Fantasy Disguised as Politics

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Sorry to bring up politics again. But when utter, unadulterated fantasy is repackaged as a political program that people are urged to vote for–and actually do!–it mightily cheeses me off.

This particular fantasy raises anguished howls of protest over “income inequality”–as if there were ever such a thing in the real world, or ever could be, as “income equality.” The message is that if we elect a bunch of really cool Democrats, they’ll get rid of all that inequality and transform America into the land of equal incomes.

Does this mean that a gang of crooks and schnooks in Washington will wave a magic wand, and you and I will suddenly be blessed with incomes equal to Nancy Pelosi’s, or Al Gore’s? I mean, what is this–the Arabian Nights?

The only place in the real world where there is income equality is the cemetery.

I’ve Saved a Squirrel, But Who’ll Save Us?

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

I saved a squirrel’s life today.

He was trapped inside my neighbor’s garbage can, and I could hear his panicked efforts to escape. The lid was on, you see. He gnawed a hole in it and slipped inside to grab something that didn’t belong to him, and now he couldn’t climb back out. I saw the little nose protruding from the hole, so I took off the lid and set him free.

The point is… who’s going to set us free?

Moved by greed and the lure of easy pickings, the nations of the West, which used to be Christendom, have blundered into the deepest trashcan of them all–atheistic, oligarchic socialism.

For the last 150 years, self-anointed experts–administrators, scientists, educators, politicians–have promised us an earthly paradise, if only we let them run the show. They have ravaged our national economies, shattered our faith, ceaselessly pared away our liberties, trained our young in unbelief and envy, encouraged every kind of fornication, and managed to murder at least 100 million of their own countrymen in their pursuit of “scientific socialism.”

They did all this with our consent, by promising us a fair share of our neighbors’ goods and persuading us there’s no such thing as “sin.”

Well, there is, and we’re suffocating in it.

Don’t ask Jesus to pry the lid off for us. He’s already showed us how. The instructions are to be found in the Bible. This trap we’re in is of our own imagining, a prison of the mind and of the soul.

Follow the Cross. That’s the way out.

How to Set Up Your Fantasy

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

How do you get your reader into the fantasy world you’ve created? Here are some of the methods that have worked for various writers.

Don’t bother with a fantasy world: set all your action in Southern California. This is the method of choice for cheaply produced movies. Bring He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, or the Predator, some other set of fantastic characters, to L.A. It saves on production costs, and saves writers the trouble of being creative. Please don’t even think about using this method.

One exception–Ellen C. Maze’s vampire novels (if you want to count them as fantasy instead of horror). She makes it work.

Make subtle adjustments to our world to turn it into a fantasy world. I’m not a Harry Potter fan, but J.K. Rowling deserves a big hat-tip for coming up with this technique. It remains to be seen whether anyone else can pull it off.

Transport protagonists from our world into the fantasy world. No one ever did this better than C.S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. This would appear to be the easiest way to present a fantasy, but don’t get the idea that it’s easy to do it well. But it is very easy to do it badly.

Treat the fantasy world as if it were the only world. This is the approach most commonly used–Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, Harry Turtledove, and (blush!) I, just to name a few of many. How to do it is the tricky part.

I think it’s best to start the reader off with people and places that will seem familiar, or at least easy to adjust to, and introduce him gradually to people and places that are increasingly fantastic. This is why The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings start with Hobbits in the Shire. Although Hobbits are the product of Tolkien’s imagination, they are very much like us, inwardly; and as the story progresses, and they move out from the safe, comfortable Shire, they respond as we would to the more exotic regions of Middle-Earth: with wonder, joy, awe, and terror. He makes it so easy for us to identify with Hobbits, he doesn’t need to start the story somewhere in our own world.

Always assume your reader can’t help being skeptical. You’re asking him to believe in something he knows to be fantastic: and in this you have to give him all the help you can.

Remember ‘The Rockford Files’?

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

It was my wife’s birthday this week, and I gave her a DVD–Season #5, 22 episodes of The Rockford Files.

We don’t have television anymore. My friends who have cable or satellite all say, “We get 150 channels and there’s nothing to watch.” I only see TV, these days, when I have to go to the doctor. Last time I was there, I saw a special on Kim Kardashian and her ridiculous marriage, and part of a soap opera. The guy who called television “a vast wasteland” was being much too kind. It’s much more like what you’d expect to see if they had brothels in Mordor.

Patty and I were Rockford fans way back, when the show was actually on TV. We hadn’t seen it since. So we popped the disc into the DVD player, and…

Wow!

Blow me down! A plot, of all things. A clever and creative story. Characters! Played by professional actors. Crisp, sparkling dialogue, with unexpected twists that made us laugh. Do you mean to say that TV was once like this? And it was free? You just turned it on, and there it was?

Those old Rockford Files episodes, all cranked out for just one season, were better than nine out of 10 first-run movies today. I don’t even know what’s on TV anymore, other than soap operas written by dirty-minded 12-year-olds and performed by Seconal addicts, and reality shows featuring poor schlubs whose only talent is to make the audience feel superior, and sleazy, leering screenplays about teenagers coughing up their virginity. The crimes solved by Jim Rockford seem virtuous by comparison.

I wonder what else was on, 35 years ago, that was a thousand times better than the best we have today.

How did our popular culture go so bad, so fast?

Some Helpful Hints for Writers

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

I’m often asked for advice on writing fantasy, so I thought a few suggestions might be helpful. Here are some pitfalls you should try to avoid.

Don’t bombard your readers with outlandish names. If you write a sentence like this, you’re asking for trouble: “Froobish the Saffronesian dismounted in front of the Temple of Quor and prayed a silent prayer to Poogle-Mo-Pooble that he would find High Priestess Botchygaloop in a forgiving mood.” Oh, I can imagine your objections. “No way, man! Lord Dunsany always wrote like that! So did Clark Ashton Smith–and what about all those crazy monikers J.R.R. Tolkien came up with? He had a character named Legolas, for cryin’ out loud!”

Yes, part of the fun of fantasy is making up the names. All I’m saying is, don’t overdo it. Besides which, great artists like Dunsany, Smith, and Tolkien can get away with things that the rest of us can’t.

Continue Reading “Some Helpful Hints for Writers” →

Now I Really Have Seen Everything!

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

The world is entering a new Dark Age. The fabric of Western Civilization is unraveling before our eyes. The global economy is headed for the glue factory…

And along comes the Kohler Co. with the answer! Don’t worry, be happy… As the one thing we’ve all been needing, as the solution to life’s problems, Kohler proudly presents (drum roll, please)… The Computerized Toilet!

At a mere $6,500, this baby is a steal. Ideal for installing outside your glass-walled penthouse: see the ad at http://www.kohler.com/numi/

It opens, it closes, all by itself. It plays music. It plays radio stations. It remembers your favorite water temperature.

It’s full of microchips and wires and all sorts of technological whiz-bang… and you’d better not be sitting on it during a thunderstorm. One unlucky lightning strike, and you’re musical john just might turn into Old Sparky.

I heard the guy who invented this used to be a fantasy writer, but his ideas were considered too wild to be published.

A Brief Political Comment

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

I don’t like to do politics on this site, but occasionally some “leader” makes a remark that’s so asinine, it just has to be answered.

Our president says, of the Occupy Wall Street dingbats, “I understand the frustration… People feel separated from their government.”

No, dude–no! You couldn’t be more hopelessly, cluelessly wrong!

We are not separated enough from our accursed government!

The Cellar Beneath the Cellar Review by AT Ross

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“The Cellar Beneath the Cellar is better than the first, and flows with a tighter, more focused narrative. The characters all come into their own, the scope and details of the world are more fully fleshed out, and we learn more about Obann and its history.”

Read more HERE.

 

The Wildest Fantasy Ever

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

Hey! I’ve just discovered the wildest, wackiest, wooliest fantasy ever!

What if the government made everybody equal? I mean really, really equal. We all get exactly the same income, whether we work or just sit around playing video games and getting high. If I clerk at the corner convenience store, I get just as much as a brain surgeon. If I sell hundreds of my books, I get the same money as someone who sells millions. Wouldn’t that be absolutely wonderful?

Even better, what if everything was free? Why should we have to pay for stuff? Why not force Big Business to give us all no-show jobs?

These must be good ideas. After all, they’re shouted up by college students and their professors, and we all know how smart they are. I think those Occupy This and Occupy That folks must be on to something. Or are they just on something?

No matter–let’s just go ahead and set up the guillotines, and the gulags, and the firing squads, and all the rest of the instrumentality of Utopia.

If we can micromanage the earth’s climate by taking away people’s air conditioners and toilet paper, surely we can make everybody equal.

The Thunder King: The Plot Thickens (A Review by Forrest Schultz)

Posted By: leeduigonPosted On:

A review of  Lee Duigon The Thunder King (Vallecito, CA:  Storehouse Press, 2011)
$14.00   289 pp   ISBN: 978-1-891375-56-9

Reviewer:  Forrest W. Schultz

Like the second book, the third one in the Bell Mountain saga adds more plot elements to the mix and provides deeper discussions of their significance.  Perhaps there are some critics who may judge the result to be too advanced for a juvenile reader, but, in the immortal words of Mortimer Adler, “We need something over our heads to lift us up!”.

We learn more about the significance of the ringing of the Bell and about the decadence of t he Temple, especially that of its First Prester, who is first in wickedness, not in piety.  And we see ever more clearly the parallel between the teaching in the Secret Scrolls and the doctrines in the Bible, and between the history of Obann and the history or Israel and the Church.

But it needs to be borne in mind that the story is a fantasy — a story in its own right — not an allegory. As the biographical sketch of the author on the rear jacket makes clear, Lee Duigon loves both fantasy literature and sound theology.  And, contra much of popular opinion, there is no discord between the two because, after all, God is the greatest story-writer of all — history is His Story, because it is His fantasy that became reality when He created the world.  Amen!