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Series: That Was Awesome! Writers on Writing Archives - Reactor

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That Was Awesome! Writers on Writing

Authors and editors talk about the small moments, big epics, and crazy things in the books that they love.

How to Paint With Words: 6 Descriptive Works of SFF

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Comment number: 8

Coming Home to Mouth-of-Mattapoisett: Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time

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Comment number: 3

The Price of Power in The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip

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Comment number: 15
The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones

Making the Metaphor Literal: Fantastic Reality in The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones

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Comment number: 18
The Crow Road by Iain M Banks

The Difference Is Entirely One of Setting: Iain Banks’ The Crow Road

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Comment number: 19
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell book cover

The Joys of History and Academia in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

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The Labor of Creativity: On Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke

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How Patricia McKillip’s The Riddlemaster of Hed Let Me Write Fantasy

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Comment number: 20

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann Makes Weird Seem Organic

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Dragonlance Chronicles books

How Dragonlance Launched My Lifelong Love of Fantasy

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Comment number: 77

The Magic System in Foundryside Blends Fantasy with Science Fiction

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Comment number: 9

The Stark Realities of John Steakley’s Military SF Novel Armor

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Comment number: 14

What Writers Can Learn from Margaret Atwood’s New Introduction to The Handmaid’s Tale

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Comment number: 8

Learning Fantasy from Donna Tartt’s The Secret History

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Comment number: 5

Time Cracks Open for Leó Szilárd in Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb

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Comment number: 9

The Surprisingly Intricate Plot of G.I. Joe: “The M.A.S.S. Device”

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Comment number: 6

Stephen King’s The Long Walk and the Art of Dystopian Simplicity

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Collaborating with His Reader: Theodore Sturgeon’s Some of Your Blood

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Comment number: 5

A Voice in the Head: Brian Stableford’s Hooded Swan Series

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Comment number: 14
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Let Me Talk to the Aliens! Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”

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Comment number: 9

“Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic.”

R.F. Kuang, Yellowface

TPG 2026 • Site Credit