From Amazon Fantasy Forums

J. Lyon Layden:
I dislike orcs in any work besides LOTR because the word was only used before J.R.R. as an adjective describing demonic things.
And before Dungeons and Dragons, Kobolds were simply farmhouse barn goblin-sprites, and never assembled in a large group. So I dislike Kobolds being used as anything but barnhouse fairies in any non-TSR work.

Ogres and goblins and trolls and dragons are OK to use, in my opinion, as long as they are used in an innovative way.

For instance, goblins are used in "Goblin Wars," but the story is told from the goblin's perspective.

In my own work, I do use the words like "ogre," "goblin," and "troll" but what I'm describing are the real creatures that actually lived 30,000 years ago from which the ogre and troll stories were probably derived.


Jason Pratt:{{ But they most likely held on for several thousand years past [the 27,000 year old strata] at least}}

Considering that Neanderthal DNA was just discovered to be 99.9% identical to human DNA, I'd be inclined to say they hung on a little longer than that. {g} (Their DNA differs from ours to about the same degree as yours differs from mine. Another study suggested that Europeans might be even closer than that: that 5% of them might still be 100% identical!)

It was the meganthropus or giganthropithecus I was thinking of, though. Er, which of them had a trait of occasionally having two rows of teeth or more than five fingers sometimes? Or was it another large anthropoid? (I've forgotten... one of them though. The point is that legends of giant humans going back several thousand years ago sometimes mention those traits. Kind of interesting.)


J. Lyon Layden:
To Brent: I have never been a fan of the animorphed creatures in serious fantasy. It's one of the things that turned me off to Everquest. I just ignored the existence of such creatures when DMing Dungeons and Dragons, because I found them silly. Just too cutesy and evolutionarilly implausible in my opinion.

Now in children's fantasy I have no problem with it. I better not, because my debut children's fantasy novella is dominated by animorphed amphibians. And I loved Watership Down and the Redwall series; that's somehow different to me.

To Jason: It wasn't meganthropus that had the double rows of teeth and extra digits. Those finds are usually attributed to homo sapien sapient, and come mostly from the Americas, from what I know of it. Scientist mostly pass it off as deformity. But it seems likely that there were homo sapien giants during the neolithic, perhaps with blood from more archaic forms of hominid, who were sort of a ruling class and "kept it in the family" so to speak, hence the deformities.

Meganthropus did, however, often display a double sagittal crest, and had the biggest set of teeth of any known hominid. It stood somewhere between 6 and 9 feet, and probably weighed over 400 pounds on average.

I use elves in my work, too, but try to only use the word as an adjective (as in elfin) and call them directly by more ancient names such as Avari and Sidhe, in order to avoid the stereotype and triteness. And these elves would be called homo erectus today (the Asian kind- the correct word for the European version of the hominid is Homo Antecedent, and the African variety is Homo Ergaster, despite the fact that many people tend to lump those three together).
But if ever there were a fossil of an elf, homo erectus it would be. They've even been depicted in certain scientific books with pointed ears. Incidentally,to this day, Asian people are the only race who suffer from the rare condition called "elf's ear," which results in pointed ears. 3 foot tall flores man is also of elfkind in my work, since he is a subgenre of homo erectus.

Joe Lyon Layden is a prehistoric fiction author and primitive musician. To receive a free copy of this entire novella "The Man from Parkho Khatune Bears Favor," as well as three free songs and monthly updates, freebies, and discounts on Joe's ongoing work, please sign up for the newsletter below.

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From Amazon Fantasy Forums