Fantasy magazine

From Modern Mythcraft to Magical Surrealism

Dystopia-Triptych-Banner-2023

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Feature Interviews

Nonfiction

Interview: Malka Older

When I was a kid I adored Tolkien—I remember in 4th or 5th grade taking the time to draw out fifty individual stars for a school poster about favorite books. I’m rereading it now and while some of it holds up—the worldbuilding, for example—so much of it does not. It’s not just the classism, racism, sexism; there are also a lot of weird clunky plot choices and bent-over-backwards justifications for what are presented as unassailable principles and long descriptions that I mostly skimmed as a kid.

Nonfiction

Interview: Patrice Caldwell

I love getting to explore new worlds, to fall in love with characters who become real to me, and be moved by the words on the page. Genre fiction got me through the height of the pandemic, and it’s also gotten me through so many times when I felt unmoored. Just being able to dive into a world, to for a moment be somewhere else, it’s the best gift.

Nonfiction

Interview: Locus Awards Top Ten Finalists, Part Two

Ostensibly a readers’ poll, the Locus Awards are decided by an open vote: anyone can participate, and there are no requirements, other than the ability to cast the vote. This means these awards potentially reflect the tastes of a broader range of individuals—but presumably still folks who love genre fiction. So, who better to talk about fantasy fiction than the top ten finalists of the Locus Awards in the Best Fantasy Novel category?

Nonfiction

Interview: Locus Awards Top Ten Finalists, Part One

We invited the authors of the top ten Best Fantasy Novels (according to the Locus poll) to participate in a brief collective interview, to discuss their work, their careers, and other things. We asked them all the same ten questions, with the request that they respond to at least seven of them, and let them pick whichever questions they want to answer. We are breaking the interview into two parts, across two issues, for space. We hope you find their responses as interesting as we did!

Nonfiction

Interview: RF Kuang

RF Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, Chinese-English translator, and the Astounding Award-winning and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of the Poppy War trilogy and the forthcoming Babel. Her work has won the Crawford Award and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies […]

Nonfiction

Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue – Interview with Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan, and Troy L. Wiggins

Trouble the Waters is an anthology that gathers the tidal force of bestselling, renowned writers from Lagos to New Orleans, Memphis to Copenhagen, Northern Ireland and London, offering extraordinary speculative fiction tales of ancient waters in all its myriad forms. The editors spoke with Fantasy Magazine about the project and their relationships with Black speculative fiction.

Nonfiction

Interview: Rebecca Roanhorse

Creativity is fragile. You can’t let many voices in because there’s always plenty of people who want to tear you down, not realizing your harshest critic is yourself. Or at least it is for me. So while I do sometimes read early reviews, I tend not to read anything about my work after it’s been released. It’s already gone through editors and a critique group and many, many drafts. And no work will ever be perfect or please everyone. It can only capture a moment in time for the author – who they were and what concerned then when they wrote it – and then we move on to what’s next.

Nonfiction

Interview: Short Fictioneers

This issue, I thought I’d do something slightly different. I wanted to celebrate a few authors, and I also wanted to celebrate short fiction in general. Interviews are a great way for readers to gain insight into favorite works and authors. They are also a great way for writers to find perspectives on both the craft of writing and the publishing industry. So I asked a handful of notable short fiction writers if they’d like to do a group interview.

Nonfiction

Interview: Tochi Onyebuchi

We still get dreams, and we still have our memories. We still have, somewhere nestled deep within us, the capacity to make a peace for ourselves or to try and climb the umbilical cord back to God or whatever Higher Power can grant us that peace we cannot make for ourselves. If we didn’t have that ability, we might not have gotten the Harlem Ballroom scene and vogueing.

Nonfiction

Interview: Charlie Jane Anders

I feel like it’s more interesting to watch people change through their relationships to other people than to see them go through changes in a vacuum. I feel like one thing the stories in Even Greater Mistakes have in common is that you can usually identify one or two relationships that power them. Even in my novels, this is usually the case for me, and I feel like my novels are firing on all cylinders when you can track a particular relationship from beginning to end.