Thanks for this, Joel, on a number of levels. Of course I appreciate your compliments on Fred and my work in the Ur-Quan Masters, but it’s your thesis about embracing the weird that really gets me excited. I enjoy all kinds of fantasy and science-fiction, but I especially love creative work that makes me go, “Huh?”, while also thinking, “COOL!”, like Erol’s artwork. In part this is because I cherish novelty, but what’s really going on is that I am learning something new about myself. And regarding Jack Vance, I’d be interested to know how his work rocked your creative boat so much.
Hey Paul, glad to see this comment. It found me at a good time, it's been a difficult week.
Vance was like a revelation to me having grown up almost strictly on Tolkien and being entirely disappointed with most other fantasy I had attempted to consume after that. I think the issue is, with a world as depthful and realized as Middle-Earth, anything else trying to emulate that just came off to me as synthetic in comparison. At a certain point, I stopped trying to read any fantasy altogether, and then perhaps lamentably, any fiction altogether, and focused all of my reading on non-fiction thereafter. I have a terrible tendency to retread old ground almost continuously, and that has probably hampered my own creativity to a degree, which was offset somewhat by at least a passing familiarity with important literary fiction and history.
I think what has struck me about Vance is that the worlds he is weaving are so matter-of-fact. I feel like I'm tapping into something well realized without the verbiage to support it. Things just sort of ARE in Dying Earth, and he doesn't waste a lot of time explaining the why's and wherefore's. It immediately thrusts you into your own imagination in the process, and he gives just enough to paint a picture in your mind without inundating you in a lineage of kings and countries. It really is the polar opposite of any Tolkien imitator, and maybe its age, but it is sort of a relieving form in which to enjoy the creativity of the fantasy he is spinning. If brevity if the soul of wit, Vance seems to have mastered it, which is something I work very hard on in my own projects and often miss the mark on.
As far as where this all sits in terms of something like D&D, my own games have a similar philosophy where I try to illuminate as little about the world as possible to the point that sometimes I will check in with players and say something like, "Hey, we need a town over here. What would that look like?" It's probably in diametric opposition to how you SHOULD run a game, but it gives us all a collective state in things, and for a game that has existed over fifty years, it's just far too easy to beat the dead horse of existing tropes to the point where it's almost not worth it to try and create a world that feels REAL, but rather one that feels like it is constructed to be a game, and one where there is a grounding in the kind of work Vance and others in his era were penning. These worlds could always stand to be more bizarre both for the quelling the boredom of tired DM's and players who have seen it all alike!
Thanks for this, Joel, on a number of levels. Of course I appreciate your compliments on Fred and my work in the Ur-Quan Masters, but it’s your thesis about embracing the weird that really gets me excited. I enjoy all kinds of fantasy and science-fiction, but I especially love creative work that makes me go, “Huh?”, while also thinking, “COOL!”, like Erol’s artwork. In part this is because I cherish novelty, but what’s really going on is that I am learning something new about myself. And regarding Jack Vance, I’d be interested to know how his work rocked your creative boat so much.
Hey Paul, glad to see this comment. It found me at a good time, it's been a difficult week.
Vance was like a revelation to me having grown up almost strictly on Tolkien and being entirely disappointed with most other fantasy I had attempted to consume after that. I think the issue is, with a world as depthful and realized as Middle-Earth, anything else trying to emulate that just came off to me as synthetic in comparison. At a certain point, I stopped trying to read any fantasy altogether, and then perhaps lamentably, any fiction altogether, and focused all of my reading on non-fiction thereafter. I have a terrible tendency to retread old ground almost continuously, and that has probably hampered my own creativity to a degree, which was offset somewhat by at least a passing familiarity with important literary fiction and history.
I think what has struck me about Vance is that the worlds he is weaving are so matter-of-fact. I feel like I'm tapping into something well realized without the verbiage to support it. Things just sort of ARE in Dying Earth, and he doesn't waste a lot of time explaining the why's and wherefore's. It immediately thrusts you into your own imagination in the process, and he gives just enough to paint a picture in your mind without inundating you in a lineage of kings and countries. It really is the polar opposite of any Tolkien imitator, and maybe its age, but it is sort of a relieving form in which to enjoy the creativity of the fantasy he is spinning. If brevity if the soul of wit, Vance seems to have mastered it, which is something I work very hard on in my own projects and often miss the mark on.
As far as where this all sits in terms of something like D&D, my own games have a similar philosophy where I try to illuminate as little about the world as possible to the point that sometimes I will check in with players and say something like, "Hey, we need a town over here. What would that look like?" It's probably in diametric opposition to how you SHOULD run a game, but it gives us all a collective state in things, and for a game that has existed over fifty years, it's just far too easy to beat the dead horse of existing tropes to the point where it's almost not worth it to try and create a world that feels REAL, but rather one that feels like it is constructed to be a game, and one where there is a grounding in the kind of work Vance and others in his era were penning. These worlds could always stand to be more bizarre both for the quelling the boredom of tired DM's and players who have seen it all alike!
I hope you had a good new year!