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

Please be aware that we discuss some fairly heavy topics in this episode, including addiction, violence against children, and racially motivated violence. Also, less serious in nature but full disclosure: I reference Star Trek really early in this episode. I was proud of myself. Towards the end of this episode, we discuss some important issues […]

It’s easy to see why haunted houses are frightening – most of us live in a house and share a terror of what might happen if some unpleasant force took up residence there alongside us. Similarly, folk horror that is rooted in a particular place can challenge our sense of feeling safe within a community. […]

The best horror takes place when we are at our most vulnerable. In our house. Under our bed. The best monsters are those that we trust because they have the greatest capacity for betrayal. With that in mind, it’s no wonder that families feature so strongly in horror fiction. In this episode, we are joined […]

Have you ever wandered into a bookstore and found yourself baffled by the shelving of some books? Have you ever read a review that labeled a book written for adults as YA only to bemoan the amount of adult content? What do most of these erroneously shelved books have in common? They’re written by women. […]

Fairy tales are both timeless and personal. We see their themes and motifs repeated in stories spanning centuries. But while the characters and scenarios might be familiar, the morals change over time. The story’s message may differ depending on who is telling that story, and who is listening. In particular, women’s roles and sexuality have […]

When Madeline Miller published Circe, it heralded the start of a new wave of feminist retellings, in which writers revisited well-known classics in order to tell the stories of those excluded from the dominant narrative. Now the popularity of mythological retellings is at an all-time high and bookshops are flooded with tales of heroic women […]

Ursula K Le Guin is the very definition of a legend. So many of us found our way to speculative fiction through her works, while others only realised later that the tropes we so loved – considered cliched now – were fresh and new when Le Guin brought them to life. When we think of […]

The tale of Cinderella – or the Cat Cinderella, or Aschenputtel – is a story that is found in many cultures throughout the world. The extraneous elements may change – sometimes there’s a ball, sometimes not, there can be murder, a nut tree, a fairy godmother or the kindly spirit of a deceased mother – […]

It’s high fantasy. You know the drill: personalities are defined by race. Elves are pointy-eared snobs who are unbearably pretty, orcs are barely sentient lap dogs, dwarves love gold and mining… And this is how it’s been, for the most part, since Middle Earth.  Not only are these narrow stereotypes incredibly problematic, but they are […]

If you have been listening to our podcast for some time now, you will be well aware of our fascination with fairytales and how they continue to shape modern speculative fiction. But when we talk about fairytales, we are often thinking of a very narrow subset – those that are more familiar to English-speaking audiences… […]