Brondt Kamffer's Blog, page 17

Abigail Hilton: Fauns and Filinians

*The following is in response to an author's request for review*

The Prophet of Panamindorah book one (of three), Fauns and Filinians, is the story of a boy named Corellian (Corry for short) who can't remember his past. All he knows is he doesn't belong in some foster home in Florida. He soon encounters a faun (half human, half deer), and before long he's whisked away to another world, one from which (it is revealed) he came to begin with–though he has only deep memory to confirm this...

Reading Fantasy as Literature

How do you read? How would you define a good book? I look at two critical approaches in this episode that have informed my own thinking on the matter. The first comes from C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism and the second from Mark Edmundson's Literature against Philosphy. I think it is important to understand your reading patterns as a means to understand yourself. This episode also marks a transition from a general discussion of fantasy into a future focus on specific works in the...

B.V. Larson: To Dream with the Dragons

Seeing as everything B.V. Larson publishes these days turns to gold, I've been tracking this series of sword and sorcery novellas for some time. I finally decided to give the first one a try as a break from my usual fair, since at 25,000 words (or 100 pages), this wouldn't take long to read at all. And to be honest, To Dream with the Dragons was a fun, fast read.

The adventures of the Hyborean Dragons centers around the young king Therian and his sidekick, the barbarian Gruum, who, after a...

Motifs of Fantasy

Motif, as it applies to literature, is one of those words that sends students running for the hills. So, I spend the first portion of the episode defining motif and how it relates to theme and symbol. Once that is out of the way, I take a closer look at five major fantasy motifs, at least one of which will always show up in any fantasy novel you read. I then offer five less common motifs to give a further idea of how motif works in fantasy literature.

Direct Download – 23:23 – 21.6mb mp3

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Lindsay Buroker: Dark Currents

The moment I finished reading Lindsay Buroker's The Emperor's Edge, I was eager to get my hands on the sequel, for which I had to wait a few weeks. While I definitely enjoyed this second entry in the series, I am slightly concerned that the formula may already be wearing thin.

For a start, Dark Currents once again features Amaranthe, Sicarius, and the rest of the crew as they continue seeking out good deeds to do in the empire in order to exonerate themselves, Amaranthe and Sicarius being...

Theme in Fantasy

While there are a variety of different themes in various fantasy novels, I discuss five very popular and recurring themes that have been around in the genre for a long time: Good vs Evil, Fate and Free Will, Empire, Power, and Mythology. I also spend some time talking about fantasy as social commentary and as allegory.

Direct Download – 28:47 – 26.5mb mp3

As far as social commentary and allegory go, fantasy is unique among book genres in allowing an author to talk about the real world without a...

Brandon Sanderson: Mistborn Trilogy

Let me start off by confessing that I am an official badge-wearing Brandon Sanderson fan boy. This trilogy was one of the best I've read in a long time, though it is certainly not without a few faults. One of the things I really liked about the Mistborn trilogy was the fact that Sanderson wrote each book as a stand-alone title. While the first can certainly be read without the others, I felt that the books became increasingly reliant on each other to make sense. It seemed more like the first ...

Worldbuilding: Language

This is the final episode in the six-part worldbuilding series, and today I talk about language creation. Language creation is daunting, made even more so for English speakers by the fact that English is so incredibly complicated. The good news, though, is that English is unique in this sense. That is, most languages are far simpler and more consistent than English, so that you can create a fantasy language with far more ease than you would think (though still with a lot of hard work and...

Douglas Hulick: Among Thieves

Digging through the fantasy bestseller lists for something other than Brandon Sanderson or Robert Jordan leads me to think that the only stuff being published at the moment is dark, gritty, bloody fantasy. Having expressed my distaste for Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch, I was rather hesitant of picking up Hulick's Among Thieves, first in his Tales of the Kin series. What decided me in the end was the lure of the first person narrative, something rather uncommon in the genre–oh, and a pretty ...

Fantasy, now and then

This is the inaugural episode of a brand new podcast in which I will be discussing the fantasy genre. Topics I'll be looking to discuss in future episodes include common fantasy themes and motifs, fantasy bestiaries, world building, important authors, etc. Most of this information is an accumulation of ten years' reading and studying fantasy as an avid reader and aspiring writer.

In this episode, I discuss the history of fantasy as a recognized genre, as well as examining the development of...