Building worlds and selling them. Working fantasy authors on collaboration, output, marketing, and the realities of a long career in the genre.
Character DevelopmentMatt Damon's Loki ended up floating in the Mediterranean. The original ended up chained in a cave until the end of the world. How the trickster of Norse myth turned into Wagner's fire god, Marvel's adopted brother and Kevin Smith's…
Fantasy FictionEvery Ray Harryhausen film reviewed on this site, ranked. The skeleton duel, the cyclops, the Medusa and the giant creatures that an entire generation of directors grew up wanting to make.
Fantasy FictionLe Guin grew up in a house of anthropologists and applied their central question to places that did not exist: not what a society has, but why it arranged itself that way. That order of operations is why her worlds…
FaithLewis was an Oxford medievalist who became an unlikely broadcaster, wrote seven children's books in seven years, and produced a book about grief so raw he published it under a false name. His thirty-year argument with Tolkien about worldbuilding is…
AprilPratchett left school at seventeen, spent seven years as press officer for four nuclear power stations, and wrote forty-one Discworld novels that made him the best-selling author in Britain. He was dismissed as a comic fantasy writer for most of…
Book ReviewsMost fantasy writers grab the movie version of a creature and run with it, which means they're usually working from a film made fifty years after the creature existed. This book shows you the gap between what a thing actually…
Fantasy FictionFantasy has to be wondrous and believable at once. Chase only wonder and the world collapses at the first hard question; chase only logic and nobody feels
Fantasy FictionSpeculative romance is not ordinary romance with special effects. It works when the supernatural or futuristic element amplifies a character's psychology
Fantasy FictionThe war between Heaven and Hell has run for eons and neither side can win. Military fiction with real doctrine, told largely by an artificial intelligence that crossed over.
AmbiguityA late-night Pittsburgh radio host has built an eleven-year career interviewing the dead on air, while everyone argues over whether he's a fraud. It's real, and one night the line opens for the one voice he's spent his whole career…
AugustBradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and The Illustrated Man, the book that hooked me for life. On his birthday, a look at the lyrical, humane science fiction that took hold of me and never let go.
AdaptationNational Tolkien Reading Day is March 25. The boxed set I saved for, the boring opening I almost quit, the eagles plot hole, and what Tolkien taught me.
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