Tag Archives: genre

Yesterday I finished the final draft of The Prince of Lies – yay! – which inevitably left me feeling more than a little punch-drunk, like I’d been hit round the head with a 135,000-word manuscript…So I goofed around on Twitter a bit, and whilst chatting about book lengths and genre I realised that fantasy really  Continue Reading »

I now have my programme for EightSquared, the 64th Eastercon, so I hope I’ll see some of you at the following events: Friday, 7pm: Genre Get-Together – Fantasy (seems to be a big informal signing event) Friday, 9pm: Panel – Underground London Sunday, 2pm: Panel – The Changing Portrayal of Gender and Sexuality in SF  Continue Reading »

Last Saturday saw the return of BristolCon, the small but perfectly formed SF convention based in the city of the same name. It was my second year of attending, and though it’s a long way to go for a one-day convention, it’s well worth a visit. The programming is always excellent, managing to avoid the  Continue Reading »

Maybe it’s a cliché to write a romance-themed blog post for Valentine’s Day, but the celebration is rife with clichés so I thought, why not? In medieval and Renaissance times, a romance was not a love story but “a long fictitious tale of heroes and extraordinary or mysterious events, usually set in a distant time  Continue Reading »

There’s been a lot of debate recently following an online survey asking readers for their “must read” SF list, the issue being that less that 10% of the suggested books were by women. Why, it was asked, the overwhelming bias? Various explanations – and solutions – to this woeful state of affairs were put forward.  Continue Reading »

There’s been a teeny debate online this week between two people I met at EasterCon: Gavin Pugh of Gav Reads, and Sophia McDougall. The discussion centred on slash fiction and whether it was right to (homo)sexualise fictional characters in fan fiction. I won’t go into that here–you can read the respective blogs if you’re interested–but  Continue Reading »

Ever since George Allen & Unwin decided to publish The Lord of the Rings in three volumes, the trilogy has ruled the fantasy genre to the point of becoming a cliché. Admittedly fantasy didn’t invent the trilogy–it goes back at least as far as the Victorian three-volume novel–but it certainly picked it up and ran  Continue Reading »

It’s traditional to begin the New Year with a retrospective post about the previous one, but I thought – why stop there? Why not look back on the whole decade? So, here are my thoughts on what I see as the big fantasy trend of the new millennium. Over the past ten years, a new  Continue Reading »