Castle. The simple word evokes images of myth and legend, fantastical landscapes populated by the stalwart and sinister characters of lore. Castles have been the sites of some of the more dramatic moments of medieval history, but they have also coloured our screens and dominated our imaginations in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. […]
Scottish Castles in Sci-Fi and Fantasy: an Introduction Read More »
Welcome to the first in our “Meet the Committee” series! Today, you’ll meet Marguerite, the Vice Chair for Glasgow in 2024. She is originally from California but has been based in Ireland for nearly half her life. As Vice Chair, she is there to back up Esther, our Bid Chair, but also to challenge her
Meet Your Committee: Marguerite Smith – Vice Chair Read More »
When a friend suggested we play the bleak zombie survival game Dead of Winter, I was initially sceptical. My ingrained fear of zombies certainly didn’t help but the lack of joy and fun in the bleak-sounding game put me off. And then my friend mentioned that they were using this game as a lead-in to
Gin2024 Rookies Guide to Games: Dead of Winter and This War of Mine Read More »
I recently found a pile of Shrinky Dinks paper at the bottom of a drawer and thought to myself, “Oh, the possibilities!” No doubt this is the exact same thought I’d had when I put it in the drawer to begin with several years ago, but this time I was determined to make something with
Crafting Fan Jewellery from Shrink Plastic Read More »
How it often starts: with a rush of non-linked ideas. I want to write about flight and apophenia and knowledge in context and about data bias and nonconscious cognitions, and hybridity and speculative spaces, and the joyful upending of inequalities, and the pleasure in being thrilled when reading and discussing and writing. I am holding
[T]he invisible world remained invisible, insensible except by metaphor. . . .Yet the invisible and the visible are both there, and the opposite of real is not unreal -Melissa Scott, Night Sky Mine, 8. I was born in 1955, in a small college town in Idaho, an intensely conservative state in the western U.S. As
Melissa Scott’s Invisible Worlds Read More »
I am the kind of person who learns about everything through books. Fiction has been the place where I have found a space to explore my own queer identities – which I am still exploring. There are stories I have read that have made me question my entire existence through their excellent representation. But not
Trans women in SFF: A view from the inside Read More »
I first read a fantasy novel with a lesbian couple in it in 1997, the year I started, sort of, thinking about coming out. My final year of high school. It was one of Charles de Lint’s Newport books, Trader, newly published. It was only the second novel with same-sex attracted women in it that
Seeing myself in Fantasy Read More »
In Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story ‘Dragonfly’ (2001), something very queer happens when the titular character receives her true name. This rite of passage, which in many ways is the cornerstone of Le Guin’s wider Earthsea mythos, rests on the notion that people and things are fundamentally knowable; the name, in a sense, is
Theology, with Drag(ons): How Fantasy Queers Religion Read More »
Fantasy and science fiction offers a space to imagine new worlds and new possibilities, and to challenge established or assumed norms. And yet it is still relatively uncommon – although not as rare as it used to be – to find explicit bisexual and/or pansexual representation in SFF. In media and literature, bi/pan erasure still
Recommended Reading: Bisexual/Pansexual Characters in SFF Read More »
