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 Articles by Robert Gibson (119)   
Robert Gibson 
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17 Articles Total
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| Voluntary Constraints - Setting Yourself Boundaries in Science Fiction Writing You may have seen old film footage of Harry Houdini in straightjacket hanging upside down from the top window-ledge of a multi-storey building, doing his escape-act. The interest aroused by some plots can be analogous to our interest in the... ( added 148 days 18 hours ago.) |
| Putting Time Into Your Invented World - Timekeeping and SF Writing If you invent a world on which to set your stories, you will have to think about its "day" and "year"; and you may find that these details are more than details - they can become a great part of what the story is about.
The world may be alien... ( added 150 days 20 hours ago.) |
| Sentence Structure in Edgar Rice Burroughs In pursuit of the ultimate discovery of the secret of story-telling, one could do worse than study the rhythms of Edgar Rice Burroughs' prose. Because of his stereotypical characters and defects as a plotter, he must derive his power from some... ( added 154 days ago.) |
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| Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars and Venus - A Comparison of Two Worlds Apart from Tarzan , Barsoom (Mars) is ERB's most famous creation. His wonderful portrayal of a dying planet of warring city-states, with all its detailed and colourful depiction of varied flora, fauna, races, cultures, religions and customs, has... ( added 154 days ago.) |
| Small-Town Magic - Familiar Community Life in Science Fiction In Clifford Simak's All Flesh is Grass (1965), the narrator, Brad Carter, describes his love-hate relationship with his home town of Millville:
I stood there on the sidewalk, looking down the street, and I felt hatred for the town - not... ( added 154 days ago.) |
| The Great Reason for Learning Italian
Suppose that, like me, you regret lacking a classical education, and envy those few who can effortlessly read Homer and Virgil in their original languages - an achievement that normally takes years of intensive study. Of course one trusts that... ( added 154 days ago.) |
| The Good Haunting - Comfort from Reading Dante
I write in the spirit of one who offers to compare notes with other readers. This is therefore a personal essay. If you have ever been rejected or misunderstood (and who hasn't?), you may find as I did that certain lines resonate with a comfort... ( added 154 days ago.) |
| Mood and Action in a Tale of the Far Future - Seeds of the Dusk
The story "Seeds of the Dusk" by Raymond Z Gallun, published in 1938, is a gem of classic SF. Its 31 pages give us an insight into the lives and fates of three species: an alien invading plant intelligence; the descendants of crows; and the... ( added 154 days 1 hour ago.) |
| Politics with a Difference - Science-Fictional Constitutions
It's fun to set the world to rights on paper, and SF authors are no slackers when it comes to inventing constitutions.
Some of them are recognizably "close to home" in that they merely tinker with what we already have. Neville Shute's In The... ( added 154 days 1 hour ago.) |
| Solar System Development Area - Planetary Romance
First the rhapsody, then the grumble.
We live in a fantastic age of astronomical discovery. No one is a greater fan of space-probe epics than I. As Voyager 2 passed no less than four giant worlds and their satellite families in 1979, 1981... ( added 154 days 1 hour ago.) |
| Reincarnation as a Theme in Science Fiction
One might invent a science-fictional rationale for reincarnation, perhaps using the concept of a physical stream of particles such as the "mindons" of Bob Shaw's Orbitsville Departure. However, what most people mean by reincarnation - the soul... ( added 154 days 1 hour ago.) |
| Inventors of Words - Neologisms in Science Fiction Surely the most famous new word coined in science fiction is "robot", in the 1920 play by the Czech writer Karel Capek': R. U. R. ("Rossum's Universal Robots"). I don't know any Czech but I dare say "robot" comes from a root similar to the Russian... ( added 156 days 19 hours ago.) |
| Elbow-Room in Plotting - The Example of Overgovernments in Science Fiction Governments are governments, right? A thing is what it is. But.... even in our world things aren't that clear-cut. The dons of Cambridge University, for example, might be hard put to it to define the relationship of the colleges to the University... ( added 156 days 19 hours ago.) |
| Interstellar Invasion - How to make it sound plausible
Mere interplanetary invasion - attack from another world of our own Solar System - is hard to plot plausibly, given modern knowledge of the unlikelihood (in fact the virtual impossibility) that any other world circling our Sun could harbour a... ( added 159 days 19 hours ago.) |
| Empires and the SF Imagination: science fiction and the imperial theme The word empire is a popular magnet for prospective readers or game-players, however unpopular it might be in real political life.
Probably the most familiar example in SF is the Galactic Empire whose last two centuries of decline and fall is... ( added 303 days 22 hours ago.) |
| H P Lovecraft - Unrecognized Master of Science Fiction Some quite well known writers are extraordinarily mis-represented. I, as a reader, have at times been put off trying an author for decades, only to find, when I did try, that what you get is nothing like what youve been warned about.
Sometimes... ( added 303 days 22 hours ago.) |
| Science Fiction Future Histories - Criteria for Success Introduction :
Within the field of science fiction, fans can get especially addicted to the sub-genre "Future History", a series of interconnected stories set in a common background that develops over time.
For any story to be enjoyable... ( added 308 days 21 hours ago.) |
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