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Small wars are operations undertaken under executive authority, wherein military force is combined with diplomatic pressure in the internal or external affairs of another state whose government is unstable, inadequate, or unsatisfactory for the preservation of life and of such interests as are determined by the foreign policy of our Nation.
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creativeSo, if you dropped Sharpe into Howard’s Tower of the Elephant scenario, (Wikipedia article here ) he’d do pretty well, but it would be a weak story because the original derives it’s running conflict from Barbarian Rogue vs Urban Rogue, and Sharpe is an Urban Rogue (Phut!).
What if Howard had invented Sharpe? Perhaps he happens on copy of “London’s Underworld” , becomes fascinated with the idea of a modern barbarized underclass, and decides to redo his latest half-finished Conan story…
Rolling around in Howard’s head are Sharpe, the Tower of the Elephant (transplanted from Hyborian era Zamoria to 1800s Spain), the sorcerer and the enslaved alien. He has the rough draft of the Conan version; how will he swap in Sharpe without a major rewrite?
Sharpe will be on a solo mission. The Texan pulpster was never really interested in man management, bureaucracy - or even friendship. His stories wouldn’t really work if the protagonists had a unit of soldiers in tow. So, the Rifleman must face this adventure alone.
To keep the thematic structure, the antagonists all become aristocratic rogues. The easy way to do this would be to put the tower in the countryside. However, that would mean binning the cool tavern.
I earlier argued that the Elephant Alien served as a yardstick for Conan. Like Conan, he’s a free-spirited wanderer, but a flawed one, since he let himself get tied down and then enslaved. Obviously, Sharpe needs a different yardstick.
So…
( Read more... )
Robert E Howard's original Conan stories are tight, fast-moving-but-rich tales of grim swashbuckling in the sorcery-ridden lost eons of the Hyborian Age. Even returning to them with the critical eye of a near 40-year-old, rather than the naive enthusiasm of a late teenager, I can say that, though their language is subtly dated, they do indeed rock.calcinationscalls "nanowibbletech"?).How do the threads and the people go together to make a Sharpe novel? Not in the parallel manner implied by one of the comments on my original post. Rather than analyse one of Cornwall's novels in detail - and since there are several of you looking in - it would be interesting to build a MilSF novel collaboratively (wit the caveat that anything you post is up for grabs).
So, we need:
Once we have these, we can lace them together and come up with some supporting characters. (And if nobody can be bothered, I'll throw in random ideas myself).
Over to you folks...
UPDATE:
Two so far.. very useful. I'll do the easy one first...
fechtbuchhas posed something bit more challenging, mainly because it would involve a lot of unit stuff. Here's how I'd approach it:</font>
There's no point in reinventing the wheel (unless you end up with armoured tracks). So, though I myself aspire to writing refined, nuanced tales of unicorn herding and holistic magic-wielding, sorry "path-working" vegetarian Earth Priestesses and their tormented coterie of Gay Warriors Who Cry, when a friend unburdened himself of the (almost) complete Sharpe books ("Take them pleeeeeeaaaaase! I can't stand them anymore – I've read them all, ten times!!!"), I was happy to let them fall my way. I'm a great fan of seeing how other writers handle the technical challenges posed by certain sorts of story.
thoughtful
determined