Michal Wojcik's Blog, page 4
August 2, 2020
A brief thought on Station Eleven
Years after I read the book, I can finally articulate why my opinion on Station Eleven has grown more negative every year after I happened to tune into a radio interview with Emily St. John Mandel this morning about a completely different novel.
Station Eleven snaps back from its post-apocalyptic setting to a contemporary one and asks us to care about characters who are already far over-represented in mainstream Canadian literature, as if it connects in some way to the troupe of actors who ot...
June 15, 2020
RPG setting: After the Hammer’s Blow
A write-up for the current game I’m running. As it’s already out there online, so I thought I’d share it here as well.
This setting is also available as a printable PDF on Risusiverse.
Background
Three hundred years ago came the Hammer’s Blow. An astral body came hurtling towards the earth with an impact so great the very continents were hurled into the sky. With it too came a large infusion of magical energies that permeated the shattered land.
Now, the world looks little like i...
May 19, 2020
Episode 43 – Step Aside, Dune
…There’s a new Kwisatz Haderach in town.
We talk Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki.
Download the Podcast (archive.org page)
April 11, 2020
1984 in 2020
The first time I encountered George Orwells 1984 was in an essay collection by Isaac Asimov I read when I was 11. It was the first thing Id read by Asimov, it was the first essay in the book, and it was devoted to criticizing 1984 as a bad example of science fiction. Its laughable to recall that essay now. Asimov was fixated on the Orwells failure to imagine technological advancement and how well it measured as a predictive text; he pushed an idea that science fiction attempts to accurately...
April 1, 2020
Episode 42 – The Law of Equivalent Exchange
Recording this episode cost us an arm and a leg.
We talk Fullmetal Alchemist.
Download the Podcast (archive.org page)
March 23, 2020
Episode 41 – Fullmetal Cybersix
We were supposed to record an episode about Fullmetal Alchemist, but we got distracted by Cybersix, an animated Canadian TV show from 1999 that should not exist.
Download the Podcast (archive.org page)
March 15, 2020
Fantasy without humanity
While fantasy novels promise the ability to reach the limits of our imaginations, its still not often that authors choose to tell stories with no humans in them at all. Estrangement is a common way to describe fantasy, but crossing the gap to completely alien biologies and societies puts more distance between a reader than just throwing in unfamiliar words, behaviours and cultures. I know plenty of readers thrown off by the first chapter of Dune just from the terminology used in the first...
February 1, 2020
Three for January
Three bits of art I made in January, two digital and one with ink. Posting because I thought these were better than anything I did all through 2019.
The last is a tribute to Cybersix, a character from an Argentinian comic that improbably became a Canadian-Japanese cartoon in 1999. The original comic, as far as I can tell, has never been translated into English or Japanese.
[image error][image error][image error]I also did a painting commission for Marie over at Shrink & Expand, which you can see here.
December 29, 2019
Farewell to 2019
In preparing for the post, I read over my previous “farewells”. I realized my reflection on the year is largely the same as in 2018. I’m still frustrated with my creative output. I wrote no fiction at all this year, and while I’ve devoted most of my free time to artwork, I’m still not happy with my finished pieces. The house I’ve been building since 2018 still isn’t finished. Lay on that trouble sleeping and it hasn’t felt like a great year.
But, on balance, I should be more positive about...
