Normal People, Abnormal Worlds: Young Adult Speculative Fiction as a...
The following is an academic essay, written for my university course. You might find it dull and full of academese. You may not. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Speculative Fiction (SF[1]) and Young...
View ArticleI am a sexist, I am a racist, I am a homophobe
Yesterday Elise Catherine Tobler wrote a post discussing a friend of hers, Chris DeFilippis, who had not read a single woman author since 2012. This shocked me. Stunned me, in fact. His response in the...
View ArticleArt & the Author, or the Kameron Hurley effect.
I always find it difficult to separate the author and art. I bought God’s War by Kameron Hurley on the day it came out in the UK, some time last year. I bought it for two reasons: firstly, it won …...
View ArticleBut… I’m a bloke. Sexual Harassment and cons
Last year at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, I was sexually harassed. (Yeah. Trigger warning.) This was weird for me. I didn’t know what to do. Surely sexual harassment is just dirty old men...
View ArticleAbove and below – Agency in Above by Isla Morley & The Bunker Diary by Kevin...
Above by Isla Morley and The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks came to me at roughly the same point, from husband and wife team Anne Perry and Jared Shurin. Jared’s review of Brooks’ book made me buy...
View ArticleCuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge & No Harm Can Come to a Good Man by James Smythe
In Frances Hardinge’s Cuckoo Song, twelve year-old Triss wakes up in a hospital, with a fracturing memory of what has happened before. Slowly, she pieces together that she was in the ‘Grimmer,’ some...
View Article2015
Over the course of the last six months or so while I’ve been away from this blog, I’ve had some major life changes, and some major realisations. It’s 1am now, on the first day of a New Year. I am, …...
View ArticleScience Fiction and Fantasy as ‘home’ genres
I was asked recently about what I read and what I write. Oddly enough I found this very difficult. I was in America, and I was talking to a lady who I knew would read R.A. Salvatore or the Belgariad …...
View ArticleDear Mr Abercrombie, piss somewhere else
I’ve just finished Half the World by Joe Abercrombie, and I loved it. I love all of Abercrombie’s books. He has a voice like no other fantasy writer around: gritty, real, bloody and laid bare. His...
View ArticleRegrets
I feel like I’m too young to have regrets. Too young to walk past a place that’s filled with a year of memory, and think ‘what if.’ Too young to watch those the same age, and feel like they know …...
View Article2013 in Review – Covers
COVERS Never let it be said ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’ On the contrary, in the priviledged world in which I live, surrounded by and mildly obsessed with books, a good cover its worth its weight...
View Article2013 in Review – Events
2013 was a year I came of age. I’m now twenty one. I can legally do pretty much anything except rent a minibus as of this year. In celebration of becoming a fully fledged human I embarked on a year …...
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