Marc Aplin's Blog, page 157

Fallout 4: Of Dogs and Desk Fans

It’s been a few a days since I left…since I escaped the vault. The world has changed and I’m saying that as the reigning master of understatement. It’s been destroyed, ripped up, torn apart, burned to crisp and reborn into a twisted parody of its past. And it’s not funny. Somewhere. Out there. My son. […]

‘The Winds of Winter’ months away from being finished… if the writing goes well.

Yesterday fans were disappointed when George R.R. Martin’s promised New Year’s post was lost. Martin used his Live Journal site to explain that the post – which many thought would contain an update on The Winds Of Winter release date – disappeared when the author experienced some kind of software error. Many fans took to Reddit and Facebook […]

Fantasy-Faction’s Best Fantasy Books of 2015

It’s getting harder and harder to be a well-read and up-to-date reviewer in Fantasy these days. It’s also getting incredibly difficult to order the best of the year lists. I know that complaining that too many good books are being released probably isn’t an argument I will get much support for, but wow oh wow were there […]

Black Butler I & II / Kuroshitsuji – Anime Review

Black Butler (Kuroshitsuji) can be a somewhat confusing franchise for those new to the material. First, it was a manga, written and drawn by Yana Toboso. The manga was then adapted into an anime – which has now seen three incarnations itself. It is also a musical, and a live-action movie. I’ll be discussing the […]

The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

“There’s never going to be an end to suffering if ‘he deserves it’ is all the justification people need for inflicting pain.” Ken Liu is known in the SFF community for writing wonderful short stories like ‘The Paper Menagerie’, which uses an inventive, fantastical plot to tell a moving story about living between cultures. The […]

In The Mix: Fantasy and Other Genres

Fantasy is a genre that assimilates elements of other genres, whilst still remaining, for the most part, a genre not often thought of as having a great number of “crossovers” and hybrids. Strictly speaking, this is changing with the natural evolution of the genre. SFF as a whole is growing more diverse and this results […]

Top 10 Most Popular Posts of 2015

2015 has been a wonderful year for me as the Editor of Fantasy-Faction. Thousands of you have been visiting the site on a daily basis and our team has been doing their absolute best to ensure a new article, interview or review is waiting for you each time you stop by. So, for today’s post, […]

Fantastic and Forgotten Christmas Stories

The holidays are always a time for stories of magic and miracles. Whether the stories are told at a place of worship, at home in front of the fireplace, or in a cinema, these stories have been told and retold for generations. “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” or Dickens’s A Christmas Carol are perhaps the […]

Luke Skywalker Can’t Read and Other Geeky Truths by Ryan Britt

I think it is fair to say that nerds tend to be obsessive completists who love to study things at a very granular level. And one of our favorite things to do with that knowledge is to show it off: we pontificate, we spout off, we rant, we theorize. And sometimes this ends badly. It […]

The Thief Who Knocked On Sorrow’s Gate by Michael McClung

When did I go from being a thief to some sort of hero? When exactly did that happen, and how could I possibly not have noticed? I was introduced to Michael McClung and the Amra Thetys series through Mark Lawrence’s Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off. McClung’s entry, The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble’s Braids, immediately caught my […]