Nick Lowe wrote some of the best genre movie reviews I ever read, as a regular columnist for the British SF magazine Interzone. Through an article at SJ Games’ Pyramid magazine, I found an old article by his called The Well-Tempered Plot Device, which I’ve either read before or read quoted at length somewhere else. The Stephan Donaldson racing game, the Leonard Nimoy poetry all sounds familiar, but is well-worth reading. And his points about the taxonomy of plot devices, plot coupons, plot vouchers are as funny and insightful as ever, and demonstrate how to easily deconstruct (well, deconstruct is what boring academic critics do; what cool critics like Lowe do is more properly rip to shreds) most modern fantasy – the current prime example (too late for Lowe to mention; this is an old essay) would be Harry Potter, but Tolkien’s already trod down that treacherous path..
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