Nonfiction
Author Spotlight: Seanan McGuire
So the “kids + magical world = adventure” equation was very, very heavily used during the 1980s. Almost every cartoon had it, because it was a way to get the kids into the story.
So the “kids + magical world = adventure” equation was very, very heavily used during the 1980s. Almost every cartoon had it, because it was a way to get the kids into the story.
European folk tradition has placed quite a strong emphasis on the connection between the shadow and the soul; this connection can be found in German and Portuguese folklore, and in non-European folk belief as well.
Write for yourself, write like everyone you know is dead. Then when you finish you can worry about who might like it.
We knew that we were going to have the fairy tale world as a backdrop in Puss in Boots, we wanted to make sure we didn’t end up just parodying them. We wanted to take the original stories and put a new spin on them.
You can’t hope to get a whole person on the page—other people are always the biggest mystery, the great unknowable in life—but you can sometimes get down in words that thing that makes them strange and alluring.
Welcome to issue fifty-seven of Fantasy! Here’s what we’ve got on tap this month … Fiction: “Her Lover’s Golden Hair ” by Nike Sulway, “Torn Away” by Joe R. Lansdale, “Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage” by Seanan Maguire, “Vici” by Naomi Novik. Nonfiction: “Feature Interview: Chris Miller” by Andrew Penn Romine, “The Deathly Shadows in Our Lives” by Veronica Schanoes, “Falling With Style” by Alasdair Stuart, “”Three Dragons” by Genevieve Valentine.
The natural connection between pen and sword is solidified by the language of fencing, wherein the fencer’s repertoire of movements is called a conversation of blades, or a judge will “read the phrase” of the action before awarding a touch.
It’s the book we all loved in high school (or college), the one we weren’t sure we should admit to our friends we loved—until we found out they loved it, too. It’s the one with the trashy cover that turns out to be amazingly great.
The Weird West goes back to the earliest days of the Western: to the dime novels and serial stories in weekly gazettes that turned the American west into a mythic land even before it stopped being a place you could move to
In a way, of course, I’m appropriating everything. I’m borrowing this very American mode—the Western—and Niven’s magic system, and I’m setting it in a sort of Victorian-era China dealing with foreign incursions.