Fantasy — Essays — Speculative Insight

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor is a genre-blending novel, which was published in 2009, but unlike work from authors of western science fiction, it does not open with spaceships or futuristic cities, but in sun scorched deserts. No spaceships, no metal utopias, no, there are spirits, ancient deities, a young woman who comes to realize that she can change the world with her magic. This work by Okorafor was an eye-opener to the readers with a Euro American background in science fiction: for many western readers, Okorafor redefined speculative fiction.

The conditions of the possible have been redefined by a new generation of Nigerian writers, artists and filmmakers whose storytelling is deeply rooted in cultural memory.

Mar 6
Mar 6 Indian Feminist Science Fiction: A History (Part 1)

Amritesh Mukherjee

In 1905 colonial Calcutta, where purdah confined women and British rule circumscribed everyone, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain imagined otherwise. Sultana's Dream transports its narrator to Ladyland, a society where men remain secluded in the mardana (a play on the word janana, which referred to the space women were “kept” in) while women govern through superior scientific knowledge, harnessing solar power, piloting air-cars, controlling weather, eliminating crime entirely. If physical strength doesn't entitle lions to dominate humans, why should it entitle men to dominate women? "Since the mardana system has been established, there has been no more crime or sin; therefore we do not require a policeman to find out a culprit, nor do we want a magistrate to try a criminal case," Sister Sara explains.

Jan 2
Jan 2 The Politics of Translation

Christine Yunn-Yu Sun

Generally speaking, politics is a set of principles, beliefs and activities associated with the distribution of power and resources. In terms of relations among states, communities, organisations or individuals, the aim of politics is to influence decision-making processes that help to improve someone's status and/or to increase their power.

In this sense, translation is very much a political act. Translators are traditionally viewed as being invisible and passive, working behind the scenes to transfer information from one language to another. However, in recent decades, researchers are increasingly investigating the politics of translation and the (pro)active role that translators may play in cross-cultural communications.

Dec 6
Dec 6 Must a Hero Journey?

Donna Glee Williams

It was sometime around 2012 that I first got tapped on the shoulder by the ghost of this young girl born into a sort of forest utopia. Catastrophe falls on her people—in the form of the downstream effects of toxic agriculture—and she has to fight her way back to the source to fix the problem.

This felt like familiar ground to me. I’m a fantasy writer; I’ve venerated the Hero’s Journey ever since I first read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces in my early 20s. I can spot a Hero’s Journey a mile away on a foggy day. I knew where this was going.

Seventy years ago, the literature professor Joseph Campbell’s personal charisma and power as a teacher broke the idea of a heroic quest monomyth free from academia and turned it loose onto the world.

Nov 1
Nov 1 Almost a Witch

Freyja Stokes

Mrs Palm is an interesting Discworld character, as is the historical context her story references. Discworld’s foremost witch, Granny Weatherwax, describes Mrs Palm as ‘almost a witch.’ These two characters provide a Discworld lens through which we can explore related real-world history and how that is applicable now: “[i]n Discworld, stories and lies come together to create something necessary and meaningful. […] It is a training ground upon which to learn that beliefs have power, regardless of whether or not they are, conventionally speaking, true (Fellows 2014, p.216).”

The real-world history and stories about “witches” directly inform the portrayal of Discworld’s witches. Discworld’s sex work and sex workers are similarly informed by real-world history and narratives.

Oct 4
Oct 4 Lives under empire

Eric de Roulet

Amid the dizzying flurry of political news and global affairs developments in 2025, it might be difficult to imagine why we would need more fiction about imperialism, dictatorships, and the manufacturing of consent for forever-wars. After all, doesn’t our own world abound with examples of powerful countries exploiting and extracting from weaker ones, of autocrats (or aspiring ones) extending their tentacles into every aspect of public and private life, of empires lurching from one war to another in attempt to justify their continued existence, and of supposed authority figures and thought leaders falling in line?

Yet this is exactly what we see in the setting that unifies the stories in One Message Remains, a collection of short fiction by Premee Mohamed.

Aug 2
Aug 2 Glass Geographies

Ben Lockwood

The first time I read Ivy Grimes's Glass Stories (2024), I didn't find much in the way of geographic themes in the pieces. In fact, in one of the first notes I took I wrote that these stories seem to "float" in space and time, not fully located anywhere or anytime we might recognize as our own. But this is only on the surface, and upon revisiting the pieces I found that Grimes is doing much more with the places and spaces her characters inhabit than I initially realized. So, the purpose of this essay is to examine the ways these geographic themes manifest in Grimes’s work.

Jul 5
Jul 5 Upwardly Mobile and Hating it

While the city of Ankh-Morpork is certainly on the grubby side, it rarely descends into anything approximating noir, except when we are looking through the eyes of Sam Vimes, captain and later Lord Commander of the City Watch.

In the first three City Watch novels, which work as individual police procedural mysteries as well as a fantasy trilogy exploring the idea that monarchy is indistinguishable from villainy,[1] our protagonist appears on the page as the epitome of every crumpled drunk detective who ever brooded his way through a pulp fiction magazine, or the monochrome opening credits of a grimdark TV show.

The difference between Vimes and every other crumpled drunk detective, however, is that the usual noir hero with one foot in the gutter and an endless array of world-weary sarcastic quips is usually immune to narrative change.

Jun 7
Jun 7 The Dublin Portal… Or The Dublin Intrusion?

Val Nolan

Science fiction, Fantasy

Styled as the kind of ‘sufficiently advanced technology’ that’s ‘indistinguishable from magic’ which Science Fiction and Fantasy has rehearsed for decades,[1] the Dublin/New York Portal—an interactive public video installation—represents a sincere artistic effort to flatten the curvature of spacetime by bringing together cities geographically distant and temporally out of synch, while, in the process, encouraging people to ‘rethink the meaning of unity’.[2] A freestanding 3.4 meter circular screen livestreaming images across the world, this ‘technology art sculpture’[3] is one of several envisioned by Lithuanian artist Benediktas Gylys (with the object itself designed by engineers at the Creativity and Innovation Centre at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University).[4] The Dublin Portal on the city’s North Earl Street was established with the collaboration of Dublin City Council in May 2024. Its corresponding screen was initially placed on the Flatiron South Public Plaza at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 23rd Street in New York City …

Apr 5
Apr 5 What Lies and Threats

Abby Roberts

J.R.R. Tolkien was a philologist, not a scholar of myth. He admitted as much in “On Fairy-Stories,” an essay originally given as a lecture in 1939. Nonetheless, “On Fairy-Stories” shows Tolkien was knowledgeable about myth scholarship of his and preceding generations and had drawn his own conclusions on the origins and functions of myth. For Tolkien, myth was the process by which human beings comprehend and describe the world around them: “The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval.”

Tolkien had begun writing The Lord of the Rings at about the time he delivered “On Fairy-Stories.” His ideas about the cognitive role of myth play out in the novel.

Mar 1
Mar 1 Celibacy & the Single Wizzard

“When it comes to wine, women and song, wizards are allowed to get down and croon as much as they like.” (Sourcery)

Wizards don’t have sex. Except of course where sex = biological gender because wizards are male in almost all instances and will argue any exceptions out of existence.

The celibacy of wizards is an odd quirk of Discworld magic which regularly returns as a running joke. However, most people (including the wizards themselves) are hazy on the ‘why’ behind the sex ban. Is ‘No Sex Please, We’re Wizards’ a rule of the universe, a rule of Unseen University, or more of a guideline?

We’re offered several answers over the course of the series, contradicting one another, and awash with flagrant heteronormativity. Marriage, sex and procreation in the Discworld are inevitable and interchangeable consequences, it seems, of men and women being allowed to come into contact with each other.

Feb 1
Feb 1 The SEA Is Whose?

Ng Yi-Sheng

For years now, I’ve been a passionate champion for Southeast Asian speculative fiction—just check out my Strange Horizons essay, “A Spicepunk Manifesto”,i in which I praise its creation as a decolonial act. At the same time, I’ve struggled with an imbalance at the heart of this genre, obvious to insiders but otherwise almost invisible.

Simply put, the best-known authors of Southeast Asian SFF aren’t racially representative of the region. We’re ethnically Chinese. I’m talking about celebrated names like Zen Cho and Cassandra Khaw from Malaysia; Pim Wangtechawat and SP Somtow from Thailand; Jes and Cin Wibowo from Indonesia; Isabel Yap and Rin Chupeco from the Philippines; Neon Yang and Wen-yi Lee from Singapore; the editors of the landmark anthology The SEA Is Ours, Joyce Chng and Jaymee Goh…

Nov 2
Nov 2 Brutes, Villains & Bureaucrats

They sneer, they stab, they laugh maniacally… and sometimes they stare through you as if you’re worthless. Terry Pratchett is great at many things, but crafting horrifying villains is one of his superpowers. While he has certainly introduced many memorable female villains to the Disc — the Duchess of Lancre, Lily Weatherwax and the Queen of the Faeries for example — and many iconic antagonists that are entirely (or mostly) ungendered such as the Auditors, the Gonne, and the creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions, there is something deeply and deliciously sinister about his male villains. What do many of them have in common? Competence, ruthlessness and a talent for admin.

Rub your hands together in glee, it’s time for an octagonal listicle!

Oct 5
Oct 5 The Redemption Arc

Amy Salley

Science fiction, Fantasy

There you are, mid-book. The good guy is face-to-face with the bad guy. The good guy knows that the bad guy, deep down inside, isn’t evil, that there is a chance to bring the good guy back to the light. The bad guy scoffs! Indeed no! The good guy’s virtue is a weakness! But in a private moment, the bad guy has second thoughts. You are riveted. Will the bad guy come around? If he does, will he deserve forgiveness? Yes, you think. He will.

On that satisfying note, you put your book down. You blink in the light of the real world. You scroll your apps. There’s another accusation of wrongdoing against an author. In fact, the author wrote the book you just put down. The accusation is just one example of behavior that has been going on for years, one of SFF’s worst-kept secrets. No one on the convention circuit ever called him on it and now the simmering collective discomfort has boiled over.

Jul 6
Jul 6 Men Who Respect Witches III: Male Supporting Characters in Witches Abroad

Far more than in Equal Rites or Wyrd Sisters, the men of Witches Abroad exist to serve (either literally, providing skills or assistance, or figuratively, pushing forward the narrative) the female characters, and witches in particular. There are still so many speculative fiction stories in the world where women exist as shadows, love interests and vulnerable plot tokens in comparison to the more active male roles; fantasy has come a long way over the decades, but it was a big deal in 1991 to find a story that so thoroughly turned these tables.[1]

I’ve divided the male characters of Witches Abroad into four handy categories: men who listen, men who assist, men who aren’t men, and men who aren’t there.

May 3
May 3 The Underlying Foundation of Magic

Celia Lake

I write about Albion, the magical community of Great Britain, currently between the 1880s and 1950. (Ireland is doing its own thing, magically.) There’s a tremendous amount of change in that time, in terms of medical advances, technology, communication options, and how people live their lives. At the same time, I don’t actually want to change history. Inserting magic into the landscape means thinking about what will and won’t be affected.

When I started writing, I knew I wanted to write about a magical community with a range of magical options. Just like with most other skills, I wanted what someone could do magically to depend on a combination of factors. For magic in my writing, that's a combination of talent (how easy it is for them to learn something), strength (how much they can accomplish with their magic), and knowledge (what they have learned about how to use magic). Someone with less strength but enough knowledge can still be incredibly effective, and someone with raw strength but no training has some definite limits.

Mar 2
Mar 2 Men Who Respect Witches I: Male Validation of Women’s Magic in Equal Rites

…one of my favourite tropes is the male sidekick paired with a female protagonist. (Bonus points when there’s no romance involved!) In the 1980s, no matter what popular culture you were consuming, it was incredibly rare to find stories where men assisted the narrative of powerful women… and honestly it still feels a little subversive when I stumble across it these days. In the early Witch books, this dynamic is particularly notable because these stories are grounded in a recurring theme of appreciating tradition and old-fashioned values: the Witches are constantly looking back to how things have always been done, while also being sneakily progressive – and making sure no one expects them to follow any unnecessary social restrictions that are otherwise fine for everyone else.

Jan 6
Jan 6 What Is Fantasy Anyway?

Cheryl Morgan