Tag Archives: women

Having left Camorre after the deaths of their fellow Gentleman Bastards at the hands of the Bondsmagi, Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen are running a new scam in the Sinspire, a high-class casino in the city of Tal Verrar. Unfortunately the Bondsmagi haven’t finished with Locke yet, and he and Jean find themselves working—decidedly unwillingly—for  Continue Reading »

Earlier this year I released desktop wallpapers of the lovely Alchemist of Souls cover art by Larry Rostant, and they proved rather popular. Since I love the cover of The Merchant of Dreams even more, I thought I’d better do the same for it! So, here’s the lovely Jacomina “Coby” Hendricks for your computer-decorating pleasure. Just don’t  Continue Reading »

Babylon Steel is the eponymous heroine of Gaie Sebold’s debut fantasy novel, an ex-mercenary turned madam of a moderately up-market brothel. Desperate for an injection of cash to pay for her girls’ expensive tastes, Madam Steel takes on a commission from suave gambling-den owner Darash Fain to locate a missing girl, and unsurprisingly finds herself  Continue Reading »

At WorldCon last week I attended a panel where one of the participants, Catherine Lundoff, announced she had just written a book called Silver Moon about a woman who becomes a werewolf when she goes through menopause. Several audience members reacted with “ooh, I’d love to read that!”, but I was not one of them.  Continue Reading »

The Bechdel Test is a well-known yardstick used by writers and critics to assess the feminist credentials of a narrative. Taking its name from an episode in Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, the basic principle is that in order to pass the test, there must be at least one scene in  Continue Reading »

One of my favourite UK conventions is AltFiction, a relatively small event based in the East Midlands and focusing more than most on writing and writers. I first attended last year, when it took place in Derby, but this year it moved to what I understand will be its regular venue in future, the Phoenix  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 »

From time to time I revisit The Bechdel Test, because my fiction tends to feature a lot more men than women. Now I’m not going to go out of my way to make sure my work passes, because I hate tokenism in any form, but it does keep me thinking about women in fantasy. At  Continue Reading »