Intriguing Points of View

With the post on board games, we come to the end of the series on gaming as a mode of story-telling in the science fiction, fantasy and historic genres. I have tried to comprehensively cover the various types of games – computer based and non-computer based, online and offline. There are probably more of them that I may not be aware of. Also one can delve deeper into specific games as we can into specific books and series. But then I have never really been that much of a gamer to really do critical analysis of games – for that I may have to get a guest writer for an entire series. As regular readers of this blog may have noticed I am trying to vary review or showcase series with original fiction series highlighting a facet of storytelling in the genres this blog tries to showcase. The first series was a review of science fiction series, followed by articles on classic authors who wrote science fiction. Then we had a series on children’s fantasy series which was followed by a series of retelling of fairy tales. Following that we had a series on Japanese cartoons followed by mythological retellings. So now after this series on gaming, we move on to a series on intriguing points of view.

A typical story is about humans in our contemporary times just like us. Historic fiction, science fiction and fantasy take us to a different place and time. So we see other worlds from our point of view. If we turn this concept on its head, wouldn’t one wonder how people from other worlds view our world? It could be a person from the future, a person from the past, a person from an imaginary or fantastical world. It need not even be a person – it could be an animal endowed with intelligence, or maybe a tree or an inanimate object like a rock. There could also be non-human fantastical entities such as elves and orcs, dragons and unicorns, aliens from distant galaxies, Gods. Seen from other eyes, our own world can appear as much a fantasy as other words.

As usual, while most of the stories that would form part of this series would be written by me, I will see if I can get some guest posts. While one would think people would be more reluctant to part with their original works of fiction, I on the contrary have found more takers for guest post requests on fiction series than for topical or review series. So I hope supplemented with a health quotient of guest posts, this series will turn out to be one of the longer ones like the other fiction series have been so far.

Coming up next week – Looking back from the Future - The Strange Ritual