By Jeanette Ng Well described meals can add a lot of flavour to one’s world building. I have clear memories of salivating over the banquets described in Brian Jacques’ Redwall books. Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games has meticulously described food, especially in with each district having its own distinctive bread. I love writing about food almost […]
Read More Tidbits from a Pseudo-Medieval KitchenScience fiction and fantasy, in my experience, are rarely all one thing. Sometimes – often! – SFF blends elements of other genres of fiction into it. For instance, I think just about every Philip K. Dick novel I’ve read is either transgressive fiction or a detective/crime novel. Sometimes those elements seem so weird that not […]
Read More Science Fiction & Fantasy MashupsBy Jay Bennett The Hypatia stone is only a few centimeters across, broken into pebble fragments, but it may very well be the most interesting rock in the world. Named for Hypatia of Alexandria, the first prominent Western woman astronomer and mathematician, the colorful rock was found in 1996 in western Egypt by Aly Barakat, […]
Read More ‘Hypatia’ Stone Contains Compounds Not Found in the Solar SystemBy Kameron Hurley I’m going to tell you a story about llamas. It will be like every other story you’ve ever heard about llamas: how they are covered in fine scales; how they eat their young if not raised properly; and how, at the end of their lives, they hurl themselves – lemming-like- over cliffs […]
Read More We Have Always Fought: Changing the Women, Cattle & Slaves NarrativeBy Skylar Gibby-Brown 1. Pearl Hart Born in Lindsay, Canada in 1871, Hart attended an exclusive school. However, she enjoyed adventuring more than school work. At age seventeen, Pearl eloped to Chicago with gambler, Frederick Hart. But, Frederick was abusive and Hart left him at age Twenty-two. She made her way to Arizona where she […]
Read More 10 Notorious Female Outlaws From the Wild WestI love Lindybeige’s channel; he’s got a lot of practical how-tos and whys for writers of adventure stories and historical fiction. Here’s a practical guide to revolvers, thoroughly dispelling a lot of spaghetti western myths. I’ll just put in that in the Wyrd West, a lot of legendary old firearms have been modified by gnomes […]
Read More Single- and Double-Action RevolversPleased to announce that I am going to be in this outstanding boxed set! An international bestselling cast of 22 authors, and don’t let the stats fool you, that’s a dummy file, each one of us will be writing a minimum of a 40k word novel! You can’t beat our starting price for all of […]
Read More On the Horizon Boxed Set Announcement!By Alter S. Reiss “Getting the archaeology right” doesn’t actually matter that much when it comes to fantasy. The fact is, when it comes to secondary worlds, a lot of the absolutely basic assumptions don’t make any sense. Why are there people in this world, whose history—whose natural history—is so different from ours? If dragons […]
Read More Putting Archaeology to Work in Fantasy FictionThis article is part of the Science in Sci-fi, Fact in Fantasy blog series. Each week, we tackle one of the scientific or technological concepts pervasive in sci-fi (space travel, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, etc.) with input from an expert. Please join the mailing list to be notified every time new content is posted. About the Expert Since getting her Ph.D. in Toxicology in […]
Read More Poisons in SF & FantasyBy Judith Tarr Every so often when I put up an article in this series on SFF Equines, the commenters give me all kinds of ideas for new articles. And they ask great questions. Last time was no exception. This batch of questions centers around a couple of common themes, namely horse breeds and riding. I’ll take the […]
Read More Writing SFF Horses: Notes on Breeds and Riding
Diane Morrison 