Ellen Kushner’s first novel, Swordspoint, introduced readers to the city to which she has since returned in The Privilege of the Sword (Locus Award& Nebula nominee), The Fall of the Kings (written with Delia Sherman), and a handful of short stories, most recently “The Duke of Riverside” in Ellen Datlow’s Naked City. Her second novel, [...]
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over 30 novels and 200 short pieces, fiction and non-fiction. He has received the Edgar Award, seven Bram Stokers, the British Fantasy Award, and many others. His novella, Bubba Hotep, was made into a movie of the same name.
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. [...]
Emma Bull is the author of Territory, a historical fantasy set in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 (Tor Books). Other works include War for the Oaks, Bone Dance, and with Steven Brust, Freedom and Necessity .She’s a contributor to the Bordertown fantasy series, and is a writer and editor on Shadow Unit, a contemporary SF-suspense webfiction [...]
One of the things that bothers me about a lot of fantasy is that the worlds are strangely static, like we invent all sorts of contrived circumstances to keep them from progressing naturally, because we want stories of a certain type.
Ultimately, I realized I was writing a story about three people who are trapped in different versions of hell: the three damnations in the title. None of the three has the strength of character to break free.
I woke naked in the garden. Nothing grew there—not even weeds. Just withered stalks that looked ages old. Maybe dating back to when things were still okay. The darkness was beginning to brighten. I always came to, just before dawn.
Eric Gregory lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is working toward his MFA at North Carolina State University. His stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Interzone, and more. Visit him at ericmg.com.
When people stumble into the pirate world—like drunken sailors stumbling into a seedy dockside tavern—they do it for one reason, the same reason that men and women became pirates in the golden age of pirates: Pirates are cool.
There’s evidence that quite a few women disguised themselves and took the seas. Fast Ships, Black Sails included quite a few stories about women pirates. Should I bring up Cutthroat Island? No?
