Author: Chris Mahon
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Wizards: Old Grey Beards
If you ask someone on the street to name the first three wizards that come to mind, you’ll probably hear the names Gandalf, Merlin, and Dumbledore ... -
High Resolution: Worldbuilding and the Small Details
I have a fascination with the metal buttons on pay phones, the pixels on old Zenith televisions, the writing on IV drip bags, and the lettering ... -
True Names, Binary, and Mathematics as Magic
A while ago, I decided to sit down and flesh out the notation and structure of magic in my world. One of the key problems I ... -
Hidden Layers: Spell Maps, Illusions, and Neural Networks
Anyone who’s ever watched Serial Experiments Lain remembers the scene when Lain goes to greet her friends at school, but instead a doppelganger emerges from her and goes in her ... -
Iaido, Wing Chun, and ‘After the Rain’: Reflections on Martial Arts
I started taking wing chun classes at City Wing Tsun in Manhattan recently. It’s been a great experience, partly because the people are almost universally friendly, ... -
The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
Let me put something in perspective. If you read Neuromancer, you remember the surreal paradise of Straylight, the space station Case and the crew travel to. You ... -
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
I first heard about this book when reading through Philip K. Dick’s biography, I Am Alive and You Are Dead, which took its title from one of the ... -
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Nobody needs me to say that Cryptonomicon is relentlessly witty, written with wonderful, vivid prose, immersed in layers of fascinating concepts and technology, and absolutely vertigo-inducing in scope. These ... -
Exploring Vvardenfell: How Morrowind Created an Immersive Secondary World
Back in 2012, I was sitting with a group of fantasy writers at the PNWA conference in Seattle. Everyone had begun rolling off their favorite authors, ... -
The Necronomicon to the Nokizi: Creating Texts For Secondary Worlds
Writing in-world texts offers an anchor for characters, readers, and authors—when everyone is working off the same information, there’s a sense of immersion and verisimilitude, that ...