Browsing all articles by Nyki Blatchley.
Grandmothers of Fantasy
It’s often said that, until the past two or three decades, both fantasy and SF were completely male-dominated genres. To a large extent this is true, but not entirely. For this article, rather than focus on a specific classic author or book, I thought I’d take a brief overview of some of the women who […]
The Chaotic Champion – Part Nine: Order and Chaos
I’ve spent most of this series discussing how the figure of the Chaotic Champion works in story. My contention is that he’s* a universal concept in human story, whether the story’s an ancient legend or a modern TV series, that fulfils an essential role in the narratives we tell ourselves to make sense of the […]
The Chaotic Champion – Part Eight: Which Kind of Hero Are You?
So far in this series, I’ve been concentrating on describing, in the most straightforward way, the various categories of Chaotic Champion and how each works. As I said in the first article, though, my purpose isn’t to force characters into a strait-jacket, but to provide a vocabulary to help define them in their individuality. In […]
The Chaotic Champion – Part Seven: The King Hero
For nearly a thousand years, great authors and poets have written virtually uncountable quantities of words about King Arthur. Each has tried to sum up what was special about that heroic age, and each has focused on a different interpretation. For the early Celtic writers, it was when the Britons were beating the Saxons for […]
The Chaotic Champion – Part Six: The Protector Hero
The town of Tombstone is in turmoil. The countryside around is ruled by bandits, and ranchers who are little better, and the small group of men who stand between the law-abiding townsfolk and anarchy walk out to the strains of Do Not Forsake Me (no, sorry, wrong film) for a winner-takes-all showdown. These aren’t hired […]
The Chaotic Champion – Part Five: The Outlaw Hero
In a scene early in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, when the duo have barely started on their criminal career, they come across a family sitting by the roadside outside their house. This is the Great Depression, and the bank has foreclosed on the mortgage, leaving the family homeless and not knowing where to […]
The Chaotic Champion – Part Four: The Outsider Hero
Just when all seems lost, the Batmobile screeches to a halt and the Caped Crusader leaps out to put paid to the latest dastardly scheme of the Joker, the Penguin or Catwoman. “Who is he behind that mask?” wonder the grateful people of Gotham City. Well, according to my Chaotic Champion terminology, he’s an Outsider […]
The Chaotic Champion – Part Three: The Recruited Hero
This the third article in our Chaotic Champion series. You can read the other articles here: Part One: Introducing the Champion Part Two: The Wandering Hero I started this series of articles with a summary of Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven. This plot is not only a perfect illustration of the Chaotic Champion in general: it […]
The Chaotic Champion – Part Two: The Wandering Hero
This the second in our Chaotic Champion series. You can read the first article here. A gunslinger rides alone across the prairies, coming from nowhere special and going wherever the wind takes him. Stopping at a town, he gets into a gunfight at the saloon and finds himself in the middle of a feud between […]
The Chaotic Champion – Part One: Introducing the Champion
The honest, hardworking peasants of a village are being harassed by bandits and decide they’ve had enough. They can’t actually do anything about it themselves, so they hire a group of professional fighters to sort out the situation. These men, essentially not unlike the bandits they’re fighting, save the village although several die in the […]
Lost Worlds by Clark Ashton Smith
The golden age of pulp fantasy is often considered to be the years when the American magazine Weird Tales was being published (1923-1954) and particularly the decade when it was dominated by three great authors: H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft created a new take on horror whose effects are […]
The Stealer of Souls by Michael Moorcock
Sword and Sorcery had its first heyday in the 1930s, with Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and their successors – most more or less Conan clones, although C. L. Moore and Fritz Leiber were more original. The genre virtually died out in the grimmer post-war years, but by the end of the Fifties, there was […]
