Shadows of the Apt

Well, the moment fast approaches to see whether this beastie can survive in the wild, so…
To celebrate the publication of his debut novel, Empire in Black and Gold
 
ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
 
will be signing copies of the book at Waterstone's,
United Reform Building, 89a Broad Street, Reading RG1 2AP
 
SATURDAY 5^th JULY, 3-5pm

 
For those wishing to attend, it may be wise to pre-order the […]

Welcome to the Official ™ website of the series Shadows of the Apt
First things first: who the hell am I, that I have the right to comment? Am I, for example, award-winning author Neil Gaiman, internationally celebrated fantasist, whose excellent book, American Gods, has already been the subject of a blog about the post-writing process? No, I am not. ;
Am […]

There are reasons why many fantasy stories take place in an ersatz Merrie Englande composed of equal parts Robin Hood, King Arthur, Prtince Valiant and cheese. Of course, one reason is imaginative bankruptcy, but there's more to it than that. The more you sing a tune the audience has heard before, the more they can fill […]

“From childhood's hour I have not been / As others were; I have not seen / As others saw; I could not bring /
My passions from a common spring…”
 
   wrote Edgar Allan Poe (1), although very few fantasists haven't felt like that on occasion. It's a genre that traditionally appeals to the odd and the misadjusted. Fiction about other worlds […]

When I was a young lad the fantasy writing landscape was different to today's. Certainly, my fickle memory suggests there were fewer authors about, or certainly that were widely-enough published in this country to leap to the general attention. Terry Pratchett was a new development, for example, and aside from the obvious Mr T (1) there were a few […]

The roots of fantasy are rural. This is true whether one considers the original medieval romances, or the nineteenth century ‘lost race’ type fantasies of Haggard, pulp fiction like Howard or the fantasy resurgence following Tolkien. The landscapes are wild, populated by villages, castles and evil towers. The plots tend to be travelogues (1) with […]

Novels are stories, and the earliest stories come to us as myths. The joy of myths, of course, is that they are readily reinventable. I don’t mean in the sense that there are only (x) stories in the world, and they’re being constantly repeated. This rather depressing proposition is usually achieved by simplifying stories to the […]

A curious niche genrelet usually located within fantasy/science fiction’s bounds is that of alternative history. This is the quintessential “what if” genre – only with the lens turned not on the future, as with hard SF, but on the past.
 
The genre is a relatively recent one, and perhaps this is to do with changing outlooks on history. […]

Well, I’ve made quite enough sidelong references to the Grand Old Man of fantasy fiction that I thought I should meet him head on at some point (1) : JRR Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, friend of CS Lewis (2) and “father of modern fantasy” as he has been called.
 
There are few enough readers of fantasy who have […]

…And I’ll be in Narnia before ye.
 
You often hear the terms “High Fantasy” and “Low Fantasy” bandied around as the two major divisions within the fantasy genre. As discussed, dividing the corpus of literature can be a snobbish business, even in (1) a genre that is itself persecuted.
 
The most generally accepted definition of High Fantasy is that […]