Category: Fantasy
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Tove Jansson – the Truth about the Moomins
A while back I wrote a post about Tove Jansson’s last Moomin book, Moominvalley in November (1971), pointing out that behind the innocent guise of a charming children’s tale lurked a masterpiece of Nordic existentialism. I had no idea. I’ve just finished Boel Westin’s biography of the author Tove Jansson: Life, Art and Words, translated […]
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Ragged Claws available on March 16th!
Max and Abby are trapped in the city of Interosseous where the inhabitants navigate through the treacherous streets using the giant faces in the sky. If humanity is to survive Max must contact the Machine Men who live in the Heart and Mind of the Colossus. But the way onward is a deadly maze […]
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You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack – Tom Gauld
A while back I posted one of Tom Gauld’s cartoons on this blog and wrote a brief piece for my newsletter. His work is so clever, and pushes so many of the right buttons for an Eng-Lit professor turned science fiction writer that I couldn’t help but share some more of his work, taken from […]
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Dark Fantasy: is it suitable for the servants?
This week’s post is a guest article by Jane Dougherty, the author of the wonderfully grim fantasy novel The Dark Citadel. First in a series, it tells of a future religious/fascist dystopian society sheltering beneath an immense dome, around which prowl demons and creatures of legend. It’s refreshingly sinister and pulls no punches in its […]
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Pards and Manticores – A Medieval Bestiary
Herodotus the father of history divided knowledge into three types. Things he saw with his own eyes, information people told him which he could verify as true, and things he couldn’t verify and might easily be completely made up. He visited Egypt, and so when he writes about its manners and customs we can be […]
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Ragged Claws – concept art
The sequel to Thumb.
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Weird Tales
I’ve had a treat this last couple of weeks, working my way through the latest issues of the resurrected magazine Weird Tales. The first issue of the original predated the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, by three years, launching in 1923. It then went on to become the mainstay of that singularly American genre, Weird […]
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Phoenix (Hi no Tori) – Osamu Tezuka
Following on from Jim Barker’s post about the need to take comics seriously I thought I’d write about an artist who is recognised as one of the greatest comic book writers of all time, Osamu Tezuka and his finest creation, the twelve volume Phoenix series (Hi no Tori), first published in Japan between 1967 and […]
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A Field in England (2013)
The English Civil War period has always been a rich source for horror. James I whipped everyone up with his book Daemonologie in 1597 and his subsequent promotion of, and attendance at, witch trials. Keith Thomas’s classic study Religion and the Decline of Magic argued that in the 16th and 17th centuries the shift to […]
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The Art of Ian Miller
The early 1970s saw a renaissance in Science Fiction and Fantasy cover art in the UK, led by New English Library and Panther. If you compare the drab covers of the 60s with what came after the difference is striking. Gone are the clumsy Pop Art/Op Art photo collages and instead the shelves of W. […]
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King Arthur Pendragon RPG
Dungeons and Dragons came out in 1974 and a couple of years later I gave in and bought a set for the then extortionate sum of £6.99. It came in a little white box with illustrations done in biro. I hadn’t bothered to check whether it could be played solitaire (which it clearly couldn’t) […]
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Frank Frazetta
I’m still waiting for Conan. The first Arnold Schwarzenegger film was kind of OK, and had one or two impressive moments. The second was dire and I still can’t bring myself to watch the remake with Jason Momoa (despite the fact that his Khal Drogo is as close to Conan as anyone – though Rory […]
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The Castle of Otranto
There’s one school of thought, kicked off by Brian Aldiss in his book A Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1973), that says that Science Fiction and Fantasy as we know it started with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Her novel came at the end of the original Gothic movement in literature, and carried with […]
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The Singing Ringing Tree
For a certain generation in the UK, The Singing Ringing Tree, an East German take on a Grimm-style fairy tale is indelibly carved on our psyches, giving us all the screaming habdabs for years. Many of us still wake up crying in the middle of the night over fading visions of large plastic goldfish, grizzly […]
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The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke – Richard Dadd
From the mid-nineteenth century onwards British painting bore little resemblance to its European counterpart. While the French Impressionists forged ahead with their bold experiments in light and composition, English painters headed off into the realms of Genre and Narrative art. For them and their audiences the content of a picture became more important than how […]
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Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, (1950)
Last year I wrote about Jean Cocteau’s beautiful re-telling of the story of Beauty and the Beast, La Belle et la Bête (1946). In many ways it was a perfect movie for the age, giving war-weary French audiences an hour or two’s respite in fantasy while re-asserting French tradition and culture through the art of […]
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Vortex – The Science Fiction Fantasy
The disappearance of Science Fiction Monthly in 1976 left a void in the UK. While New English Library’s SFM never really escaped from its teenage boy bedroom poster origins, and the fiction and artwork it published in later issues rarely rose beyond the mediocre, it was Britain’s only real science fiction magazine post New Worlds. The biggest […]
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Nordic Noir – the Moomins
I’m a huge fan of Nordic crime thrillers at the moment. I’ve been reading Henning Mankell’s Wallander books, and watching the Swedish TV version. I’m also slowly working my way through the three series of The Killing. They are all about taciturn detectives struggling to make sense of the darkest reaches of the human soul, […]
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La Belle et La Bête (1946)
Think Beauty and the Beast and the first images that spring to mind will probably come from the 1991 Disney film and subsequent stage shows. All good stuff and a few rollicking tunes to boot. However the best version, to my mind, is the earlier French film La Belle et La Bête, made in 1946 by […]
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Nicholas Roerich – Eldritch Artist
When I was in Moscow I got the chance to visit the Nicholas Roerich Art Museum. Roerich lived in the early half of the twentieth century and was part of a movement that revolutionised Russian painting. He was keenly interested in spiritualism and tried to found a new religion for the 20th century based on […]