Grandmothers of Fantasy
Nyki Blatchley
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…
Nyki Blatchley
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…