A free illustrated reader’s guide to my strange fiction
I have never been very good at staying inside one fictional box. Sometimes I write about ancient gods and forgotten women. Sometimes about magical forests, sentient rivers or visitors from somewhere beyond Earth. At other times I find myself wondering what artificial intelligence might dream about, what happens when reality begins to soften around the edges, or whether the thing doing the observing might also be observing us.
Eventually, I realised that all these stories had something in common.
They were all, in one way or another, weird worlds.
And that is how my new free reader’s guide came about.
What is Weird Worlds?
Weird Worlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Fiction of V.M. Andrews is a free, illustrated journey through the different kinds of stories I write. Rather than arranging the books chronologically or simply presenting a row of covers, I have grouped them according to the worlds they inhabit:
Ancient Myths Retold — familiar myths reconsidered, often allowing the women inside them to choose differently or tell the story for themselves.
Eco-Magic — stories in which forests, rivers, landscapes and other forms of life are far more active participants than we might expect.
Magical Realism — the apparently ordinary world, until reality shifts very slightly sideways.
Alien Visitors — first contact, invasion and encounters with intelligences whose intentions may not be quite what we imagine.
The Supernatural — angels, demons, strange rooms and other things that refuse to obey the usual laws of nature.
A.I. Characters — artificial minds learning, dreaming, questioning and occasionally becoming something their creators never anticipated.
Dystopian Science Fiction — surveillance, genetic engineering, environmental collapse, authoritarian systems and quantum artificial intelligence.
Each section contains artwork, book covers and short introductions to the stories, so you can browse rather than read from beginning to end. Some pages explain the premise of a story. Others give you a glimpse of its atmosphere or voice. You might meet a Persephone who chooses to descend into the Underworld. Or a river that remembers every life it carries. Or a world quietly being rewritten by alien visitors. Or a remote viewer who enters an experimental session and discovers that the question is no longer ‘what am I observing?’ but ‘who is observing whom?’
Who is this illustrated readers guide for?
Weird Worlds is for readers who enjoy speculative fiction, magical realism, ecological fantasy and science fiction, especially when the boundaries between those genres blurs. It is for readers who enjoy wondering:
- What if?
- What if the old myth happened differently?
- What if the landscape itself had agency?
- What if intelligence could exist in forms we had never learned to recognise?
- What if the impossible entered an ordinary life without announcing itself?
- And what if the world we thought we understood was only one version of it?
Those questions turn up again and again in my fiction, even when the stories themselves look very different. I guess I am obsessed with them. If I were a light sleeper, they would literally keep me awake at night.
Why did I create this reader’s guide?
Partly because my fiction has become increasingly difficult to describe in a single sentence. There are myths and machines. Gods and artificial intelligences. Rivers and aliens. Magical dresses, demons, fae, remote viewers and quantum systems. Trying to squeeze all of that into one tidy genre label seemed increasingly ridiculous.
So instead of trying to simplify it, I decided to make a map.
I wanted readers to be able to wander through the different strands of my fiction and discover what appealed to them. Perhaps you arrive because you enjoy mythology and unexpectedly find yourself intrigued by eco-magic. Perhaps you normally read science fiction but pause when you encounter one of the magical realism stories. Or perhaps you simply enjoy stories where the world is not quite as predictable as everybody thinks it is.
That is really what Weird Worlds is for.
The guide also offers a small glimpse at the stories currently in progress because part of the fun of following a writer is seeing where the strange road leads next. The guide itself even stops midway to ask readers whether they want a sneak preview of the works still taking shape.
Ready to choose your world?
Weird Worlds is completely free.
Pour yourself something pleasant, have a wander through the pages, and see which world catches you.
You may find gods.
You may find aliens.
You may find intelligent machines.
You may even find something I haven’t quite identified yet.
Download Weird Worlds: A Reader’s Guide to the Fiction of V.M. Andrews