Elements of Fantasy: Brownies
Janie Bill
Hidden in the forgotten rooms of a house and in cluttered corners are little supernatural children who perform chores in exchange for food and treats. Even though they are personable…
Writing The Other Other
Aaron Miles
Writing the other can be a challenge, it’s often difficult to convincingly portray a character that greatly differs from your experiences. Without a personal frame of reference the writer is…
Fantasy ‘One-Shots’
Overlord
Fantasy. It’s our genre: we love it! But… trilogies… quartets… quintets… septologies… decalogies… and all those other ‘ets’ and ‘gies’, they take so much time to read, don’t they? Well,…
The Shores of Spain by J. Kathleen Cheney
Jo Niederhoff
J. Kathleen Cheney’s trilogy about an alternate Portugal secretly populated by sereia (better known as sirens), selkies, and otter people comes to a conclusion in The Shores of Spain. The…
Interview with Alison Littlewood
I first heard of Alison Littlewood back in 2012 when one of her Editors, Jo Fletcher, was proudly telling me that her debut novel – A Cold Season – had…
The Ciftci Case: Is Gollum Good or Evil?
Richard Bray
Almost 80 years after Gollum appeared in The Hobbit, and 60 years after Frodo first suggests that it may have been better if Bilbo had killed Gollum when he first…
Unquenchable Fire by Rachel Pollack
Jonathan Thornton
“By its own reality, ecstasy makes people see that suffering is real. And without purpose. Ecstasy is a light that illuminates pain.” In Unquenchable Fire (1988), Rachel Pollack imagines an…
The Masked City by Genevieve Cogman
Lucy Hounsom
I loved Cogman’s first novel, which introduced us to the Library, a vast repository of books collected from multiple alternate worlds. Irene is one of its agents, posted to a…
An Ember In The Ashes by Sabaa Tahir
An Ember In The Ashes has landed with a huge splash in an ocean full of Hunger Games-esque titles; perhaps due to the incredibly favourable 5* reviews amongst the usually…
The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher
Trent Cannon
I should, in the interest of fairness, begin with two disclaimers. The first is that I freaking love Jim Butcher, to an extent that would make both him and my…
Sídhe in Fantasy: From Gaelic Origins, To The Modern Market
Leo Elijah Cristea
Recently on Fantasy-Faction, Janie wrote an excellent article on some of the origins behind faeries in mythology. This piece will both go a little further back, and a little farther…
Time Salvager by Wesley Chu
Stephen Rhodes
It’s always an exciting time when an author you follow releases something new. Not new, as in the next book of an established series, but something brand new. Something you…