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How Fighting Fantasy beat traditional games
Ian Livingstone explains how his roleplaying gamebooks have become steadily more central to the cultureWhen I was 10 I wanted, for a brief period, to be a professional Fighting Fantasy player. I was so...
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The weird deserves recognition as a major literary movement
Birkbeck University's recent Weird Council reminds us that the movement anticipated our sense of a subjective, uncertain realityThe image that conjures the weird for me, above and beyond all others, is...
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Dear Ed Miliband … seek your future in post-scarcity SF
The progressive left needs science fiction's visions of possible worlds to see beyond austerityComrade,The party conference season is all but over. Our leaders have delivered their vision of our...
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Ursula K Le Guin: stories for the ages
The power of Le Guin's work will surely guarantee it an audience for centuries to comeA century from now people will still be reading the fantasy stories of Ursula K Le Guin with joy and wonder. Five...
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London: fantasy's capital city | Damien Walter
The many mysteries of the metropolis provide an irresistible route map for the imaginationMystery is the doorway to fantasy. Dark forests, far away galaxies, roads that wind into the distance: any...
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Alif the Unseen: speculative fiction meets the Arab spring
G Willow Wilson's novel about Egyptian hackers is a delirious urban fantasy which puts the unlikely case for religion in an age of empowering but intrusive technologyIt is significant that all of our...
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Darkness in literature: Philip K Dick's A Scanner Darkly
Philip K Dick explores the psychological horrors lurking in the shadows of sunny 70s California in his cult classic, A Scanner DarklyPhilip K Dick's partially autobiographical chronicle of 70s hippie...
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A brave new world: science fiction predictions for 2013
Mainstream recognition, acknowledgement of the genius of M John Harrison and a rekindled fascination with the final frontier - here are my predictions for science fiction this year2012 has been a year...
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Piracy is yesterday's worry for today's 'artisan authors'
File sharing and self-publishing are becoming the norm for a generation of writers looking beyond a moribund publishing eco-systemThe community of SF writers has reason to dislike digital copying, or...
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Adam Roberts: last of the SF writers
Jack Glass is Adam Roberts's most fan-friendly novel to date, but will that be enough to win him a Hugo award?The worst thing that ever happened to science fiction was getting confused with genre...
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The great sci-fi hunt: help us find the best independently published books
The search is on for the best sci-fi, fantasy, horror – or just plain weird – books that might otherwise go unseen and unlovedA year ago I set out on a quest to find the best weird stories on the...
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Future tech: Big Brother, big data or creator culture?
The writing of Cory Doctorow and other SF authors could help us shape future technology for liberation, not oppressionNews of secret courts being introduced in the world's oldest democracy should scare...
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Indie SF and fantasy hunt yields prize catch
From more than 800 indie-published SF and fantasy books, these are my top choicesThe real challenge for any writer isn't writing a good book – an arduous enough task in itself – but writing a great...
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The best young novelists – from SF's universe
Speculative fiction can provide an equally inspiring set of young literary stars as Granta's latest listThe relationship between the literary and speculative fiction genres is like the episode of...
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How do you write about life when it's lived on computers?
Fiction writers face a challenge in depicting the ubiquitous 21st-century experience of virtual existenceWe live more and more of our life through the screens of laptops and smartphones, but how do we...
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Does God have a place in science fiction?
Science might have no place for divine intervention, but SF has always lived by its own beliefsIf SF is grounded in hard scientific fact, and science is killing God, then what place does that leave for...
View ArticleNeil Gaiman's Guardian Books podcast: Weird London and the future for writers
This week's podcast heads into strange territory, guided by the Books site's editor-for-a-day, Neil Gaiman.First, we follow Damien Walter on the trail of Weird London, a parallel city that has been...
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Q&A: Harlan Ellison
When Damien Walter tweeted he'd 'literally kill' to interview the multiple award-winning author Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman replied 'What if the person you had to kill was … Harlan Ellison?' Here...
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Five science fiction novels for people who hate SF
The genre's denser stories can seem rebarbative to 'general readers', but these books tell immediately relevant, compelling talesScience fiction is all around us, from clandestine electronic...
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Novels remain the best interactive media
Some predict traditional fiction will be superannuated by new technology. But it already uses better hard and softwareThere's a pervasive arrogance in the approach of technologists to books. Every new...
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