by Nathan Nance,
So you’re writing SFF, and you’ve got spaceships to design. Engine systems to map. A haunted forest to populate. A talking badger to draw. If you’re not a rocket scientist writing hard sci-fi, how are you supposed to make your version of James S.A. Corey’s Rocinante, you know, fly?
We all know ‘an army marches on its stomach,’ but it’s not like Napoleon discovered something new. Vegetius (De re militari) and Sun Tzu (The Art of War) were well aware of this concept, as was Alexander the Great (Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, 1980). And it wasn’t news to them, either. Pre-modern military commanders knew this; they planned for this. They paid attention to logistics.
Fantasy writers should, too.
by Kevin L. O’Brien
It should be pointed out that while it is easy to pattern a quasi-medieval fantasy society after medieval Europe, European society of the Middle Ages didn’t just appear out of nothing. It grew from antecedents and so was based on a foundation of varied traditions, and there is every reason to believe that a fictional society would be the same way.
by Kevin L. O’Brien Welcome to Part Two of a series that examines technology and medieval machines that can be used in worldbuilding. In the first post of this series, I described how a quasi-medieval society could smelt all the iron it needed to generate and sustain an industrial revolution. However, while it could […]
by Kevin L. O’Brien
Welcome to Part One of a series that discusses technology and medieval machines that can be used for worldbuilding.
Many fantasy stories gloss over technological details that would be vital in a real-world setting. For example: how would a medieval-level society acquire the iron it needs for tools and implements?
When a character swims across the Arctic Ocean, in a story set a thousand years in the future, what stars might she use to guide her passage westward?
Set in NYC and a fictional feudal planet, this novel tempts the feral temperament of Internet connoisseurs with a lubricious story that puts the R back into romance. Alas, an AI’s effort to participate here flashes like a horror show throughout.
Renan Bernardo is a Nebula finalist author of science fiction and fantasy from Brazil. His fiction appeared in Reactor/Tor.com, Apex Magazine, Podcastle, Escape Pod, and other places. His collection Different Kinds of Defiance was published in 2024.
