Well, damn. It isn’t often you pick up a book, race through it, then wonder why the hell it took you so long to get to it (in fairness, my to-read pile is massive). Nimona was so good that it ...
Read More »Utopian future: Is this the end of dystopian fiction’s reign?
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 ...
Read More »The fallacies of YA fiction
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 ...
Read More »An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows
Having never come across Foz Meadows before, I approached An Accident of Stars with a mixture of trepidation and nervous excitement. What if I’m about to read the next SFF classic? Well, when it comes to Foz Meadows’ latest, that might ...
Read More »The end of the world as we know it: The apocalypse in SFF fiction
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 ...
Read More »Breaking the Glass Slipper: Samantha Shannon on the imagination of the child
Today’s episode is an interruption to our previously scheduled episode, an interview with Ben Peek. Fear not, we will post the interview next time. In the meantime, a controversy amongst the SFF community was recently sparked by a British educator ...
Read More »Shadowhunters: Completely unwatchable trash
I’m not surprised that Shadowhunters, the second screen incarnation of Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments, is utter shit. But I had hoped that after 2013’s film adaptation was such a commercial and critical failure, the creative team behind the series ...
Read More »Overused and unimaginative: The formula for YA dystopian novels
I can’t be the only one despairing at the lack of imagination in the countless numbers of YA dystopian novels. They have become so generic and formulaic a computer could easily write one. While I have enjoyed my fair share ...
Read More »The Maze Runner: Scorch Trials
If you thought the first film in this YA franchise was batshit crazy, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet… The log line for the sequel to The Maze Runner reads ‘The maze was just the beginning.’ They weren’t kidding. The world ...
Read More »Why you should be reading Liz de Jager’s Blackhart Legacy
I’m a big fan of Young Adult novels. Forget the haters who claim that the books should only be read by the intended target audience. Screw that! Read what you want to read. There should be no rules about what ...
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