Exclusive reading from Dread & the Broken Witch
I really enjoyed doing a reading from Dread & the Broken Witch for the Luna Press YouTube Channel. Check it out here. Contains some adult themes.
Category: Epic fantasy
The Witcher vs The Mandalorian
Both ground-breaking genre TV shows came from the ‘new media’ of internet/streaming services rather than established terrestrial networks. The Witcher was made for Amazon Prime and The Mandalorian by Disney+. Each series is an adaptation of an existing work in another media. The Witcher evolved from a short story by Polish author Andrej Sapkowski and […]
JK Rowling & Transphobia
If you grew up in the 1980s, which apart from the cyberpunk bit at the beginning were a vile conflux of blandness and a weirdly conservative sort of greed, then the 90s were meant to be an antidote to all that. We had a Body Shop poster on the living room wall of our student […]
Super-Relaxed Fantasy Club, August 2018
SRFC has enjoyed a roving existence. The first one I went to was at a hotel near Kings Cross; the next location was Waterstones in Tottenham Court Road, then the basement of Hachette’s HQ near Blackfriars, then the roof of Hachette’s HQ near Blackfriars and most recently the HQ of Forbidden Planet – also near […]
Review of ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’ by Alan Garner
Alan Garner’s brilliantly titled 1960 fantasy takes North European tropes familiar from ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and spins them into a very English children’s fantasy. Two children, a brother and sister called Colin and Susan, are sent to stay with relatives of their mother’s when she must join their father abroad for six months. […]
Review of ‘The Bookkeeper’s Guide to Practical Sorcery’ by Kate Russell
The title of this fun fantasy adventure for younger adults spells out the troubles faced by Henry Noble, an ambitious, talented youth of sixteen who dreams of becoming a wizard. Unfortunately, following the disappearance of his father on a trading mission two years earlier, Henry is the sole breadwinner for his mother and two thuggish […]
Review of ‘Starborn’ by Lucy Hounsom
We’ve all been there. Your village relies on an ancient Relic no one understands but which the economy relies on anyway, like Bitcoin. At the annual ritual in which the Relic ascribes professions and even names to the young people of the village, someone breaks the Relic and that someone is you. Then the sky […]
