Creative Industries

The issue of piracy regularly rears its ugly head across all creative mediums. The latest furor has arisen out of the SFF publishing world after bestselling author Maggie Stiefvater wrote a blog post about how book piracy had affected her. While ...

Why do we still have ‘women’s fiction’ as a category in bookshops? Amazon, for instance, lists ‘Women Writers and Fiction Books’ as one of the major fiction categories, and ‘Women’s Popular Fiction’, ‘Women’s Literary Fiction’, and ‘Women’s Short Stories’ as ...

I’ve only recently started to appreciate collections of short stories. While I’ve always enjoyed short stories as individual entities, sitting down to read bite-sized stories never really appealed to me. Instead, I always preferred to get stuck into a novel, ...

Having been racing my way through many SFF book series, I started to note the differences amongst how they approach certain issues of construction – how they deal with the continuing story, individual novels as part of a larger whole, and ...

Publishing industry insiders are predicting that 2017 will find readers turning to happier tales of escapism and hope. As a result, genre publishers are talking about the This is a big shift from the pessimistic dystopias that have dominated bestseller lists ...

When talking to Gollancz’s Publishing Director, Gillian Redfearn, at Nine Worlds (you can listen to the full conversation here), I’ve been mulling over something she said. Gillian posited that we may have a gender default – where we automatically default ...

YA fiction has always bothered me, but not for the reasons you might suspect. Don’t worry, this isn’t about how adults should grow up and read real literature. I’m a YA fan, from The Hunger Games to Paper Towns. You’ll find ...

I am currently on a mission to watch everything Joe Gilgun has ever appeared in. From Misfits to This is England to Pride to Preacher, he has quickly become one of my favourite actors of all time, while also being ...

With Independence Day: Resurgence hitting cinemas this week, I decided to watch the original. I am one of these weirdos who had never actually seen the film, despite its popularity. Well, I’ve seen it now. And while watching it, I ...

Dystopia and other post-apocalyptic tales have long been popular in the SFF world. From YA dysfic to scifi horror (robots! aliens! WMDs!), writers have great fun imagining all the weird and wonderful ways society, the world, even the universe, as ...