Teeth in fantasy

Teeth are an easy way to distinguish and learn about different species, but how to use them in fantasy?

Types of teeth

Grazers have flat-topped teeth to grind down the tough parts of plants. Carnivores have sharp incisors and canines to slice through flesh. Gnawers, like rodents, have teeth that constantly grow. The crocodile’s teeth and jaws are designed to grip, so that when it dives underwater, it drags its prey with it and quickly drowns the other animal.

Teeth can be large and spectacular in appearance as well – such as the tusks of a walrus or an elephant, or the large fangs of a saber-tooth. And finally there are the hypodermic needles of venomous snakes. Any of these could come into play when designing a new species of people or animal in fantasy.

Fantastical teeth

Not many SF races have different dentition. One exception is the Tilari of F. M. Busby’s The Demu Trilogy, who have forty teeth which ate correspondingly smaller to fit into their mouths. And of course, there are any number of paranormal races with fangs.

The Mouth of Sauron, in Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King, is a great example of this. Just making his mouth twice as large and giving him rotting fangs to match = instantly disturbing. People with circular rows of teeth, like lampreys or cookiecutter sharks, would be even worse.

Teeth in a fantasy world don’t need to be made of enamel. Metal teeth might remind readers too much of Jaws from the James Bond films, but there’s a character in A Song of Ice and Fire who has wooden teeth. Stone might work as well—or how about taking useful teeth from animals and implanting them in a character’s jaw?

Going one step further than this would be teeth that changed depending on what the person needed at the time, from injecting venom to opening a can of peas without the assistance of a can-opener. Dentition is used as forensic evidence, but in this situation it couldn’t be trusted.

Uses for teeth

Once they’ve been removed, there are several purposes they could be put to. Jewelry. Weapons. Armor with overlapping rows of sharks’ teeth. Tools, such as the large molars of giant herbivores as pestles or grinders.

Or for something more fantastical, how about a secret method of assassination? Mix tiny teeth in with cooked rice, or with something that’s likely to be swallowed whole without chewing. Once these teeth are inside a person’s stomach, they jab into the nearest surface and burrow in. Death from peritonitis occurs soon, and short of an autopsy, no one will know why.


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Five kinds of wings in fantasy

1. Feathered wings

The most common type, though these could be as varied as actual feathers are. Not just in color but in purpose too—there’s a species of bird which has a surprisingly large repertoire of sounds it can make with its wings.

Owls’ wings have also evolved to be nearly soundless in flight—an advantage for hunters.

2. Skin wings

Like bats, whose wings are sensitive enough to detect changes in air temperature and currents, meaning bats can make swift changes to their flight patterns. This would be great for an interspecies romance too—imagine the wings being an erogenous zone.

It’s been a while since I read Anne Bishop’s Daughter of the Blood, but her Eyrians might be like this—if anyone can confirm, please let me know in the comments!

3. Insect wings

I like insect wings the most, perhaps because they look so fragile. The veins running through them help to strengthen them, but it would be interesting to see these scaled up to humanoid size. That would also raise the question of whether the humanoid could hover like a dragonfly, and whether the wings would be concealed in cases when not used in flight.

4. Mechanical wings

The Icarii of Dru Pagliasotti’s Clockwork Heart have metal wings, but these can be adapted for defense and attack as well. In the X-Men comics, Archangel’s wings had metal feathers which could be fired as projectiles, and such wings could also have guns mounted on them, similar to rotary cannons or even air-to-air missile launchers. Provided, of course, that they didn’t weigh the flyer down too much.

5. Magical wings

The angels’ wings in the Diablo video games are great examples of this.



As well as looking cool, the tentacles are also prehensile and can grasp at enemies. I love that dual purpose.

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Mountains in fantasy

The Misty Mountains. The Spine of the World. Mount Doom. The Frostfangs. The Mountains of Madness. The Goblins’ Teeth.

Mountains in fantasy often have evocative names. It’s probably best not to be too obvious — e.g. calling the villain’s stronghold Nightmount or Vultures’ Peak, because a little of this goes a long way — but such names can hint at a significant detail or two. You know the Frostfangs are likely to be in the Westeros version of the High Arctic.

On a map, mountain ranges should look natural, e.g. not crossing each other at right angles unless this is is done deliberately, to show some aspect of the world. I like the idea of a ring of impassable mountains guarding something at their centre. They form good borders and defenses, which always reminds me of Hannibal leading elephants over the Alps.

Plus, mountains can always be made even more dangerous than they already are. It doesn’t have to be something big like the stone giants in the first Hobbit film. Maybe mountains change ever-so-subtly, such that passes which were traversible last week will have mysteriously shrunk to the dimensions of a needle’s eye when travelers try to go back. Maybe solid rock occasionally crumbles away into a crevasse, millenia of erosion taking place in seconds. Or maybe the mountains grow much faster on your world than they do in reality.

Mountains play a role in myth and religion — there’s Mount Olympus in Greek mythology, Mount Sinai and Mount Ararat in the bible, as well as the Sermon on the Mount. Finally, there are mountain ranges on the Moon as well (though they don’t have the poetic names of the lunar seas), and even further out is the the equatorial ridge on Iapetus, the third largest moon of Saturn. I’m not sure if there are mountains of any kinds on the gas giants, but if there are, their size would be breathtaking.

Finally, you never know what you might find in a mountain—anything from cave paintings to lost treasures to an entire city. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a desert (well, a modern-day desert with air conditioning), but I’ve always found mountains exciting. And looked forward to reading about them.

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Five alternatives to human reproduction

I tried never to miss a Star Trek episode until midway through Voyager. There were several reasons for this, but the show hardly even daring to nudge the envelope was the most important. Especially when it comes to science, Star Trek could have and should have been at the forefront.

And an alien giving birth from the back rather than the front… just did not quite cut it for me. Not when there are so many more unusual methods of reproducing.

1. Parthenogenesis

The women in David Brin’s Glory Season don’t need anyone else’s genetic input for conception, except during a certain time of the year—the titular season. During this time, they can choose to mate, though of course the children produced in this way are likely to be treated differently from those conceived in the more common method.

Suzy McKee Charnas’s Motherlines is similar; the all-female society of the Riding Women would have died out long ago if the women weren’t able to give birth to genetically identical daughters, maintaining their ancestral Motherlines.

The problem that Charnas illustrates in the novel, though, is that such a society won’t have much variation (unless mutation is much more frequent than it is in real life). Hybrid vigor will be unheard-of, and a population without genetic diversity will be that much more vulnerable to infectious diseases.

And it will be that much more difficult for people to be individuals when it comes to thought or belief or behavior as well. If identical twins are sometimes dressed alike, given similar names and expected to do the same things, imagine what it’s like for girls who know that they are doppelgangers of their mothers and grandmothers, all the way back to the first generation.

2. Mitosis

There was an Outer Limits episode where an astronaut, after exposure to something mysterious in outer space, started budding off an extra finger from his hand. He soon realized that this was just the first part of a whole new body—in other words, he was slowly but surely producing another copy of himself.

Mitosis, like parthenogenesis, doesn’t result in as much genetic diversity as sexual reproduction does, though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing if the parent copy has valuable but recessive traits that might be lost otherwise. It could also be much more convenient — look at how hard animals (and people) work to find suitable mates.

Not to mention that budding, a la yeast cells, might be a whole lot less painful than giving birth.

3. Prions

In real life, prions scare me as much as they fascinate me. There’s something insidious about strands of protein (which technically aren’t even alive) gradually corrupting the normal proteins in your brain. But to take this concept a few steps further, what if people could change others into copies of themselves?

As a long-term method of reproduction, this would carry the same risks as mitosis or parthenogenesis, but as a short-term deal, it could have some very interesting uses. I’m imagining a hostage crisis situation where the terrorists don’t realize is that one of the hostages is a prion, and being exposed to her is altering them by the hour.

4. Egg-laying

I like the indifference of most fish and amphibians — lay eggs, wait for them to be fertilized, go on with life. Of course, this is a viable strategy because they produce offspring in such huge numbers that the death of most of them isn’t a tragedy or even a problem.

Though that could apply to a lesser degree with a humanoid race as well. If each female produced, say, half-a-dozen offspring each breeding season, she wouldn’t need to raise them all to adulthood. She could instead abandon them to compete over limited resources, such that only the strongest survived. And if it didn’t, oh well, there would always be next year.

For this to work, though, egg-production, fertilization and any necessary gestation shouldn’t demand too much of a female. In mammals, so much of the female’s resources go into developing the young that naturally fewer of them are born, and those are nurtured and protected. It doesn’t make reproductive sense to devote nine months and one’s physical health to producing a human infant, only to drop it by the wayside.

Unless someone else is prepared to bring it up, which is a whole ‘nother reproductive strategy a la the cuckoo, and developed perfectly in Bernard Taylor's brilliant but out-of-print horror novel The Godsend.

5. Hive insect reproduction

I remember when I first learned what exactly worker bees — the uniformly female, non-reproducing members of the hive — get out of this arrangement. Bee genetics are such that, by allowing the queen to devote all her time to egg-laying, workers actually pass on more of their genes.

If a worker bee mated and laid eggs, her offspring would share 50% of her genes. But when she helps the queen to do the same thing, the queen’s offspring — the worker bee’s sisters — share 75% of her genes. Therefore, it makes sense for the worker bee to want more sisters, rather than children.

As a result, this is a very viable reproductive strategy and I wouldn’t mind using it at all (as long as I was one of the workers, because being stuck doing nothing but producing child after child is not my idea of a good time).

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Hair in fantasy

“Give me a head with hair,
Long beautiful hair,
Shining, streaming, gleaming, flaxen, waxen hair…”

Hair

Hair is ubiquitous. It crops up in mythology and fairy tales, it appears in a hundred different colors, styles and permutations, and I don’t think I’ve read a romance which didn’t provide at least some mention of it. It’s a source of power, a mark of heredity and one of the ways to spot a Mary Sue—her hair is likely to be overpretty or overdescribed. Usually both.

Colors

Minus Clairol, hair occurs in a small range of hues—blond, red, brown, black, grey and white. There’s a lot of room for variation within these colors, but in a fantasy characters can have Ramona Flowers hair with streaks in it—if there’s a good reason for them to have such hair.

Unusual colors might also affect how seriously the characters are taken. If everyone has hair like Rainbow Brite’s horse, the story might come off as a parody. I’d pick just one out-of-the-ordinary color, or at the most two (say, different colors for men and women).

As for natural streaks in hair, there’s a genetic condition which produces this – Waardenburg syndrome, which also causes mismatched eyes. A group of characters distinguished by a white streak in their hair is the Mallen family of Catherine Cookson’s novels, beginning with The Mallen Streak.

Styles

Hairstyles are a good way to show people’s occupations (monks, soldiers and prostitutes will all wear their hair differently) or age. For instance, girls wear their hair in braids but ladies put their hair up. Complicated styles might also be a sign of social status, because only rich people would have the time or the luxury to have their hair teased into various shapes a la Queen Amidala.

And in A Game of Thrones, Dothraki men braid their hair and cut it off when they lose a fight—so the longer a man’s hair is, the better.

Adornment

People can wear pretty much anything in their hair, and often do. Ribbons, flowers, jewelry, chopsticks, berries, seashells, cakes of scent (in a hot climate, these will melt slowly) and even stuffed birds.

This is a good way to hint at social status too. At the start of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette’s braid is bound with string, but later on it’s tied with red ribbon, to show that her family’s fortunes have improved.

Power

Samosn’s hair supposedly gave him great strength as long as it wasn’t cut. Though now I’m wondering if “hair” was a euphemism for something else.

And the gift Galadriel gave Legolas was a bow strung with a strand of hair. The color of hair could also be an indication of a person’s ability, though it might be best not to go for the cliché of fire-mages having red hair.

Finally, what’s your favorite hair color? I like black or brown for most of my characters, but the one which most fascinates me is red, especially if the person has green eyes. To me, that’s about as exotic as you can get.

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Five methods of environment detection for the blind

I usually write in pre-modern worlds, so I’m going to assume there are no such things as Seeing Eye dogs here—though a science fiction short story once featured a blind alien which used a human as such a service animal. If anyone remembers what the story was called and/or who the author was, please comment and let me know.

Anyway, that made me think of ways blind people in a medieval fantasy might become aware of their surroundings.

1. Sound

Bats and whales use echolocation, but they have suitable modifications and an environment. Water conducts sound better than air does, and bats have large ears, neither of which are likely to apply to humans. Plus, it might be difficult to have a character constantly making high-pitched noises.

Though if a blind person had sensitive enough hearing, he might be able to detect even the quietest sounds—or filter said sounds from the soup of a crowded, noisy room. The problem, though, comes when dealing with the completely inanimate. Navigating a maze or even an unfamiliar house would prove more difficult, but that’s where a different sense comes in.

2. Touch

Some predators make good use of this—and use structures such as whiskers or cobwebs to maximize the amount of their environment they can detect. Humans are at a distinct disadvantage in this respect. By the time you’re close enough to an intruder to touch him, you’re probably too close and have lost the element of surprise.

Though if a human did have skin (or skin-connected structures) which extended far enough, and which could be manipulated into exploring an environment at a distance, that could work.

3. Electrical fields

I like this one because it could work in almost any world—futuristic, steampunk or medieval. There’s real-life precedent for this as well; sharks sense electrical impulses via specialized organs called the ampullae of Lorenzini.

It would also be interesting to know how such a method of detection would work. Do the stronger electrical impulses produced by living creatures feel like the shock you get when you walk across a shag carpet and open a door? Or is it more like a monochromatic pointillist world where significant surges show up like Rorschach blots?

4. Heat

Snakes can sense the warmth given off by their prey, but it would be even more interesting to intensify this ability. The molecules of substances vibrate unless the temperature is absolute zero, in which case your character is unlikely to be doing much either, and enough vibration produces heat.

If the character is a sensitive enough thermometer, he could tell the difference between metal and wood from across a room. Or he could tell which of three identical closed doors had been used shortly before, because one handle would be just a few degrees warmer than the others.

5. Seeing through the eyes of another

The other set of eyes could belong to an animal or person devoted to that purpose—though I wouldn’t want to have the compound eyes of a fly or the multiple eyes of a spider unless my brain was able to handle that kind of input.

Alternately, the blind person might be able to look through the eyes of anyone in the immediate vicinity. That might be interesting, to see yourself from the perspective of a lover or an assassin.

Any other ways of sensing the environment?

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Size in fantasy

Extremes of size aren’t something I’ve seen in a lot of fantasies. Of course, there are mentions of giants in mythology — the Nephilim, Goliath, Ajax, the Titans and so on — and they appear in role-playing gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy. But they’re never really defined as a race in their own right, with a unique biology or culture.

Then again, extremes of size aren’t biologically feasible. As Arthur Conan Doyle pointed out in his essay “The Road to Lilliput”, someone along the lines of Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man (an excellent book, by the way) would be dead long before he was able to dig a pit trap for a black widow spider.

In a fantasy, that wouldn’t matter so much, but there should be some differences of thought and behavior and belief. If there are humanoids only a couple of inches tall, where do they live and how do they deal with a world where everything is so large? Terry Pratchett’s Truckers is a wonderful take on this. The Nomes, who live secretly in a mall, are resourceful and work together to evacuate their population before the mall closes down for good. But there’s still a great deal they don’t know, and the part where they try to drive a truck is hilarious.

Sharon Baker’s novel Journey to Membliar provides a darker take on the matter. Tadge, a child of the tiny Takanu people, rides on the shoulders of Cassia, who’s one of the bigger and taller Rabu, and even steers her by judicious use of her braids. And in A Song of Ice and Fire, there are giants beyond the Wall, but these are bestial creatures who ride woolly mammoths and speak a different language.

Sexual dimorphism occurs in so many species in the real world, and my favorite is the anglerfish, where the females look like something out a nightmare but the males look small and innocuous. Probably the best example of this in fantasy is a Nebula award-winning short story by James Tiptree, Jr, called “Love is the Plan the Plan is Death” (reprinted in the collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever). The alien narrator of the story—no humans appear in it—is large, powerful, spiderlike and male. He finds a tiny female, falls in very protective love and wraps her carefully in silk so he can carry her everywhere with him.

The problem? Females of his species eventually grow larger than the males, and are much hungrier when they’re pregnant…

Finally, size and age could be inversely proportional. There was a Star Trek: Voyager episode where aliens (humanoid, of course) turned into small children as they grew older, but the children behaved like children rather than like octogenarians — probably because the episode would have been over much quicker if they had acted their age. Someone on the Nitcentral forum also speculated on what size these aliens might be at birth (ouch!), which reminded me of a haiku by Darren Greer:

My child is born
And gently
Takes me in its arms



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Five uses for disease in fantasy

This is inspired by a book I read recently – The Speckled Monster: a Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox. Smallpox was one of the most feared diseases in the world, and for good reason. If it didn’t kill its victims, it often left them horribly disfigured or even blind, when the pocks involved the eyes.

So, what uses can disease be in fantasy worlds?

1. Confers benefits

Half the fun of creating characters with abilities or powers normal humans don’t have is saddling the characters with disadvantages and flaws to make up for that. The flip side would be starting with the negative, giving the character a significant disease and showing how this gives him an equally significant advantage.

There’s precedence for this in real-life. People with the abnormal red blood cells produced by sickle-cell anemia have some protection from malaria. Maybe in a fantasy, people with terminal cancer become able to see glimpses of the future—including their own inevitable deaths. Or what if such superpowers were linked to genetic conditions like Down’s syndrome?

2. Adds physical flaws to a character

I once read a romance novel (Lorraine Heath’s Sweet Lullaby) where the hero had smallpox scars. They probably weren’t that disfiguring, but the very fact that he had an imperfection that wasn’t the usual thin, rakish duelling scar was something I remember years later.

Other diseases leave their own marks. Meningitis can lead to the amputation of limbs, and trachomatis to blindness. Be creative with fantasy diseases—perhaps being bitten by an infected mosquito leaves you with insectile features like compound eyes.

3. Biological warfare

This is my favorite, and yes, it can work in a medieval fantasy—though the flying corpses of Kaffa may not actually have spread the bubonic plague through a city in real life. Any communicable disease can work, as long as it acts quickly (AIDS is out) and can be spread with relative ease (AIDS is out, again). More effective killers would be transmitted through aerosols or droplets, by casual touch, by vectors like insects or by water.

It would also help if animals or humans used to spread the disease did not show any symptoms while they were infective (or even afterward—if they were the equivalent of Typhoid Mary). Rabies would be a great way to spread terror through a population if animals didn’t behave strangely or foam at the mouth.

4. Isolation tactic

This is a great way to provide some privacy in a medieval world. If a ship is coming into a foreign harbor with a cargo that might be better off not declared, have her docked at a distance while she’s inspected, on suspicion of plague. Of course there is none, but no one’s going to risk going aboard until that’s confirmed.

Plus, if a character makes her face up such that she resembles a leper, not many people will get close to her. Or know what she actually looks like, for that matter.

5. Natural population limiter

Humanoid populations probably don’t breed at such a rate that they would require this kind of check on their numbers, but it would work for any fecund species which might otherwise strain the environment’s carrying capacity. Think myxomatosis decimating rabbit populations in Australia.

This might, of course, be a problem if a humanoid population depended on this species for food. Or if the disease spread to the farmers and herders as well…

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Five monobiome worlds

1. Plants

Sheri S. Tepper’s Grass begins with a lyrical description of the world—how the grass forms hills and dunes that fall away into valleys of grass. The colors are different—some grass might be more blue than green, some yellowing—but it’s all a single great endless sea of grass.

Jungle planets fall into the same category—the future Earth in Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse is one. A true Daisyworld isn’t ecologically feasible, but more biodiversity can be added—or the single-species system itself could be sustained through some alternate method, such as magic.

2. Ice

There’s the planet of Winter in Ursula K. LeGuin’s classic The Left Hand of Darkness, and any SF story about an expedition to the outer giants of the solar system or their moons is likely to describe such conditions.

I’d love to read about iceworlds in a fantasy setting, though, where the characters have fewer hi-tech resources to help them survive. It would be especially cool, no pun intended, for the perfectly preserved corpses of woolly mammoths and so on to be found entombed in the ice—or, for that matter, utilized by the people.

3. Sand

Arrakis, the world described in Frank Herbert’s Dune, is a great example of this, but a far more frightening sandland is the one in Stephen King’s short story “Beachworld”. Not only is there no water to relieve the endless miles of sand, the sand itself is sentient, seeping into machinery to damage it and hypnotizing one of the astronauts into swallowing great handfuls of it.

4. Water

Reviews of Waterworld don’t paint it as promising, but such a biome has a lot going for it. Even if the people haven’t physically altered to handle such an environment (growing gills, being able to hold their breath for long periods), they could adapt in other ways. A tamed dolphin helps protect the ship-city of Armada in China Mieville’s The Scar (the book for sea adventure), but I’d love to see something other than dolphins or killer whales in such a role. A plesiosaur, maybe.

5. Fire

Perhaps not literal fire, but a world like Venus would be interesting.

Everywhere I look, all across the expansive basaltic plains, geysers and fumaroles belch up sulfurous plumes of smoke.

The Alien Life of Wayne Barlowe

Volcanic features, water reserves deep underground, physical modifications to cope with high CO2 levels and most of all, lots and lots of volatile, dangerous and potentially explosive chemical compounds. What’s not to love?



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Deserts in fantasy

I grew up in the Middle East so I have a soft spot for deserts and will read almost any fantasy novel which features them. My favorite act in Diablo 2 was also the second one, which is set in the deserts of Lut Gholein.

Creating a distinctive desert can be a lot of fun, too.

1. Terrain

Deserts don’t have to be vast stretches of sand dunes. They could be rocky instead, with great spires of weatherworn stone that fall away into deep canyons, or great expanses of pebbles which make ground travel slow if not hazardous. As for the sandy deserts, sand can be simply sand, or it can be granulated chemicals, salt or the crushed remains of bones. It could be red sand, green sand (like the poisonous desert in Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon) or white sand.

And in Dune, there were drum sands which amplified the sounds of travelers’ footsteps and attracted sandworms.

2. Magical features

I’ve blogged before about unusual physical phenomena, and a desert would be a great place to display some of these. Walls of whirlwinds or sentient sands could provide conflict and action as well.

3. Flora and fauna

It’s fun to imagine the kinds of creatures who have adapted to life in the desert. Dougal Dixon’s After Man and The New Dinosaurs are treasure troves of such imagination, but even existing fantasy creatures can be adapted for a desert life. Unicorns might be black—and partially metallic—so that they can use solar power, for instance.

4. Humans and humanoids

If there are settlements of people in the desert, how do they cope with the heat and the scarcity of water? Are they nomadic, moving from oasis to oasis, or have they simply adapted to the point where they don’t need to drink more than a handful of water per day (and if so, there should be other physical and social modifications).

A great book set in this environment is Colin Wilson’s Spider World Book One : The Desert (out of print, though, and I couldn’t even find a copy on Amazon). The humans, who live in burrows, use giant slave ants to gather water and a tamed wasp to hunt—the wasp injects prey with a neurotoxin. Of course, the humans become the hunted when their spider overlords drift over the desert on silken aircatchers, mentally searching for prey far below.

Deserts can be—and probably should be—as varied and dangerous in fantasy as they are in real life.



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Money in fantasy

Monetary systems in fantasy often fall into the gold/silver/copper lines. Partly because this is familiar and partly because it’s easier for readers to remember than, say, platinum/steel/tin.

Usually, the variations come in what the different types of coins are called. In Westeros, the world of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, gold coins are dragons and silver coins are stags – an interesting tip of the head to the political system, where the previous (dead) king’s symbol was a dragon, and the current king’s sigil is a stag.

In China Mieville’s world of Bas-Lag, people use shekels as currency, which I liked a lot because it reminded me of the ancient Middle East. Jack Vance’s world of Tschai is even more imaginative, though, since people there use sequins.

Sequins, on Tschai, are small colored gemstone-like objects that grow in nodes that bud unpredictably from the ground. Nodes can produce over a hundred sequins, which all start off clear, but take time to ripen to their final colors of scarlet and purple (passing through white, blue, green, etc. along the way). This sets the system in place – the clears are almost worthless while the purples are the most valuable.

So fortune-hunters on Tschai look for nodes. Needless to say, there’s an area where nodes do grow in some quantity, and it’s a hunting province patrolled by the vicious aliens called the Dirdir.

In our own past, people have used cowrie shells and salt as currency (the word “salary” derives from “salt”). Theoretically, money can be made of anything, as long as people can’t easily reproduce or damage it – coins made of glass would be unfeasible. It should also be in a form that can be readily transported and transferred.

Only in modern times has money been digital, existing as information passed from one computer network to another. I’ve thought and thought, but there seems to be no way to translate this to a fantasy world, without first setting up a banking system and teaching people finance. Until then, characters will just have to carry around their shekels, sequins, stags and so on.


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Horses in fantasy

Horses are common in fantasy, and have as much of a mystical appeal as swords. When I was a kid, I loved reading horse books – My Friend Flicka and The Black Stallion. Horses feature prominently in mythology as well – the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are often identified by the colors of their mounts, and Odin was said to ride the eight-legged horse Sleipnir.

The most well-known horse in fantasy may be Shadowfax from The Lord of the Rings, but there are dozens of others, such as the white horses in Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books. The horses are telepathic beings called Companions that choose certain humans.

But because horses are so often haloed in this way, I enjoy seeing them hostile and dangerous. The Keplians in Andre Norton’s Witch World are red-eyed beasts that lure humans to their deaths, though even they were civilized in The Key of the Keplian, when a girl saved a Keplian mare and her foal.

I’d love to see ugly horses as well. With horns or tusks, maybe, or natural bridles in the form of tendrils sprouting from their heads. Said tendrils would sink into the flesh of a rider, linking the two creatures via nervous system and meaning that commands could be given mentally and instantaneously.

They could have sharp, slashing blades growing from their bodies – like the Hippae in Sheri S. Tepper’s Grass. When people ride these horses, they’re forced to sit perfectly upright so they don’t get impaled on the spikes jutting from the back of each horse’s neck. As for the Hippae themselves, they’re intelligent and vicious – one review described them as being “velociraptor-like”.

Armored horses are also an option. They might grow flat close-fitting plates of keratin along their backs and sides for protection – though that would also reduce their speed and they might have broader hooves to carry the excess weight. They just wouldn’t have the “champagne-glass ankles” of thoroughbreds.

In the world of Eden, I like to characterize lands by the different types of horses they use. Dagre, in Before the Storm, is the closest to what we’d consider normal, so their horses are ordinary too, but the only breed of horse in Iternum is the palomino.

And Lunacy has intelligent but wild horses, which prey on people. Natives of Lunacy ride anything but horses, because there’s too much of a risk of the wild horses trying to impersonate tame ones, or even breed with them.

In Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a humorous parody of the cliches of fantasy, she mentions horses being treated as living motorbikes. That’s something a writer needs to take into account if the horses are covering miles and miles of rough terrain without rest or food. And if they’re a different breed of horse which is capable of this – like the sandsteeds in A Feast for Crows – it might be more realistic to give them a weakness too.

What are your favorite horses or horse stories?

Image from: http://www.jupiterimages.com/Image/royaltyFree/114359805


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Five kinds of houses in fantasy

From fairytales to epic fantasies, this genre has some of the most mind-stretching concepts when it comes to houses. Children’s stories have the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, which uses an easily adapted concept – use one’s living quarters to attract prey. Then there’s the chicken-footed cottage of Baba Yaga, and it only gets better from here…

1. Living houses

One of my favorite paintings in The Alien Life of Wayne Barlowe depicts a Villar, which looks like a gigantic human hundreds of feet tall… from the waist down. Its torso is a castle, complete with turrets and battlements (it has no head, adding to the alien look), and inside the torso, the Dwellers ride the nomadic Villar.

What I like most about living houses is that they take care of waste management and food supplies. Living in the fruiting body of a giant fungus, for instance, means breaking off a chunk of the wall whenever it’s time to eat.

2. Organic houses

Huge seashells come to mind, especially if they have many coils and turns within. Or what about the exoskeletons of giant insects or the skulls of ancient creatures? One of the most memorable things about China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station is Bonetown, which sprang up around the Ribs that are part of a giant skeleton. If the body of a dragon was preserved, people might only need to hollow out the interior.

3. Moving houses

Going a step beyond houseboats, houses might drift through the sky – either built on something which already floats (such as rocks in the Edge Chronicles) or soaring on their own power. People might never need to descend from a skyhouse if it has some means of catching food, perhaps trapping birds or snaring prey on the ground. And in an arid land, this would be a good way to follow the seasonal rains.

4. Segregated houses

Especially in cultures which practice polygamy, each wife may have her own house which the husband visits – though I wouldn’t mind seeing it done the other way around.

5. Sentient houses

In Ray Bradbury’s “There Shall Come Soft Rains”, a fully automated house goes on cleaning itself, cooking breakfast and running hot bathwater long after its inhabitants have died in a nuclear holocaust. I would love to have an apartment that cleaned itself. And a house which could communicate with me might be very convenient, not to mention excellent for security.

Unless intruders managed to foil its defences somehow, perhaps turning the house against its owners. Then it would not be so good.

And while the Bradbury story is SF, it could be easily adapted to a fantasy or horror setting, as the characters slowly realize their house is sentient or as they and the house work together against a common threat.

Which kind of house is your favorite?





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