The Fantasy Hive - A U.K. Wonderland
A hub for all things fantasy (plus some SF). Book reviews, games, author interviews, features, serial fiction- you name it. The Fantasy Hive is a collaborative site formed of unique personalities who just want to celebrate fantasy. Btw, the SFF novel to the left by one of our members, Warwick Gleeson, was a "Top 150 Best Books" Kirkus pick in 2019.
1,548 topics in this forum
-
- 0 replies
- 249 views
“I think of you in the cafeteria, holding my gaze. We’ve spent every lunchtime together for over a year. I feel the places where our languages don’t quite meet, but I believe there’s a deeper state than surface understanding, and I feel it with you most when you make the effort to pretend for my sake. Our lunches have become the thing I look forward to. You make me feel seen.” “That’s all it takes to turn someone against you – one instance of not being the thing they want you to be.” Readers familiar with Aliya Whiteley’s previous work will know when opening a new one of her books to expect something completely wonderful and utterly different from her previous stories. …
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 277 views
Lee Matthew Goldberg is the author of the novels THE ANCESTOR, THE MENTOR, THE DESIRE CARD and SLOW DOWN. He has been published in multiple languages and nominated for the Prix du Polar. His first YA series RUNAWAY TRAIN is forthcoming in 2021 along with a sci-fi novel ORANGE CITY. After graduating with an MFA from the New School, his writing has also appeared in The Millions, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, LitReactor, Monkeybicycle, Fiction Writers Review, Cagibi, Necessary Fiction, the anthology Dirty Boulevard, The Montreal Review, The Adirondack Review, The New Plains Review, Underwood Press and others. He is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Fringe, dedicated to publishing fic…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 315 views
Composite Creatures by Caroline Hardaker is a thought-provoking dystopian debut which continuously questions what it truly means to be alive in a dying world. Over the years Earth has essentially become toxic, the soil and air has become contaminated, many species of wildlife and plants have become extinct, and sickness reigns through the human race cutting their lifespan far too short. Yet a beacon of hope emerges in the form of a medical institution called Eastern Grove, scientists cannot yet promise a cure, but they have found a way to prolong life. The only drawback is what will it cost? The novel begins with our main protagonist Norah meeting a writer called …
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 303 views
Mothers get a pretty bad time of it in fantasy – we’re notorious for being missing, absent, dead, or dying. How else is our hero to get the emotional trauma needed to spur him on? That boy needs some backstory! Character depth! Fridge the mother et voilà! Tortured soul we can empathise with. Frankly, us mums are fed up of this. I live in constant fear that my son will stumble across a mysterious sword, or he’ll hatch a dragon egg, or he’ll catch the eye of some meddling old bastard wizard. It seems ironic, then, that we have a Mother’s Day (which, here in the UK, is today, because we like being different ok) to celebrate how much we love and appreciate our mothers (tho…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 283 views
George Orr is afraid of falling asleep. When he dreams a particular kind of dream, what Le Guin titles an ‘effective’ dream, Orr wakes up to find reality has quite literally shifted to accommodate that dream. When we first meet him, the weight of this has turned him into a drug user, taking anything that will suppress his dreams–it is this that sends him into the private practice of one William Haber, a psychiatrist and oneirologist who will proceed to use Orr’s “effective” dreams to reshape reality in increasingly ambitious ways. Haber finds Orr almost loathsome. George awakens contempt in the psychiatrist; Haber sees in Orr a man so weak and without character as to be …
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 295 views
The novella/short novel format seems to have a natural affinity for tales of the wild west from my early school experience reading Shane (38,000 words) by Jack Shaefer to True Grit (55,000 words) by Charles Portis. In combination Stark Holborn’s two Triggernometry stories of mad Malago Browne the renegade frontier mathematician might still fall short of Shaefer’s word count, but that doesn’t in anyway stop them from packing a very satisfying double-barrelled narrative punch. The fact that each one could be consumed in just a couple of hours is a positive advantage in a world where time is in perennially short supply. The Wild West of late nineteenth century America has…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 418 views
This is an occasional series of posts drawing on my excursion into the academic side of creative writing. Having taken a career break from secondary schooling to further my own education with some post graduate study I’ve completed an MA in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. I’ve now started on a PhD project at the same university with the catchy title “Navigating the mystery of future geographies in climate change fiction.” So the Hive has kindly given me space to post reviews of climate fiction books as well as blogging thoughts and articles on other aspects of my PhD experience. This week I’m going to look at Clade by James Bradley Bradley interrogates…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 318 views
The Fantasy Hive is excited to announce the launch of a new Kickstarter by Unsung Stories, one of the leading independent publishers of SF and Fantasy in the UK. The Kickstarter for Out Of The Darkness, a new anthology of horror and dark fantasy stories exploring the theme of mental health, goes online today. Unsung have previously successfully funded two excellent anthologies on Kickstarter, 2084 edited by George Sandison (2017), in which speculative fiction writers imagine futures inspired by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, and This Dreaming Isle edited by Dan Coxon (2018), which collected horror stories inspired by British folklore and landscape. Both antholog…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 307 views
Hey, I’m Stark Holborn, author of Nunslinger and Ten Low and it’s great to be back at the Hive to reveal the cover for the second instalment of my Triggernometry series: Advanced Triggernometry. Triggernometry is an alt-history western, taking place in a world where mathematicians are dangerous outlaws. It mixes the grit of the west with a cast of mathematicians from across history to create a truly unique and unforgettable adventure. Thanks to readers, the first Triggernometry had a great outing last year despite the pandemic, and was featured in The Washington Post and on Tor.com as well as on some of my favourite blogs (including right here)… Check out the sy…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 301 views
My experience of LitRPG is still pretty limited having sampled a couple of SPFBO examples but only read two through to completion, the first being Demi Harper’s LitRPG debut God of Gnomes and the second it’s sequel Exodus of Gnomes. I like RPG games and I like fantasy books but I was wary as to how these two concepts would mix together. It’s the kind of question chefs of old must have wrestled with as they sat with chocolate in one hand and a chilli in the other and went “I wonder what if…” However, God of Gnomes brilliantly satisfied my curiosity and assuaged my concerns with a tale full of compelling characters – even if one of them was literally a rock – and a nerdy si…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 251 views
The Second Bell by debut author Gabriela Houston is a beautiful atmospheric blend of Polish folklore, coming of age and dark fantasy. The story centres around a mother and her newborn child who are abruptly banished from their village and cast out into the woods. Yet such cruelty is not without its reason, and this child is by no means an ordinary one, for you see she holds a second heart. It is believed that those born with the sound of double heartbeats are born a striga, a terrifying monstrous being that will wreak havoc, devour and kill humans. Fear drives the villagers to desperate measures and so every time a child is born with a double heart they summon a Dola, a …
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 632 views
Gabriela Houston is a London-based writer. She was born in Poland and raised in a book-loving household on the nourishing diet of mythologies, classics and graphic novels. She had spent much of her early school years holed up in the library, only feeling truly herself in the company of Jack London’s trappers and Lucy Maud Montgomery’s red-headed orphan, among many others. She came to the UK at 19 to follow her passion for literature and she completed her undergraduate and Masters degrees at Royal Holloway, University of London. After her studies she worked in publishing for a few years. She now lives with her family in Harrow, where she pursues her life-long passion for…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 273 views
One goal of Worldbuilding for Fantasy Fans and Authors was compiling and synthesizing all the varying worldbuilding theories and best practices gleaned from fantasy authors and the worldbuilding communities. And along the way, I realized that, outside of the gaming and RPG community, very few worldbuilders take the audience’s experience into account, which was why I included several surveys in my book. Unlike authors, who have to sometimes wait years for feedback of their worlds in the form of reviews, gamers get instant feedback from the players, which helps shape the world in turn. So with that audience-focused approach in mind, I’m kicking off a (hopefully) monthly fan…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 298 views
This is only my second time reading a story by Adrian Tchaikovsky but I’ve already begun to see how versatile, bizarre and wonderfully imaginative this author is. One Day All This Will Be Yours is a post-apocalyptic novella set in a time where a war, known as the Causality War has caused much devastation, to be more precise it has ended the world. No one can be sure who started the war but we do know that it began after the invention of time travel; Causality Bombs were unleashed, and time was broken into a million shards. Yet there is one man who did survive, a time warrior who now lives in his own self made Eden. A man who is now hell bent on making sure the war never h…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 337 views
Fantasy fans, John Gwynne is back and this time he’s brought all the monsters with him. The Shadow of the Gods is the first book in The Bloodsworn saga, a Norse inspired tale of blood and vengeance. In a world where gods have fought and died and in their wake opened a pit unleashing monsters of land, sea and sky, surviving is no easy task to say the least. The lands of Vigrið and the Battle-Plain are a perilous place to call a home, it is a place where Jarls plot to become the most powerful, where mercenaries battle for gold and fame, where war is an ever looming threat. It’s a grim, harsh, unforgiving world and it breeds the hardest of people – you either mercilessly …
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 298 views
“I have since understood how storytelling works, what it does with your senses. It was as if they somehow became entangled. The meaning of the story presents itself, sensation on top of sensation, all of them building together to create one woven pattern, one in which no one element is primary, the story a single perfect whole made of fragments and patches, moments of understanding, smells, visions.” Marian Womack’s debut English novel The Golden Key (2020) was one of my literary highlights of 2020, a mesmerising work of climate change gothic fairy tale. Womack’s new novel, The Swimmers (2021), builds on the distinctive use of the Weird to explore the unease, alienation …
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 577 views
A Desolation Called Peace makes half or more of the sci-fi works I’ve read over the last few years seem woefully incompetent. Arkady Martine’s second book is the sequel to the Hugo award-winning A Memory Called Empire. Memory introduced us readers to Martine’s masterfully crafted culture of Teixcalaan, which draws from many real-world empires and people to create something fresh and unique—central concepts of the Teixcalaanlitzlim such as civilized people versus barbarians and the political importance of poetry are borrowed from the Roman and Byzantine empire; the naming conventions of Teixcalaan’s citizens is drawn from the Mixtec people of Oaxaca; and the cultural domin…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 673 views
Liath Luachra: The Seeking is the third in a set of novels called the ‘Irish Woman Warrior Series’ and relates the adventures of a young woman warrior and her war party, Na Cinéaltaí – The Friendly Ones – in 1st/2nd century Ireland. This book is the first in a two-part story to be completed this year. Although the first book in this series (Liath Luachra: The Grey One) was originally conceived as a prequel to my ‘Fionn mac Cumhaill Series’, the character’s powerful personality and backstory ended up driving that narrative into places and situations I’d never really anticipated. The end result was a kind of ‘Gaelic Grimdark’, a gritty adventure far darker than I’d origin…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 315 views
The Fantasy Hive are so excited to bring you all the cover reveal for Edward Cox’s upcoming novel The Wood Bee Queen, which will be released on 10th June by Gollancz. It’s currently available to pre-order from all the usual places! Without any further ado, here’s the cover: Cover artist is Sue Gent. https://www.suegent.com/ We absolutely love how striking the simplistic colour palette is, and how gorgeously intricate the bee is! Ed also stopped by to have a quick chat with us so to find out more about The Wood Bee Queen please check out our interview below: Welcome back to the Hive, Ed. It’s so good to have you here! Hello, you fabulous folk! It’s nice to be bac…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 330 views
We have a brand new cover to reveal to you all today! The World is at War, Again is a futuristic yet retro fantasy by Simon Lowe. Available in digital format from the 2nd of April, and in print from 7th of June, from Elsewhen Press. You can sign up for our InFlight Newsletter HERE. Blurring the boundaries between genres, check out the blurb: The World is at War, again. New technology has been abandoned, a period of Great Regression is under way. In suburbia, low level Agent Assassins Maria and Marco Fandanelli are given a surprise promotion as “Things Aren’t Going Too Well With The War”. Leaving their son Peter behind, they set sail on the luxury cruise-liner Water Li…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 664 views
Good morning! I’m excited to be back here on the Hive to announce that my second novel, Exodus of Gnomes (God Core #2), will be released by Portal Books on March 10th 2021 (you can pre-order the ebook here!). I received such an overwhelmingly positive response to God of Gnomes’ cover reveal that I figured you wouldn’t mind me flinging its sequel at your eyeballs as well. I even designed the cover myself this time. Behold! “Art” by me Shockingly, my pen-and-paper masterpiece was not deemed cover-worthy by my publisher (rude, I know), and so they hired illustrator Raph Herrera Lomotan instead. A single glance at his Artstation profile is enough to reassure anyone that th…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 290 views
“Orphids are quantum computers. They don’t observe; they entangle.” “’We’re alchemists,’ said Thuy. ‘Transmuting our lives into myth and fable.’” Rudy Rucker’s Ware tetralogy is an essential cyberpunk series that over the course of its four volumes redefines the limits of the genre. Over the period of time that he was writing the Ware novels, Rucker was also writing everything from the transreal fiction of The Hacker and the Ants (1994) to the bonkers genre pastiche of The Hollow Earth (1990) to the unfiltered Ruckerian brilliance of Master of Space and Time (1984). Whilst all of these novels share Rucker’s love of the Beats, his surreal humour and his fascination with…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 577 views
This is an occasional series of posts drawing on my excursion into the academic side of creative writing. Having taken a career break from secondary schooling to further my own education with some post graduate study I’ve completed an MA in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. I’ve now started on a PhD project at the same university with the catchy title “Navigating the mystery of future geographies in climate change fiction.” So the Hive has kindly given me space to post reviews of climate fiction books as well as blogging thoughts and articles on other aspects of my PhD experience. This week I’m going to look at The Last Day by Andrew Murray Hunter The La…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 297 views
“Within these walls, we take few things. Clothes, personal belongings, photos of loved ones whether family, friends or pets; precious books, maybe a volume like this; our favourite means of hearing music, digitised or analogue. Our arts, our sports, our trinkets. Our personal effects, verifications of self. Remember this: nothing is more important than what we carry upright each day when we rise from our pods to greet the world. Ourselves.” Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time (2021) is an ambitious, confounding and thought-provoking book. Set in an alternate history in which colonialism and slavery never happened, the novel is an attempt to imagine a decolonised world…
Last reply by EditorAdmin, -
- 0 replies
- 285 views
We’re thrilled to reveal the striking cover for Fury of a Demon, the conclusion to Brian Naslund’s Dragons of Terra trilogy. Fury of a Demon is due to be released on 2nd September, by Tor UK. Before we show you all the cover, here’s the official blurb: “The war against Osyrus Ward goes poorly for Bershad and Ashlyn. They are pinned in the Dainwood by monstrous alchemical creations and a relentless army of mercenaries, they are running out of options and allies. The Witch Queen struggles with her new powers, knowing that the secret of unlocking her dragon cord is key to stopping Ward’s army, she pushes forward with her experiments. Meanwhile, with every wound Bershad su…
Last reply by EditorAdmin,