Aliette de Bodard

Recent Actions

• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  :) The God of Google......
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  Hahaha Heteromeles that is awesome. Giving me a lot of ideas for future material......
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  Wow, so I step back for a bit and the conversation has been going on for a while, I see :) I'm not a folklorist, so this comes with a big big helping of caveats, but for me myths are...
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  That's neat. I love people who break each other's fundamental principles (I do it in the book). It's so funny to handle (me? sadistic? Not at all :p)...
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  Thank you! And agree with you (though as said below and in my post I think both approaches are two poles of a continuum that starts with Wild Magic and ends with magic-as-science)....
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  I was having this conversation on twitter earlier... Much as I love ropleplaying games (which do need fairly "stress-tested" systems so that your players have a good idea what they want to do, and don't spend too much time arguing...
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  icehawk@40 and April_D@35: I love these. Can I hazard a guess that they work because the focus on the story isn't on the magic and there aren't many magicians around? (I've never read the Black Company :( ). If you...
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  guthrie@30: for me, "irrational and illogical" is a question of point of view? It's just something that doesn't make sense from the characters' point of view, but it probably makes a lot of sense from the magician's point of view...
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  John Ohno@18: thank you for the detailed explanation! Magic as engineering is great (but not quite what I wanted to go for in that book...). John@20: that sounds like a fabulous idea! Bookmarking for later....
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  Dick Bruere@15: thanks for the link! I, uh, come from a very different direction I guess? I want to write about the stuff of myth and fairytale with a thick enough veneer of realism that the reader suspends disbelief (which...
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  Gregory Muir@8-10: sort of agree? Magic can have rules (if you read the Sanderson books, it's pretty clear that doing the same thing in the same circumstances nets you the same results). The issue is that in narrative, you need...
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  CPickersgill @4: thank you! Michael @5: I really liked that in the subsequent books of the Farseer series (the detailed mechanics of dragon carving were just awesome. Best idea ever). I think magic and science are sort of related, or...
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  @heteromeles: I'm a qi gong practitioner (at level, er, very beginner) so I have some idea of what you're talking about (a lot of it is based on Traditional Chinese Medicine actually, which is... pretty close to a science in...
• Commented on Introducing guest blogger: Aliette de Bodard
  JamesPadraicR@4: aw thank you! Xuya stories will hopefully be collected at some point, but right now I'm focusing on House of Shattered Wings #2 (and project snakelet, which is a time drain in and of itself...)....
• Commented on Magic systems and my world building process
  Princejvstin@1: funnily enough, I fall somewhere in the middle? I love Sanderson, but I'm incapable of writing that rigidly even if it's actual science... The Ile-Rien colliding magic systems are fabulous (I've only read Death of the Necromancer, but I...
• Commented on Introducing guest blogger: Aliette de Bodard
  Hey Michael@5: thank you so much, glad you've enjoyed it! The House of Shattered Wings has a lot of places, depends where you want to roam: Notre-Dame is the obvious one, followed by a walk around Ile de la Cité...
• Posted Magic systems and my world building process to Charlie's Diary
  Hi everyone, this is Aliette de Bodard peeking in from Paris. Charlie's been kind enough to let me borrow a spot on his blog while he recovers from jet lag (we both went to Worldcon in Spokane, but I have...
• Commented on Introducing guest blogger: Aliette de Bodard
  Bellingham @1: waves Aw thank you! Very flattered that it worked for you. I have no idea how I pulled it off :) Andreas @2: arg, awfully sorry about that. The rights to O&B reverted to me end of June,...
• Posted Attempting to Charlie's Diary Test Bed
  OK trying to see how this works so I don't screw up....