Fantasy magazine

From Modern Mythcraft to Magical Surrealism

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Nonfiction

Nonfiction

Women Destroy Urban Fantasy: An Interview with Carrie Vaughn and Kelley Armstrong

It’s so ironic that you’ll hear people talk in one breath about how women are better at writing fantasy and men are better at science fiction, and in the next breath talk about how of course men write better epic fantasy, and women really only write that “girly” fantasy. There are some folks who’d squeeze us out entirely if they could.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Nalo Hopkinson

Bluebeard gives his wife an egg, and when she enters the forbidden room, she drops the egg in horror and gets blood on it. The bloodstain won’t come out, and that’s how Bluebeard knows she’s been in the room. So right away, the folktale has associations with menstruation and a loss of both innocence and reproductive possibility.

Nonfiction

Language and Imaginative Resistance in Epic Fantasy

Our view of the world, and reality, is a constructed one. Our brains—in their unending quest to be more efficient—often pull on early images and memories to construct our view of the real world. After all, what other information do we have to achieve this but those early stories about how the world is, how it works?

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: T. Kingfisher

Many fairy tales have their own sort of logic and don’t hold up very well to scrutiny, but Cinderella’s particularly bad in that regard—can you imagine what that slipper would be like after it had made the rounds of the kingdom?

Nonfiction

The Princess and the Witch

Once upon a time, there was a woman who told stories. Stories of witches and of princesses and of choosing true love. Stories that began once upon a time, and ended in happily ever after. You think you know what these stories are, and oh, perhaps you do. But until this woman, until Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, the stories were not yet called what they are now. But she wrote these stories, and she gave them their name—contes des fées. Fairy tales.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Delia Sherman

The thing about writing is that while you’re consciously researching and writing a story about, say, scientifically plausible mermen, asexual women, and the infinite varieties of human affection, your subconscious is busily weaving a different story entirely, about love that seeks to own, or plain, middle-aged, scientific spinsters trying to make a place for herself in a culture that doesn’t believe such a creature could possibly exist.

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Preface

Welcome to issue fifty-eight of FANTASY MAGAZINE! Over at LIGHTSPEED we were excited to publish our special issue, Women Destroy Science Fiction!, in June, but when our Kickstarter’s tremendous success unlocked all of our stretch goals—thus offering us the chance to expand the destruction into fantasy and horror—we knew that the Women Destroy Fantasy! special issue had to be a FANTASY MAGAZINE special issue.

Nonfiction

Editorial, October 2014

Here’s the thing. All humans live inside a vast structure made of the flow of power and resources. All around us are the things that have grown to shape and express those flows: conventions and laws and manners and pop culture and highbrow art, architecture, religion, literature . . . even genre fiction.

Nonfiction

Artist Spotlight: Women in Fantasy Illustration Roundtable

A roundtable interview with women artists (and one art director) Julie Bell, Irene Gallo, Rebecca Guay, Lauren Panepinto, Julie Dillon, Elizabeth Leggett, and Zoë Robinson.

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight: Kate Hall

This is a story about anger as much as art: about anger’s power to trap and destroy, as well as its power to liberate. The scream is the anger that lives in every person who is forced to be someone/something they don’t want to be, and it can either set you free or doom you.