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…
science fiction
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.”…
Down Station by Simon Morden
Lucy Hounsom
I made the mistake of reading the first few chapters of Down Station on the Tube…which in Morden’s world is consumed by a terrible fire, along with the rest of…
Trying Out Science Fiction: A Guide for Fantasy Purists
Nicola Alter
Are you a reader who sticks purely to fantasy and looks suspiciously at the science fiction side of the shelf in the bookstore? Perhaps you’ve thought about trying out some…
Monthly Short Story Winner: Plot Twists
Xiagan
Plot twists are often a specialty of short stories and you find them there more often than in other forms of writing. The most famous examples I can think of…
Medusa’s Web by Tim Powers
“The past,” she repeated, “it is always out there, isn’t it? I hate now. I hate that whenever you look at a clock, it shows a different time. What’s the…
Interview with Louisa Hall, author of Speak
Overlord
We’ve featured a fair amount of Science-Fiction on Fantasy-Faction lately, far more than we usually do, and that has opened doors to chat with some fantastic authors writing within that…
The Diversity of Today’s Cutting Edge Sci-Fi
Sonia Grace
When we talk about science fiction we divide it up. It’s too big for a single shelf, we have to break it into subgenres and swallow it in pieces. There’s…
Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
Radiance pulled me into itself like the waves on a strange, Venusian beach. I went in with high expectations, since Cat Valente is a fabulous author whose work I have…
All The Birds In The Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
“One day the Singularity would elevate humans to cybernetic superbeings, and maybe then people would say what they meant. “Probably not, though.” All The Birds In The Sky (2016) by…
In The Mix: Fantasy and Other Genres
Leo Elijah Cristea
Fantasy is a genre that assimilates elements of other genres, whilst still remaining, for the most part, a genre not often thought of as having a great number of “crossovers”…
Unquenchable Fire by Rachel Pollack
“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…