Spec Tech: Your Protagonist Wants Sleeves: Fashion in F&SF

Most clothes are uncomfortable, cumbersome, and dangerous, and can really make your characters’ lives miserable.  As a writer, this is an underused resource for inflicting pain and suffering upon your poor, hapless protagonists. Unless manufactured on machines by cotton produced on industrial farms and sewn en masse by underpaid illegal laborers, clothing is expensive. For……

Spec Tech: Excuse me, do you speak Elvish?

As someone who studied linguistics, one of my biggest pet peeves in high fantasy is when our stalwart protagonist first encounters the elves in the forest, and he can of course speak with them because he’s half-elvish.  All elves speak elvish. It’s a racial thing.  Now, I’m not saying that it couldn’t be a racial……