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What We’re Reading: Children of Time

TDW: Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is one of those books I saw on Amazon popping up, but I never saw any coverage on social media or other outlets. Instead I read a single review on Goodreads by someone I followed that sold me immediately. It’s really quite crazy how much more important word of mouth […]

Artistic violine player at the sea. Art photo, noise is manually added

What We’re Reading: The Traitor

TDW: I don’t often read fantasy, but this was certainly an exception. It isn’t swords and sorcery, just swords. And pikes. And chemical warfare. In a word, it’s grimdark, easily my favourite branch of fantasy. In case you don’t know, grimdark fantasy gets its name from Warhammer 40,000, where, ‘In the grim darkness of the far […]

5 Cool Things Mars Edition

5 Cool Things: November 2015 (Mars Edition)

Every month we bring you five things that we think are cool. Because that’s how we roll.  This month, to celebrate the release of The Martian, the discovery of flowing water on the red planet, and because it’s all-round pretty cool, we bring you 5 Cool Things, the Mars edition. 1. Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson […]

3body

What we’re reading: The Three Body Problem

Liu Cixin’s 2015 Hugo Award Winning Novel The Three-Body Problem, translated from Chinese into English by Ken Liu, is a book that’s so big on ideas and themes you can easily forgive the occasional uninspired dialogue and exposition dumping. Exiled to a remote radio base during the Cultural Revolution, astrophysicist Ye Wenjie makes contact with an alien […]

world without us

What We’re Reading: The World Without Us

Chris: Imagine if humans disappeared tomorrow. What would we leave behind? How long would it last? These questions are at the heart of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. It’s a book I mentioned in a list of Cool Things a few months ago, but I wanted to explore it further here. The setup reads […]

Narcos

Writing Lessons from … Narcos

TDW: Welcome to the first edition of Fantastica’s Writing Lessons, where we take examples of writing from popular media. Today we’re looking at Narcos, a Netflix original TV show. What can we learn from the story of Columbian narcos and the American agents sent to stop them?