Romantasy and romance books on display at Avid Reader bookshop in Brisbane, 2026 (Photo: Nicola Alter)
Over ten years ago I wrote a post that ended up being one of my most read of all time. I had just come out of tutoring a course on genre fiction, and I was frustrated by the fact that when I looked up fantasy subgenres online I would get one of three things: a detailed look at a few specific subgenres that ignored all the others, a breakdown of someone’s own very personalised way of categorising things, or an epic three-digit list of every fantasy sub-genre under the sun, many of which I’d never heard of.
For those of us who like a touch of the magical and the medieval, nothing quite beats a visit to a fictional castle. But with all those trap doors, winding passageways, and changeable stairs, it’s hard to know where to start and how to make the most of your time.
Yes, you may already have Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland to help you tour the fantasy realm, but fictional castles are an experience all their own, and are deserving of some closer attention. Plus, let’s face it, the internet really needed another “top ten” list. So here are ten must-see sights and experiences to ensure a memorable, action-packed, and relatively peril-free stay.
I’ve always loved science fiction and fantasy stories that focus on language, translation, and linguistics. And I’m not talking about the Tolkien-esque creation of whole fictional languages to furnish invented worlds, which I’m also in awe of, but about books where the very act of communication or translation itself becomes core to the plot.
Why do these stories appeal? I think it’s that mysterious sense that something needs to be “decoded”, the bridging of culture gaps, and the unlocking of exciting new possibilities for human (or non-human) connection. The theme of language itself also just inherently feels a little magical. The fact our brains are capable, with enough effort and exposure, to transform unintelligible babble into something meaningful, is remarkable. I admire the almost superpower-like ability of polyglots to shift seamlessly between different languages, and I enjoy encountering characters like this in stories.
The promotional pin I received at a recent screening of Project Hail Mary
I recently saw the film adaptation of one of my favourite novels, Project Hail Mary… twice. I’ve read the book twice, too. Back when I first picked it up it was one of those rare novels where I actually felt sad when I got to the end, not because I didn’t like the ending (I loved it), but because the story was over, and I would never get the same emotional experience of that “first read” back again. With the film adaptation, however, I did get something similar: a “first watch”. I’d been looking forward to the release ever since I learned it was in production, and I wasn’t disappointed. The filmmakers did a remarkable job of the adaptation, and I enjoyed every single moment in that cinema. I confess to shedding more than one tear.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about attending Bristolcon, which I try to do every year. This week, I wanted to reflect on the second convention I went to this October, one I’ve never been to before. The World Fantasy Convention is an annual event that, as the “world” in the name suggests, takes place in different countries or cities – though rarely outside of the USA and Canada. This year it joined forces with Fantasy Con, run by the British Fantasy Society, and took place in Brighton on the weekend of Halloween.
This is not the first large international convention I’ve been to – my first was actually Worldcon in Dublin in 2019, and I went to Worldcon again last year when it came to Glasgow. I was curious, however, to see how WFC would differ, especially being a more UK-focused affair with the inclusion of Fantasy Con, and perhaps also a more fantasy-focused affair, given that Worldcon’s full name is actually ‘The World Science Fiction Convention’ and that it has a strong science-fiction focus.
I was also simply curious what it would be like to do two cons back-to-back, and wanted to join other friends who were going. So I set off to Brighton, keen to find out.
I’ve been a bit quiet recently, but for a good reason at least – a few weeks ago I attended two fantasy and science fiction conventions in the UK. The first, Bristolcon, is a favourite I attend pretty much every year. This October, however, the stars aligned to put the World Fantasy Convention only a week later in Brighton. What’s more, this particular World Fantasy Con joined forces with Fantasy Con (an annual UK-based convention run by the the British Fantasy Society) in a sort of extra-large affair, so it seemed worth going to both.
If you’re getting confused by all the extremely similar con names, you’re not the first… a few times when drafting this post I accidentally wrote “Worldcon” instead of “World Fantasy Con”, which would be an entirely different con yet again.
Anyway, I wanted to share a few personal reflections and highlights from both conventions, but in this post I’ll just focus on Bristolcon to keep things short. I’m also not going to write extensively about everything I attended, because the mere thought is exhausting and because I didn’t take diligent enough notes, so I’ll simply pick out a few highlights that stayed with me.
The Völklingen Ironworks in Germany’s Saar region—a warren of rusted towers, smokestacks, and steam-age machinery now preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
While I was writing a previous post on the origins of steampunk, inspired by a trip to Wuppertal, it occurred to me that I’ve actually been to several other very “steampunk” locations in Germany since moving here. As a country that boomed during the industrial era, it has a lot of these to offer, but they’re sometimes off the beaten track and not the first attractions listed among the ‘must-sees’ of a region (often displaced by castles or quaint villages, which I can completely understand!).
As a writer of science fiction and fantasy, however, these places filled me with a particular kind of thrill and wonder, as if I’d been transported into another century or stepped into the pages of a novel. Steam-era architecture, giant cogs, brass finishes, steel rivets, historic machines, old fonts… it all felt like fertile inspiration just waiting to be transformed into a steampunk tale or artwork.
Historic German postcard that imagines Berlin in the future, Bröhan Museum, Berlin.
I recently visited a city called Wuppertal in central Germany. It’s not your typical tourist destination, but I had my sights set on a particular, admittedly very nerdy, goal: I wanted to ride on the ‘Schwebebahn’, the oldest suspension railway in the world. This truly odd and unique structure was completed in 1901 and is still used today for local public transport… and from my first glimpse, I was charmed. Not only does the railway have an extremely historic “steampunk” vibe, it winds through a city that retains other remnants from that period – rustic old brick factories, billboards in archaic fonts, steel bridges, Art Deco stations.
The whole experience also made me reflect on the moment 6 years ago when I first heard about Wuppertal, which was also, not-so-coincidentally, the first time I fully grasped what steampunk is and why it exists.
I was recently thinking about one of my favourite novels, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, and it reminded me that there’s a quality some science fiction, dystopian and speculative fiction stories have—a rare one—that I absolutely love. It’s hard to describe, and perhaps even harder to achieve, but I’d characterise it as a tantalising sense of wrongness intertwined with mystery, often (though not always) occurring at the beginning of a story, which usually precedes a giant, reality-altering twist.
It’s that growing conviction that things don’t make sense in the world, that something very odd is happening, perhaps even something sinister, but you don’t know what it is yet. You just have this sense that the situation is off, wrong somehow, and that you, and perhaps even the characters, have a fundamental misunderstanding of the reality in which they find themselves. At the same time, you can feel in your bones that you are going to find out what it is, and that when you do, it’s going to be a hair-prickling revelation or a fantastically unexpected twist. This feeling seems to often be evoked when the initial story world, or simply the story we think we are about to be told, is increasingly questioned, then ultimately flipped on its head.
More often than not, it’s the gushing, positive things in reviews that help convince me to read a book, and the negative ones that make me steer clear. However, as I’m sure is the case for many other readers, sometimes criticisms in a negative review won’t actually turn me off… in fact, they’ll make me think the book might be up my alley. This is of course mostly due to personal taste, for example if the reviewer mentions something they dislike that I don’t, and more rarely, due to things that make me suspicious as to the reviewer’s motives. Continue reading →
