Category: Worldbuilding
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Meditations on Immortality, Part 2: Fractals and Infinity
In Part 1, I talked about the overlapping ideas of eternity, perfection, and immortality and the seeming paradox of making something perfect: “…making perfection a reality seems to evoke the mathematical concept of the asymptote— ‘a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it.’ One can approach perfection, but the closer…
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Meditations on Immortality, Part 1: The Paradox of Perfection
Immortality is a recurring thing in the fantasy genre—liches, elves, gods, and so on. I wanted to write down some of my thoughts on immortality, both in terms of fiction and more generally. It’s a fascinating topic, because it naturally intersects with so many other things—mathematics, metaphysics, and the limits of the human body and…
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Building a Magic System: No-Eyes’ Necromancy
Recently, I started work on a new short story that deals with necromancy. It’s the first time in a while that I’ve had to flesh out the details of a magic system, and I wanted to share the thought process that went into it. Narrative & Inspirations First, I want to talk about the story,…
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The Narrative and Worldbuilding of Bloodborne: Part 2
If you haven’t read Part 1 of my Bloodborne analysis, read it here. In it, I give an abridged summary of Bloodborne’s plot and take a closer look at the key elements of the narrative, including the Hunters and the Great Ones. To restate, much of this analysis is rooted in The Paleblood Hunt, but…
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The Narrative and Worldbuilding of Bloodborne: Part 1
For most people, the narratives of FromSoftware’s games are (understandably) treated as kind of a joke. I don’t think anyone denies that an incredible amount of time and care is put into building these stories, but when unearthing them involves deciphering the purposely cryptic description text of a necklace hidden in some god-forsaken niche in…
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Highlights from GIFCON 2017 and my trip to Scotland!
Hey, so you probably heard I was asked to speak at the Glasgow International Fantasy Conference on my 2015 project, The Rats in the Walls. The talk went great, and I’ll be publishing the full text soon, but in the meantime I wanted to give some of the high points of the trip. First off,…
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I’m Going to GIFCON This Week!
After a month of preparing, I’m heading to Scotland on Monday to speak at the Glasgow International Fantasy Convention on my Rats in the Walls project! You can check out the details of the project here, and read an excerpt from my speech here. You can also check out the promo video Alex Sherman and…
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New Essay in Clarkesworld Magazine: “Frodo is Dead: Worldbuilding and The Science of Magic”
I’ve said this before: magic should not be science. Magic can be systematic and internally consistent, but it shouldn’t be reduced to a human tool, like astronomy or chemistry. A lot of writers and worldbuilders don’t seem to understand the difference–didn’t Arthur C. Clarke famously say that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?” But there is a…
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Five Years Worth of Sketches: Ritual Magic, Death Masks, and Helmets
This weekend I finally started digging into about 5 years worth of sketches and thumbnails doodled in the margins of my school notes. The majority of the sketches are for helmets, masks, and faces, but there are some symbols and ritual magic designs. Most of the helmets on the left are meant for Redcaps, which are elves…
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New Books! Wabi-Sabi and Tibetan Buddhism
So I swung by the Spoonbill & Sugartown Bookstore in Brooklyn today while running errands and some cool books. The bookstore itself was fascinating and had a lot of cool, eclectic titles, including the Atlas Obscura and the new Non-Stop Metropolitan. There was a surprising amount of stuff on magic and mysticism, which caught my…
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THE OCCULT READING LIST VOL. 3: Three Body Problem, Language as Magic, and New Retro Wave
This is Vol. 3 of the Occult Reading list, where I collect all the interesting stories and strange pieces of trivia I’ve picked up over the past week from books, articles, and webpages. Also included are the songs that have been on repeat for me this week. Guaranteed to make you more interesting at parties. Disclaimer: There’s…
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Hypnotica: New Short Story and Sketches from Joel Clapp
9 months after its inception, my new short story, Hypnotica, is out for submission to fantasy magazines! If you want to learn more about the inspiration behind it and how I fleshed out the magic system in the story, you should check out the posts DREAMWAVE: FANTASY WRITING, QUANTUM THEORY, AND DAFT PUNK and NARCOMANCY: MORPHINE, LUCID DREAMING, AND…
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ERGODICA, Part 2: Interdimensional Necromantic Blues
New, from Chris Mahon’s Occult Triangle Lab: interconnections between Kierkegaard’s existentialism, Buddhism, immortality, Kabbalah, fractals, Godel’s Incompleteness theorem, and a piece of experimental literature about an interdimensional necromancer trapped between two infinities.
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The Crownless King
Headless gods, self-surgery, and living forever: an excerpt and some sketches on a necromantic theme, ‘the crownless king.’
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Worldbuilding: Morrowind and Vvardenfell
No one liked Cliff Racers, but Vvardenfell was one the greatest fantasy worlds ever built.