Alternate episode title: Magic goat sword (it will make sense if you listen!) If you’re planning a murder, always have a koala with you! Works of fiction are rarely confined to a single genre, especially when it comes to speculative fiction.

We spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about how authors are subverting or downright overturning classic SFF tropes. But there are still merits of entrenched tropes, after all, tropes became such because they were enjoyable and worked,

Writing better female characters is covered in a lot of writing advice. Many of these pieces will preface their comments with sarcastic comments like ‘Women are people too, duh’. This sort of statement, I think,

Redshirts. No sooner are they introduced than they are killed. The tension rises, there are beads of sweat on Kirk’s brow… now the audience knows the peril is real. These stock, disposable characters exist in a story solely for the purpose of being dis...

Lucy and Charlotte talk to horror writer Catriona…

A Charlotte and Lucy special! After the success o…

Social inequality and the unequal distribution of…

Having already looked at women's jobs in science …

We spoke with author Anna Smith Spark, Queen of G…