Interview episodes
Unmapping fantasy with A. K. Larkwood
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. ...
Slavic narratives with Gabriela Houston
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...
Women, history & power – with Kate Heartfield
For our first episode of 2022, we are going back to the 18th century, to look at the women who wielded power and the means they used to gain it. What challenges did they face? Are they remembered more or less favourably than their male contemporaries? And if, say,...
Beyond the Mafia – with Fonda Lee
Fantasy – and indeed most fiction – often involves bitter rivalries. Fights over a kingdom or territory, long-standing feuds where people no longer even remember why it began… Such opposing forces are also a key ingredient in organised crime narratives, though they...
Cli-fi and catastrophe
We are destroying our planet. The scientists agree, there is no denying that catastrophic climate change is imminent. And yet our leaders continue to pay lip service to the issue without taking real, impactful action. If things don't change – drastically and soon – we...
Hopeful speculative fiction with Ryka Aoki
The incredible Ursula K. Le Guin won the National Book Foundation medal for distinguished contribution to American letters in 2014. In her much-shared speech, she noted that “hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives...
Body horror with Ellen Datlow
Your body is a temple – a saying that has been with us for centuries. The message: look after your body because you and it are going to be together for a long time. The body is in a symbiotic relationship with the soul: one cannot exist without the other. But what if...
“Perfect” women – with Cat Valente
The idea of perfection, the perfect being, is one of the oldest stories in the world. How that perfection might be tainted, or turn against the hand that made it, is something that has always intrigued writers of fiction. We can see this idea in stories as wide...
Female friendships – with Alix E Harrow
Female friendships tend to take a back seat in our narratives, so that when they are given the space to exist, they exist almost solely to discuss a man. Virginia Woolf once commented that "all the great women of fiction were . . . not only seen by the other sex, but...