We have long been obsessed with the chosen one. This ubiquitous archetype has spawned thousands of heroic narratives involving a prophecy and a great evil to be overcome. But in recent years, we’re seeing less and less of the standard trope,

Entrenched racism is all around us. This is not a new phenomenon nor the first time racism has been headline news – and yet we have a seemingly incredible ability to forget the atrocities committed daily as long as they aren’t at the top of the news cy...

You know the drill, you are alone in the middle of a foggy field and there’s no one within miles… except the person following you. There’s no one coming to help you. Isolation is an ever-present theme in horror fiction,

Well, it’s that time again: 80s family film funtime! Today we are looking at 1988’s Willow, starring Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer, directed by Ron Howard with a story by George Lucas. But first, let’s set the scene. It is a time of dread.

Monster. Freak. Beast. These words are often thrown around, but what do we really mean when we use them? What is a monster? Why are they so central to our narratives? Like many of the issues we discuss on this podcast,

When we pick up a book, we know we’re going to be told a story. We trust the author or, in the case of first-person POV the narrator, to tell us the truth. We might be reading about vengeful ghosts or glorious dragons that take our imagination to the v...

Speculative fiction has always been a genre that challenges traditional views and established ways of seeing. We regularly discuss how the worlds that genre authors create are arenas in which it’s possible to tackle social narratives away from conventi...

It has long been obvious that our world’s power structures are set up to benefit men, so how does women’s power play out in our narratives? What happens when women are suddenly given a power they are usually deprived of?

Cosmic horror is an unhelpful term by itself. HP Lovecraft himself is quoted as saying that: The fundamental premise [of cosmic horror is] that common human laws and interest and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

The three of us are children of the 80s and like many of our generation, we love to revel in nostalgia. For us, this has meant revisiting some of our favourite fantasy films of that decade: Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal,