Marc Aplin's Blog, page 239

The Mender of Soles Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a tragic play fraught with intrigue, betrayal, and murder that makes us question the very foundations of human nature. It starts with a joke. To be more precise, the first scene is a series of puns in which a nobleman is made ridiculous to the audience by […]

There is something that really gets me thinking (well, there are many things, really, but this is a big one) about the genre and its tendency to label things, to pigeonhole authors and books into categories with ‘helpful’ titles. In a sense labels can be useful; they can separate and advise. But when they’re misused […]

Listening to the news in the real world – that horrid place where dragons are small and kept in vivaria and pixie is just a kind of haircut – it is very apparent that life is a very complicated place. Anything from the politics between two warring countries, down to a neighbourly dispute on a […]

Into any great company a little division must fall, for what better moment than when the rift is healed, the prodigal returns and the collective is fused anew, stronger than it was before. So it was for me with House of Chains, book 4 of The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Upon posting my review […]

The following video is of New York Times Bestselling author Brandon Sanderon reading the opening chapter of a brand new and untitled novella set in the Cosmere. What I really liked about this piece is that Brandon openly states that this is an example of him writing a world that he has only just envisioned […]

What does a true medieval fantasy look like? It is the most accepted and stereotypical settings for fantasy novels and yet few authors consider the subtle intricacies of the time period in regards to building their new fantasy world. The world of The Traitor Son Cycle is constructed as a full-fleshed fantasy world in the […]

It is a running joke that a hooded man or a woman in leather holding a gun are the two choices we, as fantasy fans, have when trying to judge a book by its cover; but Orbit’s collective covers for 2014 through 2015 seem to offer a little something for everyone. Spaceships, hooded men, Viking-like […]

Over the years, any anthology Edited by George R.R. Martin has been guaranteed to attract big names. His latest, Dangerous Women, featured an incredible list of bestselling SFF authors, including Brandon Sanderson, Joe Abercrombie, Jim Butcher, Diana Gabaldon, Lev Grossman, Sherilynn Kenyon, Lawrence Block, Carrie Vaughn, S. M. Stirling, Sharon Kay Penman, and many others […]

We’ve made no secret of our admiration of the work of Myke Cole over the years… We’ve given all three of his books, Control Point, Fortress Frontier and Breach Zone pretty damned decent reviews and interviewed the man not once, not twice, but three times – the third we even jumped him without notice at […]

In what can only be good news for the genre we all love, Brandon Sanderson’s latest book in the Stormlight Archive series, Words of Radiance, has hit #1 on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller list! Though fantasy does make an appearance on the list, only very rarely do authors manage to debut at […]