An Epic Fantasy* like no other!
(*with dragons)
Epic Fantasy *With Dragons
Master Dragonslayer Corlan Tang is the best in the business!
So it is little surprise that jealous Guild rivals conspired to have the sniveling Prince to banish him from the city.
Sent out into the Valley of Death – and stuck with a runaway boy from the palace kitchen – Corlan decides on a plan. He will head to the far end of the valley where he’s heard a vast marsh provides nesting grounds for the dragon horde. There he will smash their eggs and lance the younglings, destroying dragons once and for all! Then he can return as a conquering hero!
However, like any foolhardy quest, there are constant dangers and seductive detours along the way – as well as unsettling encounters with new allies, fiends, and traitors. A quest changes a man, Corlan realizes, and he finally must reconcile the dark secrets from his past.
Despite every distraction, Corlan must succeed, if only for his own stubborn sense of justice, but also so he might return home again. To achieve his goal, he must push himself onward, use his wits and guile, demonstrate his daring-do, and employ all the will and strength he can muster – for surely the gods have assigned him their harshest tests in this twisted new world, harshly cleaved from fire and quake. After all, the fate of the world rests in our hero’s hands.
[Read more about the creation of this epic work on the author’s blog.]
If utopia is quite literally paradise, then dystopia can be thought to be a place that is hell on earth. While this definition can be true, dystopia as a genre is quite often used to describe a place that appears perfect on the surface but is bad underneath. Sometimes this corrupt existence is known but suppressed (The Capitol in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games is a perfect example of this). In other instances, the world appears to all intents to be perfect, but it is discovered as otherwise, quite often by the main character in the story.
Many novels you see in the genre of post-apocalyptic are actually apocalypse novels. The Stand by Stephen King is an example of this, his more recent novel, Under the Dome, also falls into the apocalyptic genre. For this category, you need a world that is in the midst of crumbling. There can be many reasons for this: famine, disease, medical mayhem, earthquakes & other natural disasters the Mayan calendar, religion & the end times, zombies, aliens, and so the list goes on. The main thing to be aware of is the fact that life as we currently know it is disappearing and the survivors have to cope with this as well as plan for the future ahead.
This genre is similar to the apocalyptic one, and sometimes it can even overlap. The Passage by Justin Cronin does this. His book starts as a post-apocalyptic adventure, but in parts we are taken back to the time of the apocalypse.
Sometimes the post-apocalyptic world will be many years and generations into the future and this is quite often where the line between post-apocalyptic and dystopia blur. When this is the case, the world that we currently live in is quite often (but not always) seen by the post-apocalyptic characters as an utopian world. In other instances, the post-apocalyptic world will be newer and many of the characters in the story remember what life was like before the big change. They have memories of lost loved ones and things that they once had but no longer can have (ie. TV, McDonalds, the internet, etc). The Walking Dead comic series by Robert Kirkman is an excellent example of a newly post-apocalyptic world.
