I’m always attracted to secret, arcane realms, which is one great subect of fantasy. I started in that direction with The Entire and the Rose, which I’ve (loosely) been calling a science fantasy for its quest theme and fantastical adventure.

Robin Price, a fake literary agent and film producer accused of bilking writers out of more than £500,000 over a number of years, admitted in a UK court on Wednesday to six counts of theft.

The books I love most immerse me in a world utterly different from my own. Arrakis, Pern, Barrayar, Chalion… I crave deep information about these planets, and fortunately the author always delivered.

A judge has dismissed the case of an author who launched a criminal libel suit against a journal editor who published a bad review of her book, and the author has been ordered to pay punitive damages to the defendant.

I’m surprised quite often how little or ill thought-out the political and economic infrastructure of secondary worlds can be. How the hell do people get food to eat? How do they earn their money? What are their voting rights and what stops people from rising up against their governments?

This guest post by author and essayist Kim Brittingham addresses an issue I’ve been getting an increasing number of questions about lately: pay-to-play TV talk shows.

Rob Horning in The New Inquiry says publishers will not only use data collected from eReaders to track your buying habits, they’ll use it to track your reading habits. Did you skip to the end of the book? They’ll know. Did you give up on page 28? They’ll know.

Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master SFWA has named Samuel R. Delany, Jr. (1942– ) as the 2013 DAMON KNIGHT MEMORIAL GRAND MASTER (presented 2014) for his contributions to the literature of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Samuel R. Delany is the author of numerous books of science fiction, including Nova, Dhalgren, Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand, and most recently Through […]

I’ve never been inclined to play the “what genre is it?” game or to take part in the oftentimes bloodier “that’s not such-and-such genre!” debates. Genre lines are so arbitrary and, in many regards, subjective. Like, to me, horror is more contemporary in setting, mood, and character than dark fantasy, but at the same time, urban fantasies are essentially defined by their modern settings, and they tend to be quite dark, yet I don’t consider them horror.

What is it that makes us entertain fantasies about mating outside our own species? Surely this can’t be in our DNA; the mule, sterile offspring of a horse and donkey’s mating, is an example of the evolutionary dead end that results.Yet since our earliest days we’ve apparently been fascinated by the non-human cultures we co-exist with, and the fantasy of strange creatures, able to shift from wild animal to human. Long before we could write, we told stories around the campfire about them, as lovers, not monsters.