Popverse's top stories

• More people tuned into the Stranger Things season 5 release date announcement than the Stranger Things season 4 debut on Netflix
• MEMBERS ONLY: What do Aggretsuko and Chainsaw Man have in common? They're both about how much capitalism sucks [Popverse Jump]
• I have a hunch why Mike Flanagan worked so much Back to the Future into The Life of Chuck

If you were a fantasy reader as a kid, chances are you were impacted by Tolkien or C.S. Lewis, or both. While both writers represent a small drop in the larger bucket of the fantasy genre, it's hard to overstate their influence on the genre, at least within Western literature. I mean, George R. R. Martin got the "R. R." in his name from Tolkien. At MCM x EGX 2024, fantasy writer V.E. Schwab broke down how the work of both writers has impacted the relationships that fantasy readers have built with their worlds, and what her approach is as a writer. 

"With Tolkien, you will never access the door. You can't, except through the pages of those books. You cannot go there. You cannot be part of it. But C.S. Lewis teaches you that somewhere in your house is a cabinet with no back. And so you as a child or as an adult spend your time looking for the cabinet with no back because C.S. Lewis is saying that magic can come into your world - that you actually can access magic. And that's the kind of fantasy I want to write, or the fantastical I want to write. Which is that, I want to convince you that magic is real." 

It's interesting when Schwab lays out Lewis's writing like that, because I remember as a child, the way that Digory and Polly spoke to each other in The Magician's Nephew, specifically, their use of the word "shan't," was utterly foreign to my New York City brain. They might as well have been elves from Middle-earth, because I couldn't conceive that another child would talk that way on purpose without it being a joke (I was six years old, okay!). So in that sense, I really needed the work of someone like Schwab to make magic feel a bit more contemporary for me, within the vein of Lewis. Well, I got there eventually. 

Just like yourself, the Popverse staff spends a whole lot of time with our respective noses in respective books. It's why we've come up with stuff like:

• The hottest upcoming fiction
• Queer romance to add to your reading list
• A reading guide to Cassandar Clare's Shadowhunter Chronicles

...and a whole lot more. Join our metaphorical library, won't you? There are no late fees and you can be as loud as you want, so long as the people you live with are OK with it.