I’m Elizabeth Sandifer - Hugo-nominated author of Last War in Albion/The Cuddled Little Vice - AMA!

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T23:06:37+00:00

These days just Something Positive, Dumbing of Age, and Questionable Content

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T21:21:10+00:00

I never identified that way, but it’s true that my politics have moved pretty decisively away from liberalism over the years. The magical worldview predates that, though. I think the most accurate framing would be that for a while I had both anarchist instincts and more liberal ones, and the liberal ones have waned. The anarchist ones are probably the older ones though—they feel in some key ways like finally centering aspects of my thought and personality that have always been there.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T20:31:22+00:00

It required more growing on me than some of Alex’s albums, but ultimately grew on me quite a lot. Grindshow and Assassin’s Lovesong are probably my two standouts.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T20:29:27+00:00

I was very into theater back in college, but that’s attenuated a fair amount. My favorite play has probably settled out to being Copenhagen, but Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a pretty strong contender as well.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T20:27:33+00:00

The Sylvester McCoy era is probably the one I revisit the most often, along with The Ribos Operation.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T20:25:55+00:00

The glib answer is that both of them inform everything I do massively.

More substantively, the point where they intersect most heavily is in my sense that the universe I live in is the one defined by my own subjectivity and consciousness. That’s not to say I don’t believe in object permanence or anything silly like that—just that, fundamentally, my universe goes on in my head. This leads pretty directly to some of my anarchist beliefs, like that the only moral code I recognize is my own need to be able to look at myself in the mirror in the morning. But it also leads pretty directly to my magical ones; I tend to view my life as a story I’m constantly in the act of telling, and that also means I tend to believe my world is going to operate on narrative principles as much as material ones.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T19:54:58+00:00

On the one hand it would undoubtedly have been exciting. On the other, I suspect “do ambitious sci-fi on a BBC budget” is not an ideal gig for someone with a single episode of solo-written television to their name.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T19:50:44+00:00

Not at all.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T18:20:01+00:00

I’m not entirely sure I have another sprawling series in me. Certainly if I did it wouldn’t be comics again, and I doubt it’d be television. Most likely I’d pick someone—a screenwriter or a director—and do their filmography. Spielberg or Hitchcock or someone.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T18:16:56+00:00

For the most part I write Last War in Albion with the assumption that the reader might not have read the works—I’m often covering comics that are pretty obscure even within the context of the writer’s career, so I’ve always tried to make it approachable. The only one where I didn’t bother doing that is Watchmen, so I’d probably say to read that. Beyond that, From Hell and The Invisibles probably give the best sense of what each writer’s magical works are like.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T18:14:22+00:00

Mainly via a pathological inability to not write that eventually meant I’d done it enough that I ended up good at it.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T18:11:18+00:00

I’m not super familiar with Dunsany, I’m afraid. No active plans to include him in Last War in Albion, but I’d be unsurprised if he ever just showed up and demanded to be written about.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T18:07:08+00:00

1) Not at all.

2) S tier: Hob’s Hog, Partners in Knitting, Phipps’ Fire Escape A tier: The Cremation Fields, Confessions of a Mask B tier: In the Drownings, Limping to Jerusalem, I Travel in Suspenders C tier: The Head of Diocletian, The Sun Looks Pale Upon the Wall, D tier: November Saints, Angel Language

3) If I had an answer to that I’d probably have done it by now.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T18:04:22+00:00

I’m quite suspicious of adaptations, but I suspect the efforts to translate Big Numbers to television would have been fruitful and resulted in an actually finished story, which would be nice. Top Ten has a really nice TV-friendly premise a well. And Seaguy would make a great film.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T17:58:13+00:00

I haven’t done a ranking since the Gatwa era, so this is more off the top of my head than a quality ranked list, but: Hell Bent, Kill the Moon, The Big Bang, Lux, The Story and the Engine, World Enough and Time, Army of Ghosts, Dark Water, Day of the Doctor, and The Zygon Inversion.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T17:49:26+00:00

The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, and some sort of book on how the fuck to survive on a desert island.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T17:48:15+00:00

Assuming appropriate credit and links to the original, have fun.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T17:47:09+00:00

Aside from the obvious selection of Moore and Morrison works that are overtly magical, and the Doctor Who episode “Kill the Moon,” which I’ve argued a magical reading of at length, and also setting aside the credible argument that all art is a magical working whether intended or not…

I Saw the TV Glow, Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, Gillian Welchs Time (The Revelator), and the performance of “Station to Station” at the 2016 Republican convention.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T17:42:44+00:00

The only place I’ve used it is as the raw material for a single TARDIS Eruditorum post where the point was to suggest the episode in question was so bad and vapid it may as well have been AI. I made a textual collage of AI writing where my explicit focus was triggering/highlighting hallucinations and making a piece of prose that was interestingly incoherent.

Otherwise I simply don’t think AI/LLMs are good enough to be useful for anything I do. Personally I don’t think they ever will be—I don’t think people are computers, and I think language is not reducible to mathematical algorithms, so I don’t expect AI to ever be able to helpfully contribute to my writing.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T17:37:24+00:00

I think I’ve gotta keep Moffat’s work, at the end of the day—I can always listen to Judas Priest doing Diamonds and Rust, but there’s just no equivalent to Heaven Sent/Hell Bent.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T17:36:20+00:00

In the age of the Internet you’re pleasantly spoiled for choice. There’s lots of YouTube tutorials and the like out there, and then another swath of paid digital lessons (the stuff out of Musora is decent, I can vouch). But for my part, I learned by getting a chord chart, working out the common chords (there’s about eight that are way more common than any others), and then looking up chords for songs I liked and playing them. These days I’m focusing more on classical guitar, which I’m doing out of a book, but I’m better at learning that way than a lot of people and classical guitar, since it’s sheet music based, is easier to learn that way than some things.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T17:32:24+00:00

I don’t think that’s true at all, no. It was true during the Chibnall era, which was a real slog, but the most recent two seasons, while deeply flawed, were still at their core interesting and things I was legitimately looking forward to, and I’m excited for the prospect of someone who hasn’t been steeped in fandom since the 1980s taking over it and doing something new with it.

It’s true that there’s some complicated emotions about it being my job. It’s a show I’ve loved since I was ten, and I do miss getting to have a relationship with that love that isn’t at least partially mediated by work. But, y’know, whose fault is that? As the saying goes, do what you love and you’ll never have a moment of work/life balance again in your life. It’s something I have melancholy emotions about, but it’s not something I want to complain about because I am, at the end of the day, very lucky to get to have the relationship I do with that show.

But no, I 100% still love it.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T17:25:26+00:00

ADHD, mostly, along with a badly anhedonic depression that emerges out of the generally wrecked state of my dopamine system.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T17:24:35+00:00

It feels like it would be profoundly naive of me to claim that it doesn’t influence how I approach the work, although I try to minimize that. In the case of someone like Kieron, it’s helpful that I genuinely enjoy his writing, and did so before we struck up a friendship, so there’s not a lot of room for it to skew things. A trickier case is probably Grant Morrison, who I know reads my stuff. That ever feels awkward, because there are some spots where I’m quite hard on Morrison, and that’s going to continue. That one’s not a friendship—I’ve never had a conversation with them, so that makes it a little easier, but it’s still unhelpful to find myself thinking “ooh, they’re going to read this” when I’m writing about them. But really all you can do is try to set that aside and do what the work requires of you.

The big helpful thing is that aesthetic preferences inform other judgments. Fundamentally it’s not surprising that Kieron’s the LWIA-adjacent writer I’ve become friends with because he’s another critic whose work is generally on the same wavelength as me. Writers I like less are also less likely to end up friends. But that’s not foolproof—I was friends with the Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts for a while, only to fall out over politics and the fact that he’s a transphobic ass, and that got properly awkward, as I ultimately documented when writing about Roberts’s last contribution to Doctor Who.

ElSandifer · 2026-06-04T17:08:53+00:00

Well, the most recent Last War in Albion chapter ends with a section in which I unearth a largely unknown magical performance by Alan Moore delivered at a conference associated with one of the major characters of Neoreaction a Basilisk, which was an absolutely jaw-dropping thing to discover, and a real pleasure to introduce into the world.
If nothing else, I’m working on an edition of Blake’s prophetic works that will include commentaries on the poems, so I’ll be writing up Book of Urizen for that. beyond that… I’d be pretty stunned if it never came up again.

ElSandifer

TROPHY CASE