Midnight Robber

When Mad Max: Fury Road opened, pretty much everyone agreed it was one of the best films of the year, and a new classic of the post-apocalyptic genre. Everyone, that is, save for a subset of dudes from one of the internet’s darkest corners, who lash out at anything that suggests that women can be just as […]

The phrase “strong female character” is problematic. Oh, so problematic. It’s a phrase used mainly by guys, first of all, generally by guys who think referring to women as “females” is somehow a more scientific and precise nomenclature, as if the women in their lives are an alien species that must be studied. The phrase […]

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 […]

It’s nothing new to point out how much epic fantasy is based on a pretty narrow swath of human culture. Due partly to reverence for foundational texts like The Lord of the Rings, and partly the institutional dominance of white, Western writers, for a long time, the phrase “fantasy literature” was nigh-synonymous with invented worlds […]