Breaking the Glass Slipper: Women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror

We love our folk horror. The genre has been growing in popularity these past years, and it’s not hard to see why. Writers take pastoral settings such as windswept hills or rugged sea coasts and imbue them with a sense of deep isolation. Throw in a community that seems at first utterly safe and then […]

Welcome to our Halloween episode! Romance has always been big business and these days there are plenty of subgenres. Despite its popularity, however, some snobbery still exists, often dismissing romance as “women’s fiction.” But if romance is really so terrible, why does it sell so well? Are the female characters in these books still the […]

It’s October, so we’re officially allowed to talk about Christmas. Sure, we’ve got Halloween first, and that’s a celebration we should all be enthusiastic about, but take a look at what books are being pushed by bookstores, Amazon, and even supermarkets, and you’ll find that Christmas stories are starting to creep in. You could say […]

We often take for granted the role language plays in communicating our favourite stories. And here in the west, there exists an unspoken expectation to be able to consume those favourite stories in English. The necessity and importance of translation is a given. Writers producing work in English but for whom English is their second […]

We’re honoured to have Isabel Cañas join us on the show as she talks us through not only her fabulous new novel, Vampires of El Norte, but also her experience of breaking into publishing as a Mexican-American writer and the pressure on marginalised creators to produce something “fresh”. Mentioned in this episode: Isabel Cañas is a […]

In the preface to Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire indicated that boredom is the truest suffering, andthis idea later became central to the fin de siècle movement, an era of decadence in which artificemasqueraded as, or was even elevated to the status of, art. The Belladonna Invitation by Rose Bigginis a Gothic exploration of the […]

When it comes to science fiction – and particularly dystopian science fiction – doctors are either the saviours of humanity with their invaluable medical knowledge, or they are the villains, using a lack of rules to exploit the vulnerable for their own questionable ends. But why is that? Is it a case of power corrupts? […]

Folklore and fairy tales can sometimes be inextricably bound up with religion. In the Grimms’ own collection of fairy tales, the Devil turns up and so do angels. ‘The Peasant in Heaven’ as well as ‘The Devil and his Grandmother’ were included alongside more famous tales such as ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Rumpelstiltskin’. With the current appetite […]

For this week’s episode, Lucy and Charlotte thought they’d take the opportunity to talk about something they have a passion for: folklore. In particular, the ballad of the Singing Bone, which is Aarne Thompson index number 780.  To give it its full name, the Aarne Thompson Uther (shortened to ATU) index was created to try […]

It’s a standard rule of writing that if you want your protagonist to look heroic and competent, you’ve got to get a powerful and menacing antagonist. In the past, writers have used AI as an overwhelming and hostile force, while others have chosen gods. But Emma Mieko Candon has taken the unusual step of pairing […]