After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress opens with a deformed teenage boy kidnapping a baby from a hysterical mother. The boy, Pete, has come from the future, using alien technology, to save the baby from the ecological disaster that will soon befall the world she lives in.
Pete is also [...]

I sat at a table full of professors and tried to explain the idea of world-building.
This was five years ago. Jeff VanderMeer and I (along with about a dozen others) were scrambling to put the final touches on Shared Worlds, a writing and world-building camp for teenagers at South Carolina’s Wofford College.
There was a math [...]

With The Riyria Revelations, Michael J. Sullivan wrote the books he wanted to read: fun adventures about loyalty and friendship. He wrote all six installments of the series before releasing the first through a small press, and he later self-published the rest at six-month intervals. His readership grew steadily, and by the fourth or fifth [...]

What do Julianna Baggott and Paul Levinson have in common? Or, how about James Enge and Joan Slonczewski? Nnedi Okorafor and Brian Evenson? Ekaterina Sedia and Jeffrey Ford? For one thing, they all write speculative fiction and they all teach at a college or university.
Below, these eight authors discuss the interrelationship of speculative fiction and [...]

Imaginary worlds offer readers a time and place that is different from the world they live in. Imaginary worlds offer a fresh perspective, a new POV—a slanted angle of vision. These settings, these places— secondary worlds or "the realm of fairy-story," as J. R. R. Tolkien called them—come with their own rules, their own customs, [...]

Jane Carver gnashes her teeth, shakes her head. Ol’ Dutch wants him "a piece." Taunting, heckling. . . he’s more of a nuisance than an outright threat to Carver.
Besides, Carver’s got a record and doesn’t need another strike against her, so she throws a leg over her "fat-boy" motorcycle and smokes her Marlboro. She’s a self-professed "swamp-trash [...]

Madness comes to the King "like a creeping fungus in the hollows of his mind." The dark sorcerer returns. The Giants welcome the storm. A Prince must avenge his father’s death and take his rightful place upon a distant throne.
From page one, Seven Princes by John R. Fultz cracks open like teeth-shattering thunder and rolls [...]

In All Men of Genius by Lev AC Rosen, Violet Adams doesn’t necessarily want to be a man, but she does want to attend the prestigious, all-male Illyria College. Denied what she desires by social convention, she does what Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and the male leads in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest [...]

In Bluegrass Symphony, Lisa L. Hannett writes of a place that is, perhaps, somewhere (or nowhere) in the rural United States—a place that is inspired, in equal parts, by the American South and Medieval Icelandic literature.
"Lisa Hannett weaves words the way the Norns weave fates, elegantly, seamlessly and with just a little bit of cruelty," [...]

The writing of The Troupe started for Robert Jackson Bennett with the image of "a boy in the dark, muddy and wounded, holding a body in his arms, and singing." He wrote the novel to understand who the boy is and how he got there.
Bennett jokingly calls himself an "accidental horror" writer. Much of [...]