Sorcerer to the Crown

Genre mashups are a mature art form these days. We’ve thrown together religious pilgrimages and sci-fi apocalypses, Victorian morals and modern technology, operas in space, and aliens visiting us across time. My personal pick: that time someone decided to mash up dragons and tea cups. In recent years, a glorious lot of authors have realized many of the people who […]

Season 7 of Game of Thrones is finally here—and somehow, already nearly halfway over! If you’re like me, and unsure how you’re going to pass the time between Sundays for the next few weeks—never mind the break between the season finale and the start of the next and final season, and double-never mind the agonizing […]

S.A. Chakraborty’s debut The City of Brass is a fantasy novel rooted in reality, and heavily influenced by the very real history of the Islamic world. She joins us today to talk about the importance of doing your research—but only in service of a greater cause: shedding light on your characters. “The past is a […]

From The Time Machine to Kirk and Uhura‘s unprecedented kiss, speculative fiction has long concerned itself with breaking barriers and exploring issues of race, inequality, and injustice. The fantastical elements of genre, from alien beings to magical ones, allow writers to confront controversial issues in metaphor, granting them a subversive power that often goes unheralded. On this, the […]