Justine: Instead of mean and cranky henchmen to cause bodily harm, you should really invest in henchment who enjoy the henching – makes them so much more effective…

On Geekdoms: I always felt the defnition of Geek requires both a devotion to some thing or interest that requires a practiced or acquired skill or knowledge, coupled with a nonconformity that places the person at least somewhat or in some way outside the mainstream social acceptance.
Therefore, anyone can really be a geek if they devote significant energies toward something the mainstream would find not worthy of the kind of energies or devotion the geek chooses to devote.

On D&D: Coming from sleepy suburban America in the late 1980s through very early 1990s, we weren’t allowed to play D&D (or hang with those who did) becuase it was satan’s board game ;}

Final Thought: being devoted to a geek-like undertsanding of Buffy is not, by definition, geeky, becuase the devotion is well-deserved and ethereal. :}

Emily

That in turn would have changed the online and computer gaming world significantly. An awful lot of readers and writers have come to speculative fiction through the many games that owe a powerful debt to Gygax and D&D. To ignore that secondary influence on the genre is to miss much if not most of the impact of D&D.

I am a well-dressed geek, but I’ve never played D&D and don’t really understand it. Also, my only interaction with “High Fantasy” outside of Tolkien’s LOTR and The Hobbit (Does Pullman and Lewis count?) is in the movies, which are always tolkien rip offs. that, and Tairen Soul, which I love.

I read more high fantasy masquerading as science fiction (or vice versa — how would one classify Dune?)

Also, I think that saying all fantasy writers owe a debt to Gygax is valid, because his creation helped the fantasy market, just like all YA writers owe a debt to Rowling, whether or not they write fantasy. However, just as I don’t think that “to be a YA writer is to consider writing a vampire novel” as one journo recently put it, I don’t think being a fantasy writer is being deeply influenced by Gygax. I am a Ya fantasy writer who is neither influenced by D&D or has ever considered writing about vampires.

D&D was a mashup of fantasy tropes: it had stuff from Tolkien, a magic system adapted from Jack Vance, elements of mythology and epic, and character types largely drawn from sword & sorcery.

There followed a sort of mashup fantasy fiction. Chiefly the Dragonlance books, of course, which were explicitly based on D&D, but plenty of others as well.

Weis & Hickman’s sales figures could probably knock us all into a cocked hat, assuming of course that you could find a cocked hat at Wizards of the Coast.

Dragonlance, based on one set of games, even spawned games of its own, plus video games and at least one feature film.

Before D&D, sword & sorcery was a viable genre. Now it’s all been sucked into the mashup game-fiction genre.

So D&D did, in fact, have a massive influence on fantastic fiction, though since it generated its own audience outside of the traditional F&SF audience, we haven’t noticed it quite so much. It’s an enormous revenue-generating machine in the middle of the room, creating an enormous amount of noise and light, but we polite bystanders are trying to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

so a jock obsessed with football is a geek?
say what?

Though debating is not only a geek thing!

I didn’t say SF, I said “fantasy literature.” I thought that since you wrote fantasy, that would qualify as an intense engagement. I thought that if you did not have such an engagement with fantasy literature that you would probably write something else.

You said: “If you start calling everyone a geek who likes something then the word becomes meaningless. It really has to be a passionate engagement to qualify.” I agreed with you that it has to be a passionate engagement.

You said: “And “geek” in the way it gets used without a qualifier means technology and science fiction-y things. You don’t call someone obsessed with horses a geek, you call them a horse geek.” Sorry, I didn’t realize we were defining the standalone use of the word “geek.” I was thinking of it as something that you would pair up with a defining adjective. It sounded to me like you were denying any kind of “geekdom” not just that you were not a computer-loving, SF-loving type of geek.

You said: “And calling a fantasy writer a geek because they write fantasy is absurd. It’s a professional engagement. It’s a job.” So you’re saying, then, that you only write fantasy as a job? You don’t love it?

If you start calling everyone a geek who likes something then the word becomes meaningless. It really has to be a passionate engagement to qualify. And “geek” in the way it gets used without a qualifier means technology and science fiction-y things. You don’t call someone obsessed with horses a geek, you call them a horse geek.

And calling a fantasy writer a geek because they write fantasy is absurd. It’s a professional engagement. It’s a job. Are lawyers therefore law geeks? I would say some of them are, but many of them aren’t. A geeky engagement is different to a professional engagement. The two can co-exist but they are not the same.

You don’t have an “intense engagement” with fantasy literature? Your wrote a couple scholarly books on it. That seems pretty intense. Fantasy is “particularly geeky” subject area.

But, hey, if you don’t want to call yourself a geek, I’m fine with that. I was just trying to understand where you were coming from.

BTW, I didn’t mean to imply earlier that I drink that flowchart’s Kool Aid–it’s just a bit of silliness and most of it is just played for laughs. I guess I just agree with it that writing an SF/fantasy novel seems like the ultimate act of geekiness.

“Geek” used to be more negative — in the 80s (U.S.), a geek was someone who severely lacked cool but wasn’t book-smart enough to be a “nerd.”

But now you can “geek out” over just about anything. I think it depends on the ability to recite long strings of esoteric facts that have nothing to do with your career. E.G.: I know many a “Buffy geek” who knows jack-all about computers. (I’d be a Buffy geek, I love it that much, but I don’t rewatch and I don’t know enough to refer to episodes by their titles, or what exact milestone took place in what episode or what other, later episode had a callback to aforesaid milestone. I’d need reference materials.)

I’m considered “geeky” by some because I’ll apply intensive lit-crit criticism to a comic book or to “Supernatural,” or to Small Gods by Terry Pratchett.