British fantasy author Terry Pratchett has spent nearly his entire career writing about the Discworld, a pancake-shaped land carried on the back of a giant cosmic turtle. Over the decades, his Discworld series has blossomed from a clever Douglas Adams-style parody of the sword-and-sorcery genre into a broad-ranging social satire that uses jokes about wizards …
English expatriate Neil Gaiman has arguably received the most attention for fantasy novels like American Gods and Anansi Boys, whose success raised him from genre obscurity to a space on the bestseller lists near Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. But he’s had a knack for the short story ever since his work on the Sandman comic series–a format that rewards …
Stop-motion animation has been around since the silent-movie days, but no one has put a personal stamp on the technique like Ray Harryhausen. In 16 movies from 1949’s Mighty Joe Young to 1981’s Clash Of The Titans, Harryhausen gave life to an entire zoo’s worth of fearsome monsters, including the giant octopus which destroys the …
Tolkien fans around the world are counting down to Dec. 17, when at long last we’ll know the answer to a hugely important question — whether the final film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy will live up to all the expectation. (Oh, and also whether or not Frodo can destroy the evil ring of Sauron …