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The Underlying Foundation of Magic

celia Lake

I write about Albion, the magical community of Great Britain, currently between the 1880s and 1950. (Ireland is doing its own thing, magically.) There’s a tremendous amount of change in that time, in terms of medical advances, technology, communication options, and how people live their lives. At the same time, I don’t actually want to change history. Inserting magic into the landscape means thinking about what will and won’t be affected.

When I started writing, I knew I wanted to write about a magical community with a range of magical options. Just like with most other skills, I wanted what someone could do magically to depend on a combination of factors. For magic in my writing, that's a combination of talent (how easy it is for them to learn something), strength (how much they can accomplish with their magic), and knowledge (what they have learned about how to use magic). Someone with less strength but enough knowledge can still be incredibly effective, and someone with raw strength but no training has some definite limits. 

The Diversity Paradox

Star Trek, Star Trek fandom, and the limits of fandom as progressivism

Liz Barr

On 6 September 1966, the general television-watching public got its first look at a little show called Star Trek. It had already been previewed at the World Science Fiction Convention, where it was greeted with enthusiasm by an audience ready to embrace a science fiction television series which took itself—and the genre—seriously. Lost in Space was for kids; Doctor Who… was also for kids, and in any case, wouldn’t reach an American audience for another decade or so. Star Trek was sophisticated and intelligent, and so was its audience.

Just ask them. Frederick Pohl, editor of Galaxy Magazine, predicted a swift cancellation, citing low ratings and suggesting that “Star Trek made the mistake of appealing to a comparatively literate group…”

Men Who Respect Witches

tansy rayner roberts

One of my favourite tropes is the male sidekick paired with a female protagonist. (Bonus points when there’s no romance involved!) In the 1980s, no matter what popular culture you were consuming, it was incredibly rare to find stories where men assisted the narrative of powerful women… and honestly it still feels a little subversive when I stumble across it these days. In Terry Pratchett’s early Witch books, this dynamic is particularly notable because these stories are grounded in a recurring theme of appreciating tradition and old-fashioned values: the Witches are constantly looking back to how things have always been done, while also being sneakily progressive – and making sure no one expects them to follow any unnecessary social restrictions that are otherwise fine for everyone else.

Ceremony, Subjugation, Sacrifice, and Camellia sinensis

kemi ashing-giwa

In speculative fiction, tea has appeared as an important cultural fixture most often in fantasy, but a number of science fiction stories have featured the drink. This includes C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner books, Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya Universe tales (particularly the tellingly named The Tea Master and the Detective) and Becky Chambers’ recent Monk & Robot series. 

The book that first comes to my mind, however, is Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, first in her ongoing Imperial Radch series. In the domineering empire of the Radch, tea and its attendant rituals are luxuries for humans—nonhumans bound in service to the empire, like the “corpse soldier” main character, Breq, must make do with water. (Or fish sauce.) Beyond tea, I have always been interested in exploring social and political domination, and Leckie’s thoughtful, culturally vivid first novel has been a major influence on my work, especially my own debut novel. 

What is Fantasy Anyway?

Cheryl morgan

This article is not about defining genre boundaries. Huge amounts of ink and electrons have been spent over such debates already. And there are good reasons for such discussions. But they have problems. The first is that most good writers, given a definition of what they should be writing, will immediately look for ways to subvert those expectations. As Gary K Wolfe theorized in his book, Evaporating Genres, genres are continually evolving and leaking into each other. Also, genre boundaries are often used as an excuse for gatekeeping. I am fairly sure that there will be some crusty old supporters of the British Library who are shocked! Shocked, I tell you! That such a venerable and respectable institution should lower itself to running an exhibition about “mere fantasy”. 

My contention here is not about genre boundaries; it is about exploding them. …

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Rendered Harmless

Strategies to Tame the Lady Knight

joyce chng

The image of the lady knight is an enduring and recurring romantic motif often found in fantasy literature. From The Cave of the Golden Rose to Game of Thrones the lady knight has seized our imagination as a heroine, a female warrior filled with fighting prowess. Respected and feared by their peers, they stride confidently. They are often beautiful, gorgeous to behold, and they instill a sense of admiration because they are powerful knights, surpassing even their masculine counterparts.

However, the lady knight of the late medieval and Renaissance epics was the subject of contention. Her body became the battlefield where mostly male writers and poets debated her validity as a warrior. And even more when these writers were confronted with a real-life lady knight in the form of Joan of Arc, the anxiety to portray the lady knight as powerful but still within the confines of patriarchy led to various tactics and strategies, where they rendered her harmless. In some ways, they relied on the existing foundation of Greek and pseudo-Greek stories about the Amazons. In others, they drew on Biblical sources and hagiographies. And yet, like a seam of mica in layers of granite, a theme emerged: the female warrior soon bore long hair, fair skin and well-proportioned features. The lady knight became feminised, sexualised and an object of masculine fantasy.

Economic Predation and the End of Capitalism

Octavia Cade

What happens if we imagine a society without these predators? A post-capitalist community where the ability to economically exploit others is limited, or entirely absent.… What does this society look like? Is it even possible?  

It’s not like people haven’t already given it a go. The history of utopian thought is littered with representations of the ideal society. Some of these, from today’s perspective, are less immune to economic exploitation than they’d like to think. Community reliance on unpaid labour, for instance, is often related to gender in ways that are not always adequately critiqued (or even addressed at all) in many literary utopias. Arguably, this is because at the time of writing, expected social roles may not have been widely perceived as being exploitative in the first place. 

The Modern Place of Fairy Tales

Amelia Brown

The point of this article is to look at why fairy tales are still relevant to modern society. Why might such stories have a place when the focus of such a society tends to be on critical analysis and corporate gains, leaving little time for tales about the good fairy rewarding the young woman for being kind? The question becomes: how much does society value virtue? How much does a person value being noble and kind? How much does a person want to think about her own character? In the answers to these questions lies the answer to the fairy tale’s modern place. Because if any person values introspection of this sort, then fairy tales have an awful lot of relevance. To get to that conclusion, the first step toward a more thorough understanding of a fairy tale’s modern place is to define a fairy tale.

Nice Safe Emotions

Joanne Anderton

Sympathy for the Heartless Killing Machine

‘I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want, or make decisions for me. That’s why I left you, Dr. Mensah, my favourite human’ (All Systems Red 149)

This is the ending of All Systems Red and every time I read it I start to cry. Yes, even right now. Not only because of the sweet contradiction of a self-titled ‘heartless killing machine’ explaining itself to Mensah, its ‘favourite human’, and hoping she’ll understand. Not only because Murderbot has been treated terribly by humans up until this point — and yet, where Mensah is concerned, it has chosen to care. But because even though Mensah gives Murderbot the opportunity to have what we assume everyone wants — a home, a family, a way to be humanised after an existence of being treated like a thing — this is not what it chooses.