BFS Journal #28

In this special issue we explore Race in Fantasy.In this issue we have our usual, wonderful regular columns - Anna Milon asks ’What’s in my LARP bag?’; Eilís L. Phillips fearlessly ventures in search of headless horsemen; Lauren McMenemy takes one last bite of the Vampire (the last of her three-part feature); PS Livingstone looks at further representations of women in Fantasy, this time considering the warrior; Alexandra Beaumont lightens things up by taking a cheeky look at frivolous folklore. In our Film feature Claire Hines grabs her popcorn and takes us back to 1980s Sword and Sorcery. And in our new feature we profile the art of book illustration with a gallery of work created for Diana Wynne Jone’s much-loved Howl’s Moving Castle for a sumptuous new edition for The Folio Society. We have our usual cross-section of reviews looking at recently published fiction.And in our Special Features we have a strong selection of international scholarship, starting with ’Speculative Repair: Modding, Fan Labour, and Racial Worldmaking in Fantasy Games’ by Diamond Beverly-Porter (Washington State University); ’Mapping Empire: Cartography, Race and the Colonial Imaginary in Fantasy’ by Ishan Tripathi (soon to be published by the Oxford University Press); ’Anglo-Saxons, Orcs, and Berethnets: Confronting Identity in Old English Literature and Modern Fantasy’ by independent scholar George Burnett; ’Zombie Jamboree and Spooky Quantum Actions: the resurrection of Goethe in Wilson Harris’s The Carnival Trilogy’ by Shareed Mohammed (University of the West Indies); and ’Overthrowing the Empire: Race, Rebellion, and the Ambiguity of Emancipation in R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War and Babel’, by Giulia Pellegrinotti (University of Pisa).The editor, Kevan Manwaring, is in conversation with the Caribbean Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson.