Languages In Fantasy
Leo Elijah Cristea
Language in fantasy: is it an outdated, often academically-gratuitous addition that bogs down a story and its world, or a clever quirk of setting that adds a sprinkle of the…
Fantasy Medicine – Part One: Healthcare, Magical and Mundane
B. Pine
Fantasy, whether epic, high, or sword-and-sorcery, would not be very exciting if the characters were as susceptible to death and disability as we are in the real world. The truth…
Using Scrivener To Store Your Research & Notes
Adrian Faulkner
If you enjoy writing, it’s quite possible that you’ve heard of Scrivener. The writing software, available for both Mac and PC, is a firm favourite for both published and unpublished…
New Models for Magicians
Eric Christensen
In many fantasy stories, magicians often follow one or two traditional models. Many are often portrayed as guides or teachers that assist the protagonist. Often this mentor is described as…
Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel
Overlord
Just like the smash hit Red Rising by Pierce Brown, Sleeping Giants has been turning heads because it has managed to sell movie rights before even being published. Its Publishers…
Angry Robot signs Eric Fischl
We keep a close eye on Angry Robot’s latest signings here at Fantasy-Faction HQ. This is because we know that when Angry Robot snap an author up, there’s two things…
Interview with Sylvain Neuvel
I was lucky enough to get a super-early Advanced Review Copy of Sleeping Giants. It was a book that immediately grabbed me and kept hold of me until I turned…
Excerpt from ‘Wrong Place, Wrong Time’ – A short story from Sharp Ends by Joe Abercrombie
There are very few authors that Fantasy-Faction forum users and Facebook group members talk about more than Joe Abercrombie. There are many reasons for this, but in addition to truly…
Monthly Short Story Winner: Fairy Tales
Xiagan
Some are funny and silly. Some are dark and strange. But all of them have a morale, a (more or less fixed) narrative, and rules. This month’s short story contest…
Fantasy and the Collector Mentality
Zachary A. Matzo
Raise your hand if own more than one copy of Lord of the Rings. I own four: the ebooks, my first mass market paperbacks from when I was 7 or…
Diverse Fantasy Is Better Fantasy
I recently I submitted a story to my writing group for critique. It was a secondary-world fantasy set in a pre-industrial port city. Of all the comments I received, the…
The Paper Menagerie And Other Stories by Ken Liu
Jonathan Thornton
“Time’s arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.”…