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Author Spotlight: Tim Pratt
I’m not sure why the protagonist ended up being such a miserable bastard. Perhaps because miserable bastards need magical beaches the most.
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Editorial, October 2011
Welcome to issue fifty-five of Fantasy Magazine! Here’s what we’ve got on tap this month … Fiction: “The Secret Beach” by Tim Pratt, “Absolute Zero” by Nadia Bulkin, “Unnatural Disaster” by Kristine Katherine Rusch, “The Invisibles” by Charles De Lint. Nonfiction: “Feature Interview: Richard K. Morgan” by Andrew Liptak, “The Downsides of Dating a God” by Genevieve Valentine, “Five Ocean-Dwelling Creatures That Look Like Aliens (But Aren’t)” by Jeremiah Tolbert, “Are You Watching Carefully?” by Christopher Priest.
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Feature Interview: Brandon Sanderson
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.
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Author Spotlight: James Alan Gardner
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.
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Ten Reasons to be a Pirate
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.
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Author Spotlight: Carrie Vaughn
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?
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The Language of Fantasy
Quenya, Tsolyáni, Láadan, Klingon, Kesh, Na’vi, Dothraki … this is not a magic spell, nor a litany from some ancient prayer book, but just a few just a few of the invented languages that have made it into print or onto the screen.
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Author Spotlight: Jonathan Lethem
What strikes me now is how much like Pratt I am, in a way—devoted to hardening my shell of ignorance, and operating within it, even if it isn’t so small as his.
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Steampunk and the Architecture of Idealism
Steampunk as a genre is about traversing the edge of that level of technology. Characters have weapons and gadgets that are conceptually similar to things we have in the modern day, but work in entirely different ways.
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Author Spotlight: Megan Arkenberg
As the story went through revisions, I reworked some of the lessons (and sometimes changed them back again!) to be sillier and less predictable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was tempting to fall back on “true love conquers all.”
