If I had to pick a “most common adjective” placed in front of the world “fantasy,” the first one that springs to mind is “epic.” We often expect fantasy tales to envelop us in their world-building, labyrinthine plots, and quests that take our heroes over hill and dale on a quest to defeat the villain or slay the dragon. […]
Genre mashups are a mature art form these days. We’ve thrown together religious pilgrimages and sci-fi apocalypses, Victorian morals and modern technology, operas in space, and aliens visiting us across time. My personal pick: that time someone decided to mash up dragons and tea cups. In recent years, a glorious lot of authors have realized many of the people who […]
Susanna Clarke’s fantasy masterpiece Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is 900 pages long, but if you’re like me, even that wasn’t enough time spent in the gorgeous, witty landscape of a magical Napoleonic-era England. Not even her follow-up short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, could hope to satisfy my thirst for More Of That, Please. Happily, the BBC agreed with me, and graciously filmed a […]
What were you like as a kid? What was your connection to video games? I assume I was like most kids who came of age in the late 70s and early 80s—I loved Star Wars, Indiana Jones and getting into trouble with my brother and my cousins. Video games were an early obsession of mine. […]