My poor apple boy looks more like a buck-toothed Link now. Annie would have pointy ears under her bonnet too. I see them more tied with old timey fae lore.
Johnny’s summoned with that glowy appleseed, and controlled with one or two marionette controllers, though he has an issue with passiveness, and tends to respond to the slightest threat from miss as-yet-unnamed witch here.
At some point witch-lady will make Johnny go all berserker-mode on the folk trying to rescue him, and he won’t like that one bit. Well, internally.
I need to draw Edison’s bull mode. Any excuse to draw bovine!
A couple of protagonists from the appleseed story, which I’ll now tag as pocket full of rye. I’ve decided these summoned spirits are not the historical figures themselves, but embodied ideals. So the gal here is a vague nod to Annie Oakley and other sharpshooters of the west. The actual Annie definitely wasn’t as frilly as this, but dangit I like decorative clothing. It’s also a smallish nod to the pink Annie from the SNES game Wild Guns.
The fella is a young warlock (Edison) that crossed the antagonist (previously mentioned witch), and as a result, was trapped in his animal shape (texas longhorn), mind-wiped and kept among the witch’s herd of cattle for several years, up until Annie freed him and restored his memories. He keeps his ear tag to remain focused on ending the witch, though Annie is only interested in breaking the bonds on her fellow spirit and close friend, Johnny.
Another story I had involved legend characters from the tall tales setting, or something close. It’d be one of the few times I’d include a modern setting, as nothing bores me more than every day locations with every day humans. But! It would begin and center around the daughter of a dairy farmer who’d practice witchcraft in private. At some point she’d learn how to summon certain spirits, or she’d stumbled upon a relic relating to western folklore, and call up Johnny Appleseed himself. Well, I haven’t decided if it would be actually him, or some embodiment of his ideals. In any case, usually only druids would summon him to help regrow a recently charred forest, but the witch has other plans.
Johnny would be a kinda’ aw-shucks/Fixit Felix character, and politely try to unsummon himself, but this witch’s relic keeps him around, and allows her to switch on a chaotic state in which he cannot deny her commands. The two of them wreak havoc in some manner, likely in the name of justice, and then we’d introduce the protagonist(s), which I’m not sure of yet. I wanted to bring in some representation of Annie Oakley and/or Pecos Bill, and respective witches and warlocks that summon them willingly.
I have a vague image of Johnny’s witch in my head, and I’ll scribble her up at some point.
Look what I found I made tons of these back in 2009 when Taylor and our fan club were nominated for the MTVLA Awards. I gave one to everyone I knew and I even told my mom to hand them out to her students lmao. Anyway, long story short we still lost but I TRIED
Happy birthday to the most talented, kind and genuine person I know. I’m proud beyond words of everything you’ve accomplished so far. Your music has not only been the soundtrack of my life, but I’m a better person because of you.
Thank you for giving us two albums in the most difficult year possible, we really needed them.
“Legend says he is not dead, but asleep with his knights in a cave in the Kyffhäuser mountain in Thuringia, and that when the ravens cease to fly around the mountain he will awake and restore Germany to its ancient greatness. According to the story, his red beard has grown through the table at which he sits. His eyes are half closed in sleep, but now and then he raises his hand and sends a boy out to see if the ravens have stopped flying.”
We get enough people at book fairs, sellers included, asking us what Speculative Fiction is that we thought an explanation was merited.
Note: I have no intention of arguing the case that science fiction and fantasy are as much skilled works of art as regular literature; that argument has been covered enough times and it bores me. Time determines what is art not genre.
As the term suggests speculative fiction is fiction that involves some element of speculation. Of course, one can argue that all fiction is speculative insofar as it speculates what could happen if various elements of a story were combined. Yet we feel that this term is descriptive enough to encompass the type of literature we want to categorise. First, a word about genre
Book genre is of limited use and is often more harmful than good. If you went into a bookshop and asked for literature, you’d be taken to the fiction section. If you said that you were looking for any Darwinian literature you’d be sent to the science section. At some point it was determined that literature suggested artistic merit. Yet we also use it to cover a particular grouping of written works. The point is that classifying the written word is a little futile as common usage will usually dictate what that classification envelops, and common usage is of course open to interpretation. Genre does however allow boundaries to be set for marketing purposes; if a reader enjoyed a number of books in a certain genre then there’s a reasonable chance they’d enjoy other books in the same genre. From a critical perspective, understanding genre helps align a work of literature with one’s expectations; certain tropes and mechanisms are, to some extent, more acceptable in one genre than another.
Now, this element of speculation. The speculation in speculative fiction isn’t concerned solely with speculation over how various story elements might interact, but speculation over the fabric of those elements. A work of speculative fiction takes one or more elements of an otherwise perfectly possible story and speculates as to what would happen if that element existed outside of current understanding or experience. Essentially, it’s writing about things that aren’t currently possible. The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a father-son story of survival, nearly everything is contemporaneously possible, except one thing the setting of the story is plausible future.
When you pick up an Agatha Christie, a Jane Austen or a Graham Greene, regardless of how the story unfurls, and how perhaps unlikely the story, it’s always within the realm of possibility (poor writing and deus ex machina aside). Yet a Philip K. Dick, a Tolkien or a Stephen King will always seem impossible, given current understanding.
The word current is key, to allow inclusion of scientific speculation. A seminal work like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars has a lot of the science in place to explain how the colonisation of Mars might / could take place (I assume the science is correct; it doesn’t matter to me personally but I know a lot of readers are particular in this area). The speculation is on how plausible, but currently theoretical, scientific and technological advances might solve a problem.
There is a slight grey area where such scientific knowledge and its technical implementation exists and is currently possible and a good story has been written about it. Imagine a book about travelling to the moon written in 1969. Imagine it’s not an adventure, it explores personal relationships between the characters and their heroic journey. For someone unfamiliar with planned space travel such a book would seem like science fiction, yet it was of course entirely possible in 1969. I personally wouldn’t classify such a work as speculative fiction as it doesn’t fit the definition, but I’d certainly class it as science fiction if I were to market it as it would fit the bill for many readers. Similarly a book like Psycho, it’s a work of horror but there’s no supernatural element and it’s plausible and possible given current understanding.
For books like The Hobbit orCarriethecurrent part of the definition becomes less important; Middle-Earth neither has nor probably will exist, neither will telekinesis. Of course, as science progresses some things that are currently implausible will be come plausible, if not possible. Space travel being a great example; progress is constantly being made.
Speculative fiction is also an umbrella term so includes the majority of works in the fantasy, science fiction and horror genres, also smaller genres such as magic realism, weird fiction and more classical genres such as mythology, fairy tales and folklore. Many people break speculative fiction into two categories though: fantasy and science fiction, the former being implausible the latter being plausible (in simplistic terms). This is helpful for those interested in having some sort of technical foundation upon which to build their speculation, and those who aren’t.
When one thinks of science fiction, one thinks back to the 1930’s and the Gernsback era, perhaps earlier to Wells and Verne. One might even cite Frankenstein. When one thinks of fantasy one thinks of Tolkien, perhaps Victorian / Edwardian ghost stories, Dracula, perhaps Frankenstein. It seems comfortable to think of these things as modern endeavours. Anything earlier often falls under the general category of literature (in the non-speculative fiction sense). Take More’s Utopia,you’d find that under literature or classics, not under fantasy. Similarly Gulliver’s Travels. Again, this is just marketing; there’s no reason why Gulliver’s Travels should not be shelved next to Lord of the Rings other than to meet a reader’s expectation.
At Hyraxia Books we like to think of certain classic works not simply as works that have contributed to the literary canon, but also as works that have contributed to the speculative fiction canon. For us, Aesop’s Fables,Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, Otranto, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Iliad, The Prose Edda, Beowulf and the Epic of Gilgamesh are not simply classics, but also speculative fiction classics. We don’t like to think of the genre starting in the last two hundred years, we like to think of literature (in the non-speculative fiction sense) having branched off from the speculative rather than the other way round. We like to see how that story has played out over the millennia.
That is how we define speculative fiction for the basis of our stock. Of course, we stock other items too, many of which we are very fond of.
