâs be honest) eminently hummable songs.
i was a teenage exocolonist (and so can you) by Doc Burford
Excerpt: While working on Adios, I had a number of conversations with someone about âwholesome gamesâ and their whole deal, because Pokemon fans â who, given that they like a series about good vibes and being kind to each other â were yelling at the team because they were mad about some dumb bullshit regarding 3D models.
Why racist monster smut is Tolkien's fault by Michael
Excerpt: Orc's are not a new part of the fantasy world. In fact, they have been around much longer than I have. Their first notable inclusion in literature would have been in Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings, which debuted in the mid 1950s. He drew inspiration from Beowolf, which is obviously quite a bit older--like, by a few centuries--but prior to Tolkein, Orcs as they are today really did not exist. With that said, Tolkein was clearly not a monster smut writer... but he did create the mold for it.