I don't actually know how much this post will help you in ridding your works of pesky anachronisms, but the title just seemed to clever to resist. If you're not already familiar, an anachronism is a literary, spatial or temporal (usually temporal) transplant. A detail, a phrase, an expression, a device, or really anything else could be an anachronism; most commonly these are stock expressions or devices of our own time that we accidentally put into our works. Nor are they unique to literature, as there are plenty of examples in movies and other media. For instance, perhaps a period movie might show cars from a later model year driving around in the background. Or my personal favorite, when an author or screenwriter has archers "fire" their arrows, an expression which could not predate the advent of firearms. This last one even made its way into The Lord of the Rings movies (notably during the battle at Helm's Deep).
Sententia Discussion Series 12: Therapy
Therapists, psychiatrists, religious leaders, consultants, and other forms of counselors have rapidly proliferated in recent decades. It sometimes seems almost like the modern Oracle - you have a question about what you ought to do, so instead of going to the Oracle at Delphi for a prophecy, you go to the local psychiatrist for an augury.
Herodotus’s Histories Review
The Histories themselves are split up into nine books, which more or less focus on the Greco-Persian conflicts of that time period, with numerous digressions to talk about the history of Egypt, Babylon, or other places that come up.
Agency
It's almost considered too blunt to say that someone died. Instead, we might say that they passed away, or that they passed on, or that they lost or gave their lives. Some might argue that the difference between those wordings is slight, incidental, even meaningless. After all, in cold facts the end result is the same. Yet those words are different, they mean different things, and we use one or the other to convey different meanings - this is especially true of the last two examples. The difference between losing a life and giving a life may be subtle, and yet it makes such a difference in how the person and the event is perceived. One makes the death a tragedy. The other makes it heroic, because it expresses that there was a choice involved, it gives the individual agency.
Dragon’s Blood Review
There have been so many different takes on dragons over the years (and, indeed, centuries), and I have read so many different books about dragons, that you would think that I would eventually get tired of them, or stop finding books that have anything really original to add to the topic. You might think that, but you would be wrong; it seems that there will always be more stories to tell about these majestic creatures in all of their various forms, which for some reason loom so large in our imaginations. Dragon's Blood is another fine contribution to the massive body of human literature on the compelling subject of dragons.
Blood Magic S1:E6: A Prime’s Place Re-Release
As I think I said when this episode was first released, or at least when I did the review of season one, A Prime's Place doesn't entirely fit with the rest of Blood Magic. Despite that, it is one of my favorite episodes. It's short, it's a very tight viewpoint, its heavy on character and short on plot. I knew going into my revisions that I wanted to make minimal changes to it, and I retained that conviction throughout my re-read.
Fo’Fonas Symbol
I'm still very excited about the potential that this world and series holds, and just because I haven't made writing progress recently does not mean that I haven't been thinking about it, which is sometimes almost as useful. For instance, one of the threads I sort of dropped in the rough draft of the first book was the idea of the magic being dangerous to its wielders, and I think I finally solved just what makes it dangerous. It turns out that the "magic" has motivations and desires of its own, or at least an objective that does not necessarily align with that of its users.
Sententia Discussion Series 11: Instincts
Many people speak of making decisions by instinct, or of "gut feelings." Without getting into the conversation of nature versus nurture, human instinct is a peculiar thing, something in which many people place a great amount of faith, but most people don't even fully understand the difference between instinct and intuition. Instinct is something that is fundamental to a creature's biological makeup, while intuition is the result of the brain's complexity leading to the synthesis of a solution without presenting in detail all of the steps it took to reach that result.
Inherit the Stars Review
Every time I pick up one of these classic-style science fiction novel, like Ringworld or Double Star, I find myself saying that a) I should read these sorts of books more often, and b) I wish that books like these were still written today.
Seeing the Light, Seeing the Lightning
There are certain principles that I have found underpin an astonishing number of our modern systems, and gaining a thorough understanding of a principle like that can enable you to understand or surmise how so many different things work. One of those, which is what we will be discussing today, is the photoelectric effect. It seems like at least once a week I come across some new piece of technology that leverages the photoelectric effect in a completely new or different way, and increasingly I marvel at how such a relatively simple principle underpins so much of our modern world. So let's talk about the photoelectric effect.
