Francis Davies argues with himself in public about writing, books, and more.
Pyromancy: Does Magic Heat Equal Easy Street?
The standard narrative runs along the lines of ‘bloke with fire rolls into non-specific dwelling of generalised discontent creation, burns a bitch and gets something in a chest’.
Lucky bloke. Now what?
Maps in Fiction: Novel Seasoning Strictly Necessary?
Cartography becomes an ego prostitute, the always-on carnival barker still barking as they comfort fuck a compass-clutching Mussolini. What a spectacle. But can we just get rid of them altogether?
Maps in Fiction: Tool or Trap?
Dip your toe into the fantasy and science fiction subcategories of genre fiction, and it won’t take long to stumble over a curious predilection for cartography. Searching for narrative treasure, a substratum of nerd developed an unhealthy attachment to the geographies they’d previously ignored in classrooms. Tolkien laid out Arda in black and white, subsequent genre fiction enthusiasts devoted hours and days to scrawling dodgy mountain ranges, improbable rivers, and questionable constellations ad nauseum. To what end?
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