Alright, sure, this strip is completely ridiculous, but given the source material, can you really blame me? Guys riding on dragons in medieval-looking futures just makes me think of metal album covers. You were this close to getting that “Screaming For Vengeance” bird, but it didn’t have appropriate lyrics.
Oh, and I hated this story with the passion of a thousand suns. To me, it represents pretty much everything I hate about fantasy fiction. But hell, if you like it, then party on. As if I’m one to judge – I’ve read, like, sixty Star Wars novels.
(And yes, there used to be a much longer rant here detailing – at length – everything I hated about this book. But it just came off as mean spirited, so I snipped the rant out a year later.)
12 Comments
@Lysander
The Harper Hall series, in which some pernese rediscover part of their past, definitely swings more towards scifi.
Just finished reading that book for the first time yesterday. It disappointed me. Sure I suppose time-travel solves everything, but everything seemed fairly effortless for the main characters. They attempted some life-lessons for the woman main character, about consequences of rash action, but the consequences were good so no lesson was learned. Frustrating. Maybe the sequels will be better.
You win so hard for referencing Priest.
As for fantasy, I was really into it when I was around 12. Margaret Weiss, Tracey Hickmann, Mercedes Lackey, etc. But I just got so frigging tired of the standards of a story that takes place in an allegorical western medieval Europe with dragons. Fantasy is such a huge genre, representing all sorts of possibilities, that it’s really a shame authors keep churning out the same old same old.
Margaret Weiss just did a bestselling novel that’s a dead ringer for the Dragonlance stuff she wrote almost 20 years ago. Time to move on, you know?
Sometimes I wonder how many people actually GOT the goofy music reference in this comic. Glad I wasn’t alone!
ToTurn? Isn’t a turn a year?
Haha, yeah, I caught crap for that the day this comic originally went online. I still stand by my stupid joke.
…thereisagenrecalledScienceFantasy… I write in it… feel free to hate on me now…
Aw, no chance of getting the rant back? I actually quite liked it. I suppose it did come across as a bit hostile though.
@Accalia
Nope, ’tis Scifi DISGUISED as fantasy. I don’t care what’s on the cover. The inside says it’s the future, the humans are from Earth, the dragons are BIOENGINEERED, their fire is combustion, they are powerful psionic users, and they face a SPACE FUNGUS OF DOOM from a rogue planet. Yes, dragons are fantasy and the covers don’t hint that it’s scifi but that’s why they say to never judge a book by it’s cover. Never thought I’d have to use that in defense of an actual book, tho.
No, it’s fantasy disguised as science fiction. Like Star Wars. Forget the dragons and the retro-tech culture; the real tipoff is the MAGICAL POWERS the dragonriders and dragons exhibit.
Telekinesis (you don’t think something like Mnementh could get off the ground just by flapping its wings, do you?), telepathy, teleportation… “psionics” is just the word fantasy writers use to say “magic” when they want to pretend they’re writing science fiction.
@roguebfl it is fantasy. Even the later books have more fantasy in them than scifi.
The two genres blend into each other quite a bit but here is a good rule of thumb to keep them straight. If the cover art features rivets, or computers, or space flight, or chrome it is scifi, if it features magic, or fantastical creatures (like dragons) or leather clad hero/heroine(with optional sidekicks) then it is fantasy.
Um as the series progress you fined out it not a Fantasy series at but Science Fiction.