Clarkesworld Magazine talks about gaming with modern fantasy authors

Clarkesworld Magazine is featuring a very nice article on the influence of pen-and-paper roleplaying games in the lives of modern fantasists like Jeff VanderMeer, Catherine M. Valente, Jay Lake and China Mieville. It seems that there are several common truths that these writers hold: gaming was an influence and served for some as a kind of apprenticeship to writing fiction, and that once this apprenticeship was served, gaming was given up in preference to writing.

Mieville is always articulate regarding the influence that gaming has played in his work, and this article was no exception:

“Many of us who love the fantastic, particularly the generic fantastic (as opposed to, say, what you could loosely call the ‘haute literary’ fantastic (scare quotes deliberate) of Gogol, Bulgakov, Kafka, etc. —) is an oscillation between two aesthetic gravitational pulls. One is what is sometimes called the sensawunda. From this perspective, what draws us to the fantastic (including sf and, in a ‘bad-numinous’ version, horror), is the awe at the unrepresentable. The vasty strangeness, the ‘Real’ (in Lacanian terms), that which is definitionally beyond our power to successfully represent. You see that in everything from the appearance of Cthulhu to the apotheotic monolith of 2001 to the sudden Becoming at the end of Tiger! Tiger! That’s the side of the fantastic that puts it in a lineage with the visionary and ecstatic…

Read the rest of Mieville’s thoughts – along with those of his peers – HERE.

Tip of the hat to Jeff VanderMeer for the link.