Tag: tvtropes

Trope Tuesday: Planetville (aka Adventure Planets)

Adventure towns…IN SPAAACE!!! Seriously, that’s the best way to describe it.  In Westerns and TV serials, the heroes travel from town to town, with a new adventure in each place.  Well, in science fiction, we don’t hop towns, we hop planets.  Why?  Because we can. Unfortunately, since planets and towns are actually pretty different kinds… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Planetville (aka Adventure Planets)

Trope Tuesday: Arcadia

What happens when you cross the Ghibli Hills with the Call to Agriculture?  You get Arcadia, a simple, uncomplicated utopia where people keep to the good old ways and live in harmony with nature.  As home sweet home for the farm boy and the country mouse, it’s often the starting point for the hero’s journey, though you’ll… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Arcadia

Trope Tuesday: Honor Before Reason

If you can’t do something smart, what do you do? Something right–at least, when this trope is played straight. Characters who place honor before reason tend to be idealists, starry-eyed or otherwise.  It’s not that they’re stupid–at least, not always–but they do tend to be vulnerable to flaw exploitation.  If the Fettered can’t take a… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Honor Before Reason

Trope Tuesday: Elegant Weapon for a More Civilized Age

Before the world fell apart and the Empire took over, when there were still men of honor in the world who stood boldly against evil and fought for the weak and the downtrodden, there was this trope.  The weapon of choice of a bygone age, more elegant and noble than the crass instruments of wanton destruction so common… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Elegant Weapon for a More Civilized Age

Trope Tuesday: Peking Duck Christmas

It’s Christmas, but for whatever reason (most likely because you’re Jewish), you don’t celebrate.  Or maybe you do celebrate Christmas, but you live in a place where no one else does. So December 25th comes around and you feel left out.  What do you do?  Simple–you find a cheap Chinese place, or somewhere similarly non-festive that’s… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Peking Duck Christmas

Trope Tuesday: Terraforming

One of the problems with interplanetary colonization is that Earth-like worlds are fairly rare (though possibly not as rare as we once thought).  In our own solar system, the only other world that comes anywhere close (Mars) is a radiation-blasted desert with only the barest hint of an atmosphere and a surface temperature colder than… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Terraforming

Trope Tuesday: Settling the (Final) Frontier

I love stories about colonization, especially when they’re set in space.  There’s just something about a small group of rugged pioneers striking out into the harsh, unforgiving wilderness to make a new life for themselves.  Maybe it’s just something about my American heritage, or all those 4x games I played as a kid, but I doubt… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Settling the (Final) Frontier

Trope Tuesday: Space Cossacks

I’m going to take a break from the hero’s journey trope posts for a while, until I have the time to do them justice.  In the meantime, let’s have a little fun. Some of my favorite science fiction stories are the ones about a culture of nomadic starfaring people wandering the universe in search of… Continue reading Trope Tuesday: Space Cossacks

Oh hey! Happy Thanksgiving!

Funny how holidays creep up on you when you’re in a foreign country. We have Friday off here in Georgia, due to an Orthodox religious holiday.  I’ll probably head east and check out the Stalin museum, maybe Mtskheta and Qazbegi depending on the weather.  A friend of mine in Tbilisi said she’d get me a… Continue reading Oh hey! Happy Thanksgiving!