M. John Harrison was part of the New Wave, a literary movement that, according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, introduced Mainstream fiction techniques into the “straightjacket” of mass produced science fiction. The literary values of the movement, which increasingly drew from the soft sciences rather than hard sciences, can be identified with the kind …
Continue reading Weird #60: “Egnaro” by M. John Harrison (1981)
What if dragons and their riders formed their own corps of soldiers adjacent to the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars? You get Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, the first novel of which, His Majesty's Dragon, I have just finished reading on my Kobo. William Laurence, a Royal Navy captain engaged in the Napoleonic Wars, captures …
If you're like me, you have probably starved for an original fantasy novel. So many novels and short stories rely too heavily on The Lord of the Rings and the epic fantasy genre that spawned from it. Are there any original fantasy works that use impossible situations without having elves, orcs, and dragons run across …
Continue reading The Secret History of Fantasy, edited by Peter S. Beagle
It's an entire world just under your feet, in the vast underground networks that form the urban environment, where people who've fallen through the cracks of society vanish from our everyday reality. Such is the setting of Neil Gaiman's urban quest fantasy Neverwhere. One of his older novels, it was originally based on a 1996 …
Matthew Rettino 