Internet Review:Phantastes Journal Spring 2000

The Spring 2000 issue of Phantastes, the Online Journal of Fantasy Criticism is now available on the Internet. Its theme for this issue is "Villains and the Problem of Evil." This issue has two interviews with Fantasy authors on the subject and several other articles. There is something of interest here for both Fantasy readers and writers.

"Orson Scott Card: On Religion in Fantasy and Science Fiction" by Moira Allen is an interview of author Orson Scott Card. He talks about how religion is almost never dealt with in books. It is all around every day life but not in fiction. When it is, it's almost always in a negative way. He gives readers some insightful thoughts on the subject.

Author Jeffrey Ford discusses the nature of evil and villains in his interview. He won the World Fantasy Award for his book The Physiogomy. In "Jeffrey Ford: The Mis-Measure of a Man" by Staci Ann Dumoski he talks about developing villains for stories. He believes that the villain must be drawn from the heroe in order to play off of very well. It's important to develop a rounded villain to keep the readers going.

Several articles cover the development of villains and the nature of evil. Cheryl Morgan covers the need for change in societies in her article "Whither the Badguy?" This article talks about those works in Fantasy that involve struggles against chaos as opposed to evil. "Shades of Grey" by Matt Beckham talks about how there are no right and wrong extremes in our modern world. This makes it difficult to develop villains without resorting to the totally evil person for the sheer sake of evil. "The Best Villains" by Bill Renk talks about the use of the Christian myth of good and evil. This is the mythos most familiar to everyone, but there are others. All of these articles are interesting and have useful points for writers.

Lastly, there are two articles that writers will find useful. "Writing Action Scenes" by Caleb Andrus is about the writing of action scenes. He offers several tips on how to make an action scene more vivid by visualizing it and slowing down your writing pace. Sophie Masson offers tips on how to write fairy tales in her article "Writing an Original Fairy Tale." One thing she suggests is to read as many of the old fairy tales as possible in order to know the techniques in creating them.

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