All in Fantasy

Celibacy & the Single Wizzard

Tansy Rayner Roberts
Fantasy

“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. 

The SEA Is Whose?

Ng Yi-Sheng
Fantasy, Science fiction

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…

Brutes, Villains & Bureaucrats 

Tansy Rayner Roberts
Fantasy

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!

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.

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

Tansy Rayner Roberts
Fantasy

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.

The Underlying Foundation of Magic

Celia Lake
Fantasy

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. 

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

Tansy Rayner Roberts
Fantasy

…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.

What Is Fantasy Anyway?

Cheryl Morgan
Fantasy

My contention here is not about genre boundaries; it is about exploding them.

If you were to ask the hypothetical person in the street what fantasy fiction is, there is a good chance that they will say it is stories about dragons and wizards. That’s not a bad first pass. After all, the two most famous fantasy worlds – George Martin’s Westeros and JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth – do fit the bill. Westeros is famous for its dragons, and Middle Earth for a wizard. But there are forms of fantasy that do not fit this definition.