News of a few autumn events in which the Fantasy Centre is involved!
Tuesday 4th November (7pm) – A Celebration of Ursula K. Le Guin Waterstone’s Argyle Street – £5 tickets
This is a ticketed event celebrating the release of The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin, featuring the book’s co-editor So Mayer as well as the poet and author Phil Crockett Thomas, Le Guin scholar Taylor Driggers, and Fantasy Centre co-director Matthew Sangster. Full details, including booking link, here.
Friday 21st November (2pm GMT) – Joy Sanchez-Taylor Online – Free
Join us on zoom to hear Dr Joy Sanchez-Taylor tell us about her new book Dispelling Fantasies: Authors of Color Reimagine a Genre (2025), exploring how fantasy and fantastic works by authors of color serve as critical counternarratives to the history of Eurocentric fantasy narratives, which often serve to reinforce Christian virtues and colonial, white supremacist structures. Please register in advance for this event.
It’s one month until our symposium on “Publishing Fantasy for Younger Readers”, an in person event at the Advanced Research Centre (ARC), to be held on Thursday 3rd April 2025, from 9:15-17:00, hosted by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow and the Children’s Literature and Literacies Team, School of Education. Alongside our keynote by Frances Hardinge, we are delighted to give you more information on our roundtable guests.
The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is pleased to announce that our blog here is back up after technical issues affecting University webpages. Welcome back!
Additionally, we have changed email newsletter providers. Please check your spam folders as the email may be mistakenly labeled spam. The email was sent on Monday April 3rd at 12:32pm BST. You can also find the contents of this email below.
Welcome to the April 2023 Newsletter of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic! Please see below for our latest news and forthcoming events and opportunities:
Future Voices of Scottish Science Fiction and Fantasy – 19 April 2023
The last event of our AHRC-funded Research Network “Future Voices of Scottish Science Fiction and Fantasy” will take place in 19 April 2023. The Network privileges under-represented Scottish voices of Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF) working across different media (literature, gaming, film, art), with an emphasis on BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities as well as practitioners with disabilities. In these dramatic times, we ask how creative practitioners imagine future worlds and respond to rapidly-changing global circumstances (e.g. the COVID-19 pandemic), concerns and anxieties (e.g. as expressed in the #MeToo or #BlackLivesMatter movements) through SFF writing/art/creativity. Join us forour last event:
19 April 2023, 6-7:30pm: Challenging the past (canon and history) in SFF narratives
Participants: Iain Clark, Amal El-Mohtar, Harry Josephine Giles, and T. L. Huchu
In addition to these events the network is publishing commissioned academic responses, and holding online discussions on the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic Discord server which you can join here.
Watch our first event on Inclusive Worldbuilding in SFF across different media (October 12) here
Watch our second event on Representation of change and the future in SFF worlds and narratives (December 2022) here
Watch our third event on Representation of social issues in SFF worlds and narratives (March 2023) here
Celebrating 70 years since J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sir Gawain lecture in Glasgow (1953-2023)
On 15 April 1953, Tolkien delivered the W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture, on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to an audience of 300 at the University of Glasgow. The essay was published posthumously, in 1983, in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Join us at Glasgow on Thursday 27 April 2023, 5-6:30pm, on-campus (Joseph Black Building) or online, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the lecture and its significance, Tolkien’s links to Glasgow, and the importance of the Sir Gawain text in Tolkien’s creativity.
Dr Lydia Zeldenrust, Lecturer in Middle English Literature, University of Glasgow
Dr Andoni Cossio, Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow
Chair: Dr Dimitra Fimi, Senior Lecturer in Fantasy and Children’s Literature, and Co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic
For those attending on-campus, there will be an opportunity to see a pop-up exhibition with documentation related to Tolkien’s appointment as the 1953 W.P. Ker Memorial Lecturer (including a hand-written letter by Tolkien), in collaboration with Archives & Special Collections, University of Glasgow.
To book your free ticket (on-campus or online) click here
GIFCon 2023: Boundaries and Margins (10-12 May 2023) – registration open!
GIFCon (Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations) is the annual conference of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. GIFCon 2023: Boundaries and Margins will take place online from 10-12 May 2023.
You can access the GIFCon website, which includes the themes and programmes of previous conferences, here. You can follow GIFCon on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Fantasy International Summer School – June 2023
Our Fantasy International Summer course, “Fantastic Texts and Where to Find Them: Approaching Fantasy Literature” will take place on-campus in June 2023. It will introduce students to fantasy and the fantastic, often defined as the “literature of the impossible”. Students will survey key texts across different media (e.g. by J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as cinematic and TV fantasy), while exploring critical approaches and recent theoretical debates. There is also the opportunity to have a go at writing fantasy as the course includes a creative writing workshop.
The cover of A History Maker (1994), by Alasdair Gray
Alasdair Gray’s novella A History Maker (1994) is set in a Scotland of the future which understands human history, past and future, in terms of the domestic household. The global economy has been transformed by the invention of a universally available green energy source, the powerplant stalk: a column of light that extends from the ground to the clouds, requiring no input or maintenance except what is provided by the local ecosphere, and capable of converting all available material into whatever a household needs, from books and minerals to china dolls. As a result, societies have rearranged themselves into small domestic units organised around individual powerplant stalks, each unit directed by a group of matriarchal ‘aunts’ whose ‘gossip’ helps them resolve every crisis faced by their community.
The men of the future amuse themselves by staging wargames between local communities, fought with real weapons and involving a sometimes spectacular body count. The book’s protagonist, Wat Dryhope, acquires cult status among the spectators of these wargames thanks to his part in winning a victory for his clan against all odds. As a result, he finds himself drawn into a worldwide plot to overthrow the matriarchy by destroying the powerplants that supply its households. Wat represents, in fact, the intrusion of history into a world that sees itself as having left history behind; history, here, being largely the product of dissatisfied men seeking to gain power by violence over as many households as they can, often because of some personal resentment caused by their upbringing. Only the matriarchs and their gossip can prevent this utopia of the future from lapsing back into its historical state of continuous warfare.
The intrusion of history into a settled world is also, for Gray, the realisation of story. Hailed as a hero, Wat stands in danger of coming to embody the desire of certain men and women to transfer their fantasies wholesale from the space of storytelling into the public and private spheres, with consequences as disastrous as you might expect if you like to read action adventures or indulge in extravagant fantasies. Mark Twain, among others, shared this awareness of the disastrous effects of confusing the real and the fantastic, ascribing the American Civil War to the passion of Southern Gentlemen for reading the romances of Sir Walter Scott, and for imposing the terms of those romances unchanged on their unfortunate nation. Gray’s world of the future, set in the Scottish landscape quite close to Scott’s home in Abbotsford, involves instead a constant interplay between fantasy and reality, and so invites us to consider how best to achieve a healthy relationship between the two. Gray politicizes fantasy, in other words, and encourages his thinking readers to do the same.
Alasdair Gray Image Courtesy The Alasdair Gray Archive
Wat Dryhope is not simply an embodiment of toxic masculinity or imperialist self-delusion. He also represents a resistance to complacency: dreams and fantasies as stimulants to reflection, invention, needful transformation. His disruption of the matriarchy leads it to needful self-reformation, giving new creative functions to the men who had formerly been wasting their lives in pointless combat. And he ends his life as a wandering Gangrel: one of those travellers whose philosophy of constant movement and debate challenges the self-satisfaction of the settlements they refuse to settle in. His first name recalls both ‘Walter’, invoking the internationally acclaimed and notoriously conservative writer of romances, and Wat Tyler, the leader of the fourteenth-century peasant’s revolt whose life was an inspiration to the socialist writer-artist William Morris. His second name summons up both the old word wanhope – despair, depression, despondency – and the conviction that the green shoots of hope can spring from the driest of grounds (‘For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease’; ‘Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live’). Like most of us, and like the fantasy genre, he is a thing of contrasts.
The Wat Dryhope Award is intended to reward thought on fantasy. To this end it is presented annually to the best-performing student in the MLitt English Literature: Fantasy at the University of Glasgow. The Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic thanks the Estate of Alasdair Gray for giving us permission to name the award after one of his quirkiest and most unsettling protagonists.
Creative workshops have been a feature of GIFCon since the very start and this year is going to be no different! You will find the workshop abstracts below, followed by the organizer’s bios. The Eventbrite links for registration will be shared to conference attendees closer to the date. All workshops take place on Thursday, April 29th from 11:00 to 12:15.
There are, however, some important things to note about this year’s event. Unlike the panels, the workshops will not be recorded for asynchronous watching so we ask you not to register if you cannot make the time, to allow for the spaces to be filled with active participants. Spaces are limited and we expect the tickets to go reasonably quickly. With that in mind, please only register for one workshop: they all take place at the same time and while we have no doubt that some of you can triple-monitor attend all three, we believe it will be better to focus your creative energy on one.
Well, Colour Me Brown! – A Creative and Critical Workshop on Writing Spec-Fic
Giti Chandra
The Workshop will bring together issues and questions that plague the non-white, anglophone, writer of speculative fiction, with creative ideas for addressing and resolving them in our thinking and writing. The 75 minutes will be divided into 5 parts.
Part 1 Issues and Questions: A brief overview i) Language and translations ii) Local and ‘world’ mythology iii) Audience iv) Race and representation
Part 2 Language and translations: keeping it local but making it accessible
Part 3 Local and ‘world’ mythology: how to level the playing field without ghettoizing
Part 4 Audience: to whom are you writing and who is reading you?
Part 5 Race and representation: how decolonized are we really?
For a maximum of 20 participants; group work and discussions, as well as actual writing and sharing should be possible. Participants could bring along unfinished work that they would like to work on in the workshop, but this is not necessary.
Giti Chandra is currently Senior Researcher with the United Nations University in Reykjavik, and has been Associate Professor, Dept of English, at Stephen’s College, Delhi. Apart from published short stories and poetry, she is the author of The Book of Guardians Trilogy: The Fang of Summoning (Hachette: 2010), and The Bones of Stars (Hachette: 2013), and the third “The Eye of the Archer” due out in April, 2020. Sadly, nobody cares about her first book, a groundbreaking academic work on violence, but the second one is going to be a bestseller. Giti writes poetry in April, paints on Wednesdays, has a PhD from Rutgers, and feels that people would do well do learn that a cello is not an oversized violin. She lives in Reykjavik with books, a husband, two kids, a dog, and a cat.
Alienation and homecoming – writing in English as a non-dominant language
Karolina Fedyk
This workshop is intended primarily for multilingual writers (particularly those for whom English is their non-dominant and/or not their first language) and/or non-Western English speakers, but everyone interested in the topic is encouraged to join.
The aim of the workshop is to construct a framework for non-standard English as a unique means of writing and storytelling derived from personal linguistic experience. We will discuss how speaking other languages can influence and complement writing in English. We will cover prose rhythm across languages, dialects, code-switching and code-mixing as well as cultural phenomena. The workshop will foster an inclusive atmosphere where we can become better writers and more compassionate readers.
The workshop can accommodate up to 10 participants.
Karolina Fedyk writes speculative fiction and poetry about lost histories, found families, and futures born out of resistance and resilience. Their work has been published in Fireside Fiction and Strange Horizons, among other venues, and they’re a Viable Paradise alum. Their debut novel, Skrzydła, was published in Poland last year by SQN Imaginatio. They enjoy knitting, LARP, and looking for owls and kestrels.
Small Tools, Small Games, Small Memories : A GAME Making WORKSHOP
Fruzsina Pittner
When video games are discussed both in and outside of academia, one much-prevailing narrative that surfaces in conversation is that developing interactive pieces is almost always a huge undertaking requiring sizable teams of developers with decades of expertise and knowledge. This is certainly true to a certain subset of video game development—triple A (AAA) video game studios often employ teams made up of upwards of 1000 people, all of whom work in highly specialised fields to bring video games that sit at the height of technological achievement to the market.
This is not all there is to video game development and video game making, however. Over the years, more and more tools began to emerge that make it possible for non-experts to create interactive experiences that, while often limited in scope, are certainly not limited in their capability to enable the making of imaginative interactive pieces. “Small tools” such as Adam Le Doux’s Bitsy, which places its focus on low graphics exploration-based narrative games, and Chris Klimas’ Twine that centers choice-based text adventures;make it possible to create impactful narrative-focused games that invite makers with little to no familiarity with game development practices to the table.
This workshop is open to those who are interested in making narrative games, but are less or not at all familiar with the industry standard technology to start. Using either Bitsy or Twine, participants of the workshop will focus on finding ways to tell an interactive story centered around a memory. They will be introduced to each tool and the simplest ways to use them, and will be invited to create their own game during the workshop which they can finish or polish afterward. Finished pieces can then be published and displayed in an itch.io collection and the GIFCon website.
Participant number: 15.
Mode of delivery: Zoom or Discord are both fine, and I’ll be available for questions afterwards via email, discord and twitter.
Pre-requisites & accessibility: Both proposed game making tools are browser-based and low impact, no high-end PC specs necessary.
Fruzsina Pittner is a video game artist, digital illustrator and current PhD candidate at the University of Dundee. She is a member of BIOME Collective, a multicultural co-working and game development group, as well as the Scottish Centre for Global History; and her research projects bring together illustration, digital comics, computer games and afrocentric speculative literature to investigate the relationships between storytelling, interaction and social change.
Adam tends to the garden. He works among the flowers where the bees dance. Around his ankles, and up his legs, and across his shoulders coils the snake, its tongue flickering in his ear…
Oliver K. Langmead, Birds of Paradise
Behind Oliver’s face is another garden, of the zoom background variety, filled to the brim with blooming digital flowers. I am thankful for that part of the online book launch experience, at least. A real garden would make my allergies act up and that would have been embarrassing. Oliver is wearing a pink velvet suit jacket, a shirt with no collar and – allegedly – matching pink velvet trousers. Rob Maslen and Colin Herd, equally dressed up although neither of them dared to go down the velvet path, have joined him. The event starts, as is traditional, with a reading.
Unlike Rob Maslen, and unlike Oliver’s MLitt cohort, the Phoenixes, I’d never heard him read any of Birds of Paradise before today, separated as we were by a zoom connection and pretty much all of Glasgow. However, prior to reading my ARC of this book (thank you Netgalley, I promise the five stars is an honest rating and not just because I know the author), my only experiences with Langmeadian writing were live readings: a sparkle of his next novel, Glitterati, at a Fantasy Reading Party at the Dram Bar in Woodlands Road, a verse or two of his epic poem Calypso in a PhD cohort meeting back when we were still able to exist in the same room with each other. Birds of Paradise surprised me with its emotion, and by its ability to evoke emotions in me. There was a scene in Birds of Paradise that made me cry and I will freely admit that I did not expect Oliver Langmead to ever make me cry.
That is not a criticism of his other writing in any way. But my opinion of it has previously been very influenced by Oliver’s live readings, infused with chaotic, high voltage energy and the slight delight in pretentiousness that he and I share (although he wears it better than me, the bastard). Birds of Paradise is very like and yet completely unlike anything I was expecting. It is a quiet book, meditative and slow-paced, and even its moments of extravagant beauty or unflinching violence (both of which can be found within its pages) were alike cushioned by the hushed tones of Adam’s voice, his heavy-shadowed presence in every single one of Oliver’s words.
Adam, as I’m sure I will not be the last to say, is a character in the tradition of Neil Gaiman’s Shadow, from American Gods. Closed off both from himself and the reader, unreliable in a way that is sombre rather than mischievous, a gentle giant carrying the world on his shoulders. I think the comparison with Gaiman’s Shadow leaves Langmead the winner. His Adam is real and relatable in a way that Shadow isn’t always, and his journey is less flashy but runs deeper. Hearing Oliver read the prologue and first few pages of his book’s first chapter was completely at odds with what I remembered from the other times I’ve heard him read. Rather than manic and energetic he was quiet, almost still, his voice steady. I have to imagine that everyone experienced this the same way I did, in a quiet room, listening to a description of the world’s first gardener.
After the reading Rob and Oliver discussed not only Birds of Paradise, but also Oliver’s previous and upcoming works: Dark Star and Metronome, his two published books, as well as his upcoming Glitterati and his PhD poem Calypso. But Adam kept creeping into the conversations like a vine, and Oliver discussed the seeds of his creation (a short story about a soldier wandering the desert rather than Eden’s clay and the breath of God) and what drew him to the character (“I like characters who are very rich and who give me a lot to work with and there’s nothing richer than a long life… Adam is interesting because he’s human”). Birds of Paradise seems to be a look into Oliver’s creative process in general, as he is constantly “trying to find fragments of Eden in the most unexpected places” as Rob put it, and Oliver agreed. He’s writing best, he claimed, when he’s miserable, finding in that emotion the need to make something beautiful, something gorgeous.
I’ve somehow gone on for almost 800 words without really talking about the event as a whole. Like most of the Creative Conversations I’ve been to it was delightful. It gave Oliver the space he needed to talk about his work in his own words, as well as Rob Maslen, who clearly loves Oliver’s work, to be his conversation partner. Other than the book itself, the two talked about the Fantasy MLitt programme, the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, the University of Glasgow, and the creative process in general. In better times, this conversation would be taking place in the chapel, and I would not be sitting in my comfortable armchair but instead somewhere near the back, craning my neck to look. Despite how comfortable my room is now, I miss the live experience. Hopefully we’ll be back next year to talk about Glitterati. I look forward to being able to see everyone’s trousers then. Until then, you can watch the event for yourselves here.
Marita Arvaniti, MLitt Fantasy graduate, PhD student at the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow
PS. In a question I very generously asked, Oliver denied basing the character of Magpie on an idealised vision of himself (albeit with worse teeth). I am still not convinced.
To celebrate this year’s Tolkien Reading Day theme of ‘Hope and Courage’, the Tolkien Society and the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow are excited to release the last of three extracts from Tolkien’s writings. In this extract, which comes from The Lord of the Rings, Sam takes hope from a star over the Ephel Dúath. Accompanying the extract are a collection of readings in a diverse range of languages that have been lovingly created by members of the Society and Centre.
We are grateful to the Tolkien Estate and HarperCollins for permission to share this extract and videos. The videos will remain live until just after the end of Tolkien Reading Day (25th March 2021). We are also immensely grateful to our amazing volunteers: Tolkien Society members, as well as students and staff from the Centre, who took the time to record our chosen extracts in French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Urdu, and Vietnamese! You can find their readings from The Hobbit here, and from The Silmarillion here.
On Tolkien Reading Day itself tomorrow (25th March), don’t forget to join us and our special guests for one of our three live webinars, to share your own reading from Tolkien and discuss how his work inspires hope and courage! Here are the links to book:
Meanwhile, the Society and the Centre will be posting about this extract on their social media profiles and you can join in by visiting the Society’s on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or the Centre’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and share your reactions to the extracts using the hashtag #TolkienReadingDay2021.
The Lord of the Rings ‘Hope and Courage’ Extract and Readings
Download and read the extract from The Lord of the Rings here:
The Lord of the Rings Extract (Word document)
The Lord of the Rings Extract (PDF document)
[These extracts are no longer available to download because the permission from the Tolkien Estate has now expired]
Below are the readings that you can watch and listen to at your own pleasure.
[These video recordings are no longer available to watch because the permission from the Tolkien Estate has now expired]
[On 24 February the Centre held an event we called ‘The Immanent Grove’, in celebration of the achievements of the University of Glasgow’s Fantasy graduates. The event focused on the close relationship between fantasy and trees, with special reference to the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, Patricia McKillip, Doctor Seuss, John Keats and Terry Brooks, among many others.
This week we feature an illustration by current Fantasy MLitt student Eva McLean, which describes how she resorted to drawing trees as a means of getting through lockdown.]
Inspired by her surroundings during lockdown walks, Eva turned the concept of these daily walks into a fairy tale-esque illustration. The hand-drawn piece kept her busy over the lockdown months. There is something inherently fantastical about forests. Eva is drawn to creating imagery that has an enchanted feel to it like the illustrations paired with Grimms’ fairy tales. Eva decided to turn the illustration into the shape of a book as she loves artwork that incorporates narrative. When Eva doesn’t have her head stuck in a book, she can be found writing reviews and posting more doodles on her bookstagram: evacat_reads.
Calling all aspiring adventurers! Join us on our quest to uncover the literary history behind Dungeons & Dragons with scholar and RPG editor John D. Rateliff, in this event co-hosted by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic and the Games and Gaming Lab at the University of Glasgow!
How has fantasy literature influenced and inspired the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons? How has the relationship between the two fantasy media developed over time? Join us on 28th January 2021 at 6pm (GMT) for an event discussing the history of this much beloved game. Tolkien scholar and RPG designer/editor John D. Rateliff will discuss its early roots in the works of twentieth-century fantasy authors, including J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard. His talk will be followed by a Q&A.
The event will also include a short introduction to contemporary Dungeons & Dragons by Grace A. Worm – with a brief, but fun, dip into how to play!
