Marc Aplin's Blog, page 197
December 3, 2014
Winner of the July 2014 Writing Contest: Apprenticeship
We’ve been getting such good feedback for the short stories our members have submitted in our Monthly Short Story Competition that we have decided to post them on the main site at a rate of one a week. Today we will be looking at the winner from our July 2014 contest. In July we were […]
Gollancz sign Dan Abnett Fantasy Trilogy!
We got some pretty exciting news here at Fantasy-Faction today, our friends Gollancz and Dan Abnett are teaming up to publish Dan’s latest series: a self-contained, action-packed heroic fantasy trilogy. Dan’s output is quite incredible and his name constantly pops up when we get into ‘favourite book’ or ‘favourite paragraph’ type discussions on the forum. […]
December 2, 2014
A Darkness at Sethanon by Raymond E. Feist
A Darkness at Sethanon is a strange novel. Whilst it brings the Riftwar Saga to a conclusive close, it truly kicked off the large-scale entity now commonly referred to as the Riftwar Cycle, a vast series of Feist’s world that has solidified itself as a permanent and impressive member of the fantasy genre. Feist made […]
Trailer for Telltale’s Game of Thrones
Lets be honest, to date, there have been two types of Game of Thrones game: 1) Bad, 2) Terrible. However, ever since we heard Telltale had hooked up with HBO and George R.R. Martin to develop an episodic adventure game that would concentrate on a story away from anything Martin has previously written about, we […]
December 1, 2014
Class Warfare: Fantasy, Sci-Fi and Literary Fiction
The line drawn between so-called literary fiction and genre fiction has always irked me. As I embarked upon a re-read of the first two volumes of Lev Grossman’s frustrating Magicians trilogy, this issue resurfaced. Grossman’s books have, for reasons that boggle my mind, sparked a debate about just what constitutes literature. As the final book […]
November 30, 2014
Fantasy Worldbuilding – Ideas for Designing a Civilization
The period in history between the fifth and fifteenth centuries, the period we call the Middle Ages, seem to go hand in hand with epic fantasy. Of course, there are many great fantasy stories that are based on different eras, from biblical times to modern urban fantasy, but the medieval era seems to be the […]
November 29, 2014
Winner of the June 2014 Writing Contest: Taboos
We’ve been getting such good feedback for the short stories our members have submitted in our Monthly Short Story Competition that we have decided to post them on the main site at a rate of one a week. Today we will be looking at the winner from our June 2014 contest. According to Wikipedia, taboos […]
November 28, 2014
Messenger’s Legacy by Peter V. Brett: Review
Novellas are hot this year. Half a decade or so ago, before the eBook, few people would have expected that top-name authors would ever be releasing novellas at a steady rate. This year though we’ve had Kelley Armstrong, Brandon Sanderson, Martha Wells, Peter V. Brett, Patrick Rothfuss and so, so many more besides releasing stand-alone […]
Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer released! Thoughts…
We’ve waited a long time for this… we’ve fallen for a number of hoaxes saying that they were ‘official trailers’ only to find upon clicking on them that they’re just fan made things using snippets of the older movies, but finally the first official Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer has been released!!! I don’t […]
Star Wars: The Force Awakens Teaser Trailer
Today the Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer was released. And it is impressive! Before you read farther, go watch it! Do it! Amazing right? If the trailer is any indication this movie should be amazing! But we, as Star Wars fans, have been burned before. My friends and I attended the midnight showing of […]
