Category: Fantasy

Written by Andrew Wallace

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 […]

Written by Andrew Wallace

Review of Wonderland by Juno Dawson

17-year old Alice’s quest to find her lost paramour Bunny is a twisty head trip down the class and gender rabbit hole. Driven by personal demons and seduced by beautiful psychopaths, transgender Alice must negotiate the beguiling social horrors of an exclusive party called Wonderland. The novel explores the glamour used by the rich to […]

Written by Andrew Wallace

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 […]

Written by Andrew Wallace

Dread & the Broken Witch

Dread & the Broken Witch is my new novella, which will be published by Luna Press next year. In the fabulous heart of the ancient, altered continent of Zabardu, a nameless Dread falls across the Village and traps Precious Child. The terrified villagers turn to their healer, a brilliant but outrageous transgender woman called Bambomiyi, who lives […]

Written by Andrew Wallace

Review of Stories of Hope & Wonder

This whopping collection of 53 stories is just over a quarter of a million words long, and explores the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror and all the mash-ups in between. It was published to raise money for the NHS during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is the first good reason to buy it. The second […]

Written by Andrew Wallace

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 […]

Written by Andrew Wallace

Light Amid the Risen Dark

In March I wrote a piece for The Shadow Booth about Susan Cooper’s great young adult novel The Dark is Rising, with reference to the extraordinary cover of the edition I had as a kid (see above), which scared me so much that at the time I couldn’t read the book. I was delighted when the […]

Written by Andrew Wallace

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. […]