"People often ask how I think of names in fantasies, and again I have to answer that I find them, that I hear them. This is an importa...

From Jeanette Winterson's Frankissstein: Naming is power, I say to her. It sure is. Adam's task in the Garden of Eden. Yes, indeed, ...

Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment : "If laughter up to now has been a sign of violence, an outbreak of blind, obdurat...

This is dumb but I got an email that started "Today we are marking International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia ...

Hi Jo, what did the name Boaty McBoatface symbolise for you? Hi Soph, the name Boaty McBoatface perfectly captures the equivocal nature of...

Earlier: SFF names #4: Beth Bradley SFF names #3: Rumpelstiltskin SFF names #2: Lucy SFF names #1: Winnie Perhaps urban fantasy has...

What is mistaken for a crisis in the speculative fiction of extrapolation and prediction is actually often confined to speculative fiction...

The name Beth Bradley appears to be a bid for innocuousness -- a bit of a humblebradley, maybe -- and it has all the hallmarks of a parti...

There is a poem about a Lucy by William Wordsworth: A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seem'd a thing that coul...

Winnie and Willie are characters in Beckett’s disgustingly cruel 1961 play Happy Days . Winnie speaks unremittingly, and mostly gaily, as a ...