Monthly Archives: February 2013

11th Century City Ruins in Wisconsin?

Posted on by
Reply

More childhood misinformation: the native american tribes east of the Mississippi were almost entirely nomadic, lacking sufficient engineering or agricultural skills to sustain large fixed populations.

The Cahokia Mounds in St. Louis, Missouri testify otherwise. More on Cahokia in a later post. What recently caught my attention was the existence of a large historic site in Wisconsin dating back the 11th century. The two didn’t exist independently:

“The inhabitants of the new settlement imported ritual objects and luxury goods from Cahokia, and probably from the Middle Mississippian settlements in central and Northern Illinois.”

Densely-populated settlements, agricultural expertise, and trade routes stretching from present-day Wisconsin to Missouri… the New World prior to the 18th century is starting to sound like the Old World.

Well, except for the people from the Old World having guns and horses.

A Game Without a Story…

Posted on by
Reply

Kotaku.com tries to figure out what happened with the poorly-reviewed video game first-person shooter that is Aliens: Colonial Marines.

The first major problem was the game’s story: even four years after Colonial Marines was announced, nobody had locked down a final script. Narrative designers at both Gearbox and TimeGate were writing and rewriting constantly, and TimeGate had to discard entire scenes and levels because of story changes during development, according to three sources.

“For a couple months, we were just kind of guessing,” said one of those sources. “It’s really weird to work on a game when you don’t have a basic idea of how things will work.”

(Also? I had no idea there were such things as ‘narrative designers.’ Neat!)

The Tale of the Lizards

Posted on by
2

As recently as 1934, sophisticated American citizens still had the capacity to believe in something as marvelous as…

“(S)ecret caves, a lost civilisation and above all, a treasure trove of gold in unimaginable quantities. And all this in the ground below the present-day metropolis of Los Angeles.”

The full article (originally published in the LA Times) detailing the lizard man find is worth a read. The maps of the tunnels are fun, too. Please do note there are no lizard people in Northern Arcadia. There are, of course, toad people. And caves. Also, possibly, cities hidden in the ground long before the arrival of the men from the East.

Color in Colonial Northern Arcadia

Posted on by
1

Ursula K. LeGuin’s decades-old complaints about fantasy protagonists, articulated in a marvelous Slate article about the relationship between her books and the miniseries bearing the Earthsea name, ring true:

I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”).

Abigail Moore is a redhead, with pale skin. Every other major character (including the two principals in THIEF) has olive, tan or coffee-colored skin. Religion divides the colonists, greed corrupts and the desire for power still sets faction against faction.

But while people from many different ethnicities can be found in the New World, ‘race’ as a concept isn’t considered useful or germane. (I’m not sure it’s useful anywhere. But in my fictional world of Northern Arcadia, on this point, people happen to agree with me.)

New Feature: Fantastic Americas

Posted on by
Reply

One of the things I wanted to explore in the Northern Arcadia books was the notion of a uniquely American fantasy setting. I love me a good castle, and I was raised on the Arthurian legends and Tolkein’s stuff, but there’s plenty of the fantastic on these shores. The mound city of Cahokia, the Roanoke Dare stones, the ruins in the Pueblo Canyon and the traces of large urban structures in the Amazon all served to inspire various threads and strands of Northern Arcadian lore. As a new feature, and to help break the monotony of me announcing the receipt of new rejection letters, I thought I’d share links to New World stuff I think is fantastic and inspirational, both.

The narrator for the History channel show “America Unearthed” is, like so many of his fellow travelers, a little breathless for my taste. But a recent episode on the American Stonehenge was provocative. When I was a kid, I left school with the impression the New World, prior to the arrival of Europeans, was empty of everything except wildlife and a few scattered tribes of Native Americans. This episode is a nice reminder of the extent to which that particular narrative is wrong.

Rejection and Resilience

Posted on by
1

This morning brought my second rejection letter from a possible agent. My spirits sank when I scanned the boilerplate. The potential for Abigail Moore and Northern Arcadia seems so obvious to me. The speed and ease with which the second Northern Arcadia novel, HEIST, is coming together, tells me this is a viable endeavor, one I could cheerfully extend and elaborate for years to come.

One of these days, I’m going to figure out how to communicate my vision for Northern Arcadia in a way that people in the publishing industry find inspirational. Hell. Maybe it’ll even be today.

What Comes to the Four (the PS4)

Posted on by
Reply

We’ll probably pick up a Playstation 4. We delayed for a couple years on the PS3, until the price had dropped. I am not excited by what I’ve heard from Sony so far. I hope I’m proven wrong, but the addition of a ‘share’ button suggests creative lethargy. As a gamer, I don’t much care about another button. I want my gaming experience improved. Help me fool all five senses. (Yes, including smell.) Innovate with controls but never forget the technology is only as good as its ability to create engaging experiences that (to borrow from Sid Meier) offer players a series of interesting choices.