There’s a new documentary on Jim Henson set to start streaming on Disney+ in the near future, and the Ron Howard production has just released its first trailer. In it, we see a lot of footage from Henson’s early years as well as several of his colleagues talking about his boundless imagination.
Here’s the official synopsis for the documentary, which is called Jim Henson Idea Man:
Jim Henson Idea Man takes us into the mind of this singular creative visionary, from his early years puppeteering on local television to the worldwide success of Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and beyond. Featuring unprecedented access to Jim's personal archives, Howard brings us a fascinating and insightful look at a complex man whose boundless imagination inspired the world.
The trailer is a moving one for anyone who has seen and loved one of his creations, whether that be Kermit the Frog or any of the Muppets, the movie Labyrinth, or The Dark Crystal, just to name a few. The project’s access to Henson’s personal files is hinted at in the trailer as well, with images of a young Henson that few have seen before. The trailer also suggests that the documentary will touch on how things changed when Henson’s popularity grew, though it’s not clear how much time will be spent on that versus celebrating his creative mind.
We’ll know for sure when Jim Henson Idea Man starts streaming on Disney+ on May 31, 2024.
The Outlander prequel is coming! Starz has just announced another slew of actors who have joined the cast of Outlander: Blood of My Blood, and some are playing younger versions of characters we’ve seen in the flagship series.
Blood of My Blood centers on the parents of Jamie Fraser (played in Outlander, of course, by Sam Heughan) as well as the parents of Claire Fraser (Catriona Balfe). As such, the series takes place on two timelines: We follow Jamie’s parents, Ellen MacKenzie (Harriet Slater) and Brian Fraser (Jamie Roy) in eighteenth-century Scotland, and Claire’s parents, Julia Moriston (Hermione Corfield) and Henry Beauchamp (Jeremy Irvine), in World War I England.
We’ve already got one additional round of casting news earlier this month, and today we have more actors to add to the list. Sally Messham (A Small Light) will be playing a younger version of Mrs. Fitz, Ellen’s maid at Castle Leoch and Murtagh’s aunt. Terence Rae (Black Dog ) is playing another (albeit younger version of) a character we’ve seen before: Arch Bug, who, in the time of the prequel series, is working as a bodyguard to Clan Grant. The Outlander character Jocasta Cameron, played on the original show by Marai Doyle Kennedy, will be played by Sadhbh Malin (Conversations with Friends). Other additions include Ailsa Davidson (Halo), who will be playing Jocasta’s sister Janet MacKenzie and, in the twentieth century, Annabelle Dowler (The Reckoning) joins the cast as Lizbeth, Julia’s boss at the War Department while Harry Eaton (Extraordinary) plays Private Charlton, Henry Beauchamp’s fellow soldier and friend.
The casting news is ramping up on Blood of My Blood just as the eighth and final season of Outlander is in the midst of production. Matthew B. Roberts showruns both series, with Ronald D. Moore and Maril Davis executive producing on both as well.
We don’t know yet when Blood of My Blood will premiere, but the back half of Outlander’s seventh season, eight episodes in total, will come out sometime in November 2024. [end-mark]
Every week, some very good books are published that could be adapted into very good movies. Every day, probably, someone somewhere is writing a screenplay that could make a very interesting film. But in this timeline, we get Space Mountain instead. The latest adaptation—I'm using that word quite loosely—of a Disney theme park ride has been in development for years, apparently (some of us may have been in denial). But now it has a pair of writers: Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec are facing the task of transforming a roller coaster into an epic movie (one presumably intended to start a whole franchise).
Applebaum and Nemec, most recently, were the showrunners for Netflix's generally underwhelming live-action Cowboy Bebop (pictured above); they were also involved in Prime Video's splashy Citadel (Applebaum is one of the creators; Nemec is a producer). They were also among the writers on Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol and the two 2010s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies that starred just a really weird bunch of people (Megan Fox, Will Arnett, Stephen Amell, Alan Ritchson, Laura Linney, Tyler Perry, what?).
And now they're on top of Space Mountain. As The Hollywood Reporter sagely notes, "The ride has no overarching theme nor memorable characters seen in such rides as Pirates of the Caribbean. In fact, Space Mountain in Disneyland has been turned into Hyperspace Mountain and given a Star Wars makeover on occasion. As such, the story is being created whole cloth with the ride acting as inspiration."
Naturally, plot details are top secret. What I remember about one childhood ride on Space Mountain is basically nothing, except that at some point you are in the dark. Which is where we all are when it comes to Disney and its endless rides-into-franchises machine, I guess. [end-mark]
Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover the first five poems in Marisca Pichette’s Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead, to the degree poetry makes spoilers meaningful.
Summary
“I braided my hair with eggshells & apple seeds, trussed together under a paisley pashmina.”
This week we cover Marisca Pichette’s “In Parting,” These Days Were Made For Us,” “The Size of Your Fist,” “Like Breathing,” and “Her Ribs Are Apple Wood.” We won’t attempt to summarize them—go instead and read them yourself.
What’s Cyclopean: Water is terrible and vital, and being afraid of it is an impossible paradox: “...tell me that you fear the ocean just like an eye fears a tear and the clouds fear the rain.”
Weirdbuilding:How do we decide what’s not normal? “...the kindness of strangers—the strangeness of kindness—the kind of strange only stranger than kind.”
It was possible to summarize Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” as I did in our previous Poetry Month post—for all that was lost in trimming the rich detail from its narrative, there was a narrative, deceptively straightforward in the way of most fairy tales.
Summarizing the first five poems in Marisca Pichette’s rivers in your skin, sirens in your hair would be a whole 'nother mission, one I’m not willing to accept, but its “impossibility” isn’t due to a lack of narrative. As Pichette writes in her introduction to the collection, she is a prose writer who “in poetry…never claimed to know what I was doing.” Yet, like “all creative work,” the poems “come from a desire to tell a new story, or an old story in a new way.” Compared to prose narrative, poetry offers “freedom from constraint, a space for authenticity.” Not surprisingly, then, her poems are written in free verse, a style that in avoiding set metrical schemes and rhyming patterns aims to imitate the authentic rhythms of speech. Much free verse, I find, more closely imitates the natural patterns and vagaries of thought, which in turn reflect those of a core metaphor of art, the river.
Appropriately, river is the first word in Pichette’s title.
What do rivers—and thoughts—do? They flow swift or sluggish or at just the right speed for safe and efficient navigation. They are deep or shallow, expansive or narrow, clear or murky, straight or meandering, treacherous with rapids or serene, nurturing or toxic. They can stick to one channel or braid out into many. They can flood, to beneficial or disastrous effect. They can collect all sorts of refuse or treasure, whatever falls into them or is dredged up from their beds, to be recombined and deposited downstream. They can run free or be locked into canals or constrained behind dams. They can plunge underground. They can peter out into stagnant marshes. They can make it to the sea, another core metaphor, representing consummation or communion, death or unbounded life.
Try to verbally summarize a river in a way that makes your audience experience it in full, as itself, the thing irreducible. Try to do the same thing with a poem of any depth. Easy enough: Type out the poem word for word, line break for line break. The poem, too, is irreducible, but as a printed work, it’s reproducible. Within the limitations of column space and copyright law, we can’t reproduce Pichette’s work here. As I’ve noted above, I decline to reduce it. The attempt would do nothing to further understanding of our discussion for someone who hasn’t read the poems.
My working theory is that the more prose-like the poem, the more summary can capture of it. Corollary: the more poetic the prose, the less summary can capture. The two literary modes lie on an infinitely subdivided continuum of verbal density.
Somewhere along their academic roads, students of literature may encounter Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” and its closing dictum that “A poem should not mean/But be.” Nevertheless, teachers of literature remain human, whatever some grade-, and high-, and grad-school sufferers may believe, and humans like things to mean as well as to exist. Who among us, then, has not slid under the paltry shelter of a classroom desk when the teacher asked, “So, what’s this poem about?” Confronted with Kilmer or Wordsworth, the earnest (or satirical) student might have replied, “It’s about trees (or daffodils.)” Pressed, they might have added, “And how they’re beautiful!” or even “And how their beauty and perseverance and other anthropomorphized qualities can teach us important moral lessons!” The most advanced responders might go on about the pathetic fallacy, and how pathetic it is.
As for what Pichette’s “In parting” is about, what can I hazard from deep under my desk? Well, it’s about someone leaving home carrying a lot of weird stuff in a lot of weird places instead of more practical stuff in more practical suitcases or backpacks. Maybe this person is deranged, because what sane person braids “eggshells & apple seeds” into their hair and then ruins an expensive “paisley pashmina” by binding it over that sticky junk? Or maybe they’re a witch with magical uses for owl pellets, wax seals, “A doll, felted from my first cat’s fur. The jawbone of an English sheep.” They could even be outright monstrous, if we interpret the “pockets I’d accumulated” to mean actual pockets of skin, flesh and fat into which they’ve packed their miscellany of needful things; these pockets filled, they’ve even lined their throat “with academic papers & diary entries rolled up in rubber bands” and topped off the load with “bookshelves, carefully folded into the creases of my skin.”
Alternatively, we could fall back on the assumption that the baggage in the poem is metaphorical, though we might then feel obliged to figure out what each item stands for. I’d rather assume the weirdness is weirdness. Pichette encourages me to follow this inclination by stating that her collection is one of “speculative poetry,” which “tells a story outside of reality, after all.”
On the other hand, she adds: “By leaving reality behind, we access the rawest truths about ourselves.” Doesn’t that imply that weird poetry, and by extension all weird art, is necessarily metaphorical? That granted, are readers obliged to dig for correspondences between the fabulous and the mundane?
In truth, unless they have to turn in papers on said correspondences, readers can do whatever they want. Closing her introduction, Pichette encourages us to respond freely: “I offer these poems to you. I hope you see in them a glimmer of memory, an echo of home.”
So here are my glimmers and echoes, what the five first poems mean to me:
“In parting:” I imagine myself sitting on the bus next to that grotesquely overstuffed human duffel bag and sharing some of their clementines while listening to their story about why they had to leave home. Clementines are extra juicy when the refrigerator chill has been driven off by body heat. Chocolate, on the other hand, fares poorly in flesh-pockets. I will be supplying the bonbons on this trip.
“These days were made for us:” Here’s a debate that my duffel-bag companion-by-chance has on the bus with the old man sitting across the aisle from us. Night and rain are falling. The old man objects to my companion’s remark that the rain is made for them in particular—he’s just been waiting for a chance to correct our grievous misconceptions about the world. He doesn’t realize my companion may be a witch—or maybe he does, and that’s the problem. We two withstand his fearful arguments. We know that teardrops can be turned to diamonds, and that seagulls love the ocean as an eye loves tears and the clouds love rain. Things bigger than us may be awe-stirring rather than terrifying. Mud lives to mark our passing, and would the old crank like a clementine and some truffles?
“the size of your fist:” After the old man drifts into a snoring doze, I randomly remark that a human heart is indeed fist-sized. This draws from my companion the story of how they labored to replace their heart after it was stolen. Golem clay, though it could hold their incised cri of love me back, proved brittle. Metals all had contraindications: Too cold, too heavy, too weak, too prone to verdigris. A heart of glass cannot be dropped. An oak, storm-felled but with heartwood still sap-dripping life, did the trick for my companion—at least their heartwood-heart has learned to beat.
“like breathing:” That’s what the woman sitting alone in front of us asks: “Like breathing?” She has knelt up against the back of her seat to look down at us. In the lightning flashes the storm has begun to toss, her pupils glow silver. She’s a vampire, my companion whispers to me, but the woman proves to be kind enough in her strangeness and refrains from feasting on any of us mortal passengers, even though I offer her the snoring old man. Only, how well she bears the weight of her centuries makes me think of all the years I’ve toiled through, for what? When I get off the bus, the deluge intensifies. I have to swim home, and fish have taken over my living room. Have they finally drunk enough, I ask them, but fish never will respond to sarcasm.
“Her ribs are apple wood:” My bus companion has followed me home. We float above the still-offended fish, and the maybe-witch tells me the story of an enchantment. There was an apple tree who was dead and slowly rotting and so cold she radiated cold, colding. When bees nevertheless accepted her invitation to hive in her hole-gored heart, she lived again with them. I wonder if my companion was rival-transformed into that apple tree. This, I think, would make sense in light of the story they told earlier about making themself a new heart, and how it was another tree’s heartwood that worked best. What happened to the bees, though? Did they get to keep the apple tree’s hole-gored heart?
And—that’s what the poems mean. I’ve been binge-reading the rest of rivers in your skin, sirens in your hair. The poems are as toothsome as well-buttered popcorn, but more nourishing.
Thanks to Marisca Pichette for the dreams already inspired, and the dreams yet to come!
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Humans birth litters of holidays. Ancient Rome offered two or three per week, their equivalent of our predictable semi-secular weekend. The Catholic Church deals days among saints like cards. And modern governments, non-profits, and random groups of mischief-makers declare observances at will. On our eclipse road trip, we nitpicked Jack’s holiday conquest strategy from The Nightmare Before Christmas. I suggested that one really ought to start with smaller and less well-defended holidays, whereupon the inhabitants of the back seat checked online and planted their flag on International Beaver Day.
All of which is to say, some holidays are tied to seasons and events, while others are more-or-less random in their timing. One could make an argument for placing National Poetry Month in the dead of winter when we hunger for color, or in the fall as an inducement to put short and sweet readings at the start of the school year. But April feels appropriate to me. It’s a liminal month of snow and sunlight. It’s a better time than the January new year for resolutions and novelty. Poems have some kinship with garden seedlings and seed packets, dense compressions of idea. This year April also hosts Passover—my family’s haggadah is about half poetry, and though I find new additions every year, wails arise if I cut any.
I’m drawn to poems about transformation. Poetry can be so intensely visceral in its sensory and emotional detail, cutting to the heart of how we fear and desire change. Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesotasticks with me two years later for the way it links personal, species, and planetary transmutation: all body horror and adaptation and transcendence. Pichette’s poems strike me similarly, though they focus more on the individual narrator. Metaphors and memories are folded into the body—maybe deliberately, maybe out of necessity. The circumstances of heart-crafting and home-leaving are left to inference. What matters is the bookshelves stored in your wrinkles, the pine needles and glass beads between your collarbones.
“In Parting” puts me in mind of sculptures that stuff skeletons with flowers and sparkling jewelry, an aesthetic so common I can’t now find the actual one I’m thinking of. What’s the home being left? Is this a memento mori for parting from life, or the past that comes with us in every transition? Is it the fantasy of grabbing everything that matters in a refugee evacuation? Maybe it’s hoarding, being able to leave a place only by becoming everything it embodied. But I imagine the gloriously chaotic literal: wrists dangling with clattering bangles, hair bound tight with dyed eggshells, throat clogged with everything you’ve dared put to paper.
“The Size of Your Fist” focuses on a single organ, a dark Three Little Pigs of the heart. Like “In Parting,” it makes me think about sculpture, trying different materials until one comes out right—or getting meaning out of the whole series rather than just the final product. It’s telling that it starts with “golem clay”—ove me back the sacred replacement for truth, but golems turn against their creators always. And does the material matter more than the method of creation? Metal is made in the same mold as clay, before moving on to the oven for blown glass and then whittling wood shard by shard. An oak heart makes me think of Sarah Pinsker’s brilliant “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather,” though of course the phrase as a byword for strength is much older. Pichette’s oak heart doesn’t feel impregnable, only just strong enough to function—maybe hearts need to be oak-strong in order to work at all between bruises.
“Like Breathing” blurs the lines between body and water—bodies being mostly water after all, and terribly vulnerable to being either less or more water than ideal. Thunder and lightning are the organs and energy that make them go, pulse and digestion. This poem also brings us “backstroking” back to a home, maybe the one that got left behind in “In Parting.” The living room is full of fish, “washed clean.” Homes, too, are vulnerable to too much water—at least human homes. Perhaps more transformation is in order, to be able to live like fish in that flood, having “finally drunk enough.”
Next week, we begin our new longread with the first six chapters of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.[end-mark]
A-list actors Al Pacino and Dan Stevens (the latter of whom is pictured above getting up close and personal with the Shadow King in Legion) want to get in on the exorcist action, it seems, and Variety reports that the two are set to star in an exorcism horror film called The Ritual.
The movie comes from director David Midell, who co-wrote it with Enrico Natale.
Here’s Variety’s description of the film:
Based on a true story, The Ritual follows two priests—one questioning his faith (Stevens) and one reckoning with a troubled past (Pacino)—who must put aside their differences to save a possessed young woman through a difficult and dangerous series of exorcisms.
That young woman mentioned in the synopsis is Emma Schmidt, and Variety reports that the film is “an authentic portrayal” of her demonic possession and subsequent exorcisms. Schmidt’s case is also apparently the most documented exorcism in U.S. history. Take that, The Conjuring franchise!
The project is still in its early days, so no news yet on when the film will scare its way into theaters. [end-mark]
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) Directed by Steven Spielberg. Starring Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, and François Truffaut. Screenplay by Steven Spielberg.
Everybody knows that the last few years of the 1970s were a pretty big deal in science fiction cinema. It started in May of 1977 with a little movie called—you may have heard of it—Star Wars, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind followed in December. The next couple of years brought in some more heavy-hitters, such as Superman and a wildly successful remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1978, and films like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Alien, and even an unexpected box office hit from Australia in the form of Mad Max in 1979.
Sci fi movies had been popular for decades, but the one-two punch of George Lucas’ Star Wars followed by Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was considered a watershed moment in Hollywood even while it was happening. Many contemporaneous reviews of Close Encounters reference Star Wars, always with the assumption that anybody watching Spielberg’s movie had watched Lucas’ film just a few months before. Something was changing in sci fi cinema, and people definitely noticed it while it was happening.
American sci fi movies from before World War II tended to be about monsters and mad scientists, whereas the immediate postwar films were often about politics and paranoia, a trend that continued up until the ’70s. In her book Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, film scholar Vivian Sobchack identifies some genre staples in films released prior to 1977: the emphasis of ideas and deemphasis of characters, an obsession with and fear of technology, the many sociopolitical allegories about what is alien and what is familiar. There were always exceptions, of course, and non-American films had their own trends, but these traits will be familiar to anybody who has spent time watching and reading science fiction—or watching and reading criticism of science fiction, because generalizations like “all idea, no character” are very commonly directed at sci fi whether or not it’s warranted.
But sci fi is always evolving past its own definitions. The breadth of films released in the late ’70s that are now revered as influential and iconic is an example of this, encompassing everything from space opera epics to dystopian miseries, alien invaders to space exploration, out-of-this-world superheroes to claustrophobic horrors.
These days it’s hard to imagine Hollywood without Steven Spielberg’s influence, but in 1977 he was a hotshot newcomer, fresh off the record-breaking success of Jaws (1975). Spielberg had wanted to make a movie about UFOs since he was a kid—in fact, he did make a movie about UFOs when he was a kid. As a seventeen-year-old in Phoenix, Arizona, he made Firelight, a film about scientists investigating strange lights in the sky; the movie was funded by his father (it cost about $500), starred Spielberg’s sister and other high school students, and had a score composed and played by Spielberg on his clarinet. Only a few minutes of Firelight survive, but just over a decade later he would get the chance to revisit the topic with a significantly larger budget.
The wild success of Jaws meant Spielberg had near-complete creative control over Close Encounters, and it became a bit infamous in Hollywood for being a mess of a production. The film ran way over schedule and over budget, and included such wrinkles as the Writers Guild of America reportedly stepping in to arbitrate the writing credit (only Spielberg is credited, but at least five other writers are known to have worked on versions of the script), rumors of the cast bad-mouthing the producers, and filming that ran so late the planned preview press junket had to be delayed because the movie wasn’t finished.
Rushed as it was at the end, Close Encounters became a massive success upon release. But Spielberg wasn’t quite happy with the finished product. So he went back the next year to rework and rerelease it as the Special Edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Twenty years later he would have another go at it in the Director’s Cut, which reverts some changes from the Special Edition—including a change to the ending that had been demanded by the studio but which Spielberg had never liked.
But we’ll get to that in a moment. Let’s start at the beginning.
We begin in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico, where we meet Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut, an icon of French New Wave cinema; we might watch his 1966 Fahrenheit 451 in the future). Lacombe is one of those nebulously scientific guys who travels around the world investigating unexplained phenomena. In this case, the five planes of Flight 19 have appeared in the desert decades after mysteriously vanishing in the Bermuda Triangle in 1945.
Then we go to Indiana, where air traffic controllers hear about a plane’s near-collision with an unidentified aircraft, and locals begin to have a very weird evening. A toddler named Barry (Cary Guffey) wakes up to find his electrical toys going haywire and something ransacking the refrigerator; when he follows the unseen intruder outside, his mother, Jillian (Melinda Dillon) has to chase him through the fields and forests around their rural home. A power company lineman named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss, who lobbied enthusiastically for the part while filming Jaws with Spielberg) is called to deal with outages across the region, and while he’s on the road he has a very close encounter with a UFO.
Okay. Wait. Please excuse my sidebar, but I have to say this one thing. I don’t write these articles wanting to nitpick movies, because there really isn’t any fun in that. And I genuinely like this movie; I think it’s great fun to watch. But this one detail is driving me crazy. The lights in the sky, the sunburns, the music, the weird electrical and magnetic effects, all of that I can accept without the slightest threat to my suspension of disbelief. The disappearances and reappearances too—no problem. UFOs are UFOing. It’s all good.
But for the life of me I do not have any idea why the aliens climb through Jillian’s dog door to go into her fridge and make a mess of her kitchen. What do they want with her fridge? What are they doing? Why do they climb through the dog door? They can travel between stars but they want to crawl around stealing food? I have so! many! questions!
Don’t worry, I also have a theory: The aliens joyriding across Indiana that night brought an alien dog with them and it accidentally got loose and made a mess of Jillian’s kitchen and befriended Barry. Later the aliens went back later to grab Barry because the alien dog missed him so much.
That’s my theory.
Sidebar over. We can now return to the story.
Following the weirdness in Indiana, we rejoin Lacombe and his ever-present interpreter, David (Bob Balaban, whom you recognize from Christopher Guest and Wes Anderson movies). This time they’re in the Gobi Desert, where the SS Cotopaxi has been found, even though it sunk off the coast of Florida in 1925. (Fun fact: In the real world, the shipwreck of the Cotopaxi was found by divers in the ’80s and officially identified in 2020.) They also travel to India, where crowds of people have heard a musical sequence of five tones from the sky. (Now those five tones are stuck in your head. Sorry.) Lacombe tells government officials that the aliens are trying to communicate, and the U.S. military begins broadcasting the tones from Goldstone to communicate right back.
Meanwhile, in Indiana, things are going poorly. Jillian’s son Barry is abducted from their home following an absolutely terrifying sequence of events. Roy’s deteriorating mental health and obsession with UFOs is testing the patience of his wife, Ronnie (Teri Garr), and frightening his children. It culminates in an awful fight—which Dreyfuss and Garr portray so effectively it is physically uncomfortable to watch—after which Ronnie takes the kids and leaves. Both Jillian and Roy are beset with visions of a strange mountain, but because neither of them has ever studied geology or the history of the National Park System, they don’t know that what they’re seeing is Devil’s Tower in Wyoming—not until they see it on the nightly news, thanks to the government’s cover-up story.
The gender politics of this film have not aged well: men get to contemplate the mysteries of the universe, women have to stay home and take care of the kids. I’m not sure how those dynamics were interpreted in 1977 and don’t want to make assumptions, so I’ll just mention it briefly. On the one hand, the Neary home is a noisy, stressful clutter; it’s a claustrophobic space and the scenes are filmed with deliberately overcrowded audio to intensify the discomfort. So one can hardly blame Roy for wanting to escape it into a wondrous cosmic mystery. On the other hand, even before he meets the UFO he’s acting like another child Ronnie has to manage; even his job conveys messages through her rather than speaking directly to him. The family dynamic is one that is common in American media of a certain age—it became inescapable in the ’80s and ’90s especially—and all the more tiresome for it: the playful man-child who desperately wants to escape his boring suburban existence, the humorless wife who keeps trying to make him grow up.
Years later, Spielberg acknowledged the immaturity of Roy’s character. In 2005 he said of Close Encounters: “Now, that was before I had kids. That was 1977. So I wrote that blithely. Today, I would never have the guy leaving his family and going on the mother ship.” So even though that aspect of the story rubs me the wrong way, I have mostly come around to thinking that sometimes a storytelling choice happens when a guy in his late twenties is writing about escaping the suburbs in a UFO, because not that long ago he was a teenager in the suburbs dreaming about escape and UFOs, and he’s just not really thinking very deeply about how it impacts other characters in the story.
Driven by desperation and compulsion, Roy and Jillian both travel to Wyoming, where they meet up again amidst the chaos of a military-enforced evacuation and government cover-up. I laughed out loud when the government agents say they are evacuating 50,000 people from 200 square miles around Devil’s Tower. Fifty thousand! I love when screenwriters who live in Southern California try to estimate population density anywhere else in the country. But never mind that. The military intercepts Roy and Jillian before they can reach Devil’s Tower, but they get away and begin climbing the mountain.
What they find hidden on the far side is a massive operation set up to greet the aliens, compete with a landing strip, a phalanx of white-coated scientists and uniformed soldiers, and a guy on a synthesizer to play the five tones. In the real world that guy was Phil Dodds, an audio engineer and the Vice President of Engineering for ARP Instruments, who was on set to install and program the synthesizer used in the scene. Spielberg liked the way he looked and cast him to play the same role in the film.
This is where we have to acknowledge the work of our old friend Douglas Trumbull and his special effects crew. As the visual effects supervisor, Trumbull developed methods for motion-controlled photography to match the flight of the UFOs—those bright lights that zoom around through most of the film, somehow managing to be both geometric and shapeless—with the miniature photography of the settings and landscapes. Those stunning images of clouds roiling and whirling are the work of Trumbull’s assistant Scott Squires, who created them by devising a method of injecting white paint into tanks of layered fresh- and saltwater. Several parts of the film, including those striking scenes toward the end in which Roy and Jillian are climbing the mountain at dusk, feature matte paintings by Matthew Yuricich (whose work is in everything from Ben Hur to Ghostbusters).
The special effects are great throughout the movie, but there is something about the way they are used that I really love. It’s all about the build-up. I wouldn’t call it restraint, exactly, because this is not a movie that is terribly interested in restraint, but there is a deliberate choice to limit our perspective to make the characters’ experiences more powerful and unsettling. Even though I still want to know what the aliens wanted in Jillian’s refrigerator, that scene is a great example of effectively withholding information. All we see is the mess and little Barry’s face, and he’s too young to convey the precise emotion that an adult character might convey. All we know is that he’s enthralled rather than scared.
Spielberg has talked about how the malfunctioning mechanical sharks used in Jaws made him reduce how much he could show the creature, and he seems to have learned a valuable lesson from the experience: you can convince your audience of a lot if you refrain from showing them so much that it looks fake. So many scenes in Close Encounters work this way, with the same psychological effect: heightening the tension, unsettling the characters, telling us enough that we know what’s going on but not so much that we begin to deconstruct it while watching.
Never quite adding up, that is, until the end. In a story that depends on generating a lot of mystery and expectation around an unseen element, there is always a choice about whether to reveal that element fully. We normally think of this in terms of horror movie monsters and the risk that comes with building up something terrifying, only to have all that terror dissipate when the monster doesn’t live up to the hype. But Close Encounters is doing the exact opposite. There has been tension, fear, and uncertainty building all through the movie; Roy and Jillian, especially, are confused and scared by what’s happening to them. The goal of the ending is to erase that fear entirely and let awe take its place.
That’s a big cinematic challenge, so how do you do it? Well, for one thing, you get Ralph McQuarrie to design and Greg Jein to build a really cool spaceship, and you fill it with color and light and music. The mothership is massive, astonishing, and overwhelming—but it’s not threatening. It’s too bright, too beautiful for that, even before the aliens begin returning the abductees they’ve taken from Earth. They return little Barry into his mother’s arms. They even return a dog! They can’t be threatening aliens if they return a dog, right? The crowd of extraterrestrials that surround Ron before he steps aboard are played by little girls—fifty six-year-olds!—so they are small and cute and humanoid. Outer space has come down to Earth, and it’s friendly, it’s fantastic, and it wants to show a regular guy from Indiana the wonders of the cosmos.
This is where different versions of the film diverge. When Spielberg proposed the 1978 Special Edition, it was Columbia Pictures that asked him to add scenes at the end showing the interior of the mothership. Spielberg preferred to maintain the air of mystery, but he wanted the studio’s money, so he complied. Many critics loved the changes, including Roger Ebert, who raved about the revised film.
But I can see Spielberg’s point about the scenes being unnecessary. It’s enough that Roy is walking into something majestic and unknown; we don’t have to glimpse the entire alien city awaiting him. But I don’t really think those scene detract from the ending either. The interior scenes of the mothership are beautiful, providing a tremendous sense of scale and hinting at a vast society that travels the stars. Maybe it’s just me being wishy-washy, but in truth both endings work for me. Whether or not we peek inside the mothership, the wonder is still there, the cosmos are still waiting, and humanity is still being welcomed into the larger, grander universe.
I want to mention just one more thing, mostly because it makes me laugh but also roll my eyes a little. Close Encounters is a film that has been assessed and reassessed many times over the years; there are a flurry of new reviews and articles at every major anniversary. And some of them (here’s one example) go out of their way to claim that Close Encounters isn’t really a sci fi movie, for all that it’s about UFOs and aliens and first contact. The reasoning is that it doesn’t count because it’s about the humans rather than the aliens.
Now, we’re all familiar with the whole “it can’t be sci fi if I like it” brand of criticism, which is so tired it’s basically a parody of itself. But it’s especially silly in this case, I think, because it misses a rather significant point: every movie about aliens is about humanity.
Alien stories are human stories, right down to their marrow. They are a way for humans to look at ourselves and at each other, a way to explore human hopes and human fears, a way to create allegories of human drudgery and human dreams. Sci fi movies about extraterrestrials are, in general, a genre of film completely obsessed with what it means to be human. That’s why we keeping making them and watching them and talking about them.
What do you think about Close Encounters of the Third Kind? What do you think about showing the inside of the mothership: Yay or nay? I’m sure many of you have noticed that I didn’t mention John Williams’ score, but in my defense I have a really bad reason for that: I don’t actually like it very much (sorry!), so I neglected to look into it. I spent all my time reading about the cool special effects instead. Feel free to share your thoughts on that and anything else below!
This Is Your Mind in the Machine
And now for something completely different! We’ve gone out to space, we’ve brought aliens down to Earth, so next month we’re going to journey into the weird and wild realms of virtual reality. Many thanks to the commenters who suggested a few of the films on this list. This is only a small sampling of what the virtual reality corner of the sci fi genre has to offer.
May 8 – World on a Wire (German: Welt am Draht) (1973), directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder One of the earliest filmed portrayals of virtual reality comes from this German television miniseries. Plan for a couple of nights, because it’s 204 minutes long. Watch: The only official sources are DVD/Blu-ray or streaming on the Criterion Channel, but you’re clever people. Check YouTube and the Internet Archive—there are uploads available. View the trailer here.
May 15 – Open Your Eyes (Spanish: Abre los ojos) (1997), directed by Alejandro Amenábar This was remade by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky a few years later, but we’re going to watch the original. Watch:Amazon, BFI (UK only). View the trailer here.
May 22 – Tron (1982), directed by Steven Lisberger According to the director, Tron was not considered for a visual effects Oscar because the Academy thought using a computer for special effects was cheating. Watch:Disney, Amazon, Apple, Google, YouTube, Vudu, Microsoft. View the trailer here.
May 29 – The Matrix (1999), directed by the Wachowskis I’m not going to skip it just because we all know and love it. Confession: I saw it in theaters on opening weekend twenty-five years ago but have not watched it since. Watch:Netflix, Max, Apple, Amazon, Google, Vudu, YouTube, Microsoft. View the trailer here.
If someone had asked, "What do you think Zoe Kravitz's debut film as a director will be?" would you have guessed "a film in which Channing Tatum invites people to a private island and then fucks with their memories?" I can't say I would have come up with that—but I'm glad Kravitz did. Blink Twice (which was originally titled Pussy Island) has a certain Glass-Onion-gone-haywire vibe: Tatum plays a billionaire tech bro with a bunch of questionable friends who invites two women he apparently just met (Naomi Ackie and Alia Shawkat) to a debauched gathering on his private island.
At least, that's what seems to happen. At first. But there's a moment where this trailer takes a wild turn, and Ackie's character finds herself the only person who remembers Shawkat's Jess. Jess, naturally, is the one who wonders, "So do you think the human sacrifice is before or after dinner?"
As Christian Slater's character says, "There's something weird going on here." The hints are all there; one guy is desperate to find his knife, while another has a mysterious black eye he seems unconcerned about. Things simply don't track, and in a most intriguing way.
Kravitz co-wrote the film with E.T. Feigenbaum, who also wrote an episode of the Kravitz-starring High Fidelity series. Blink Twice also stars Kyle MacLachlan, Haley Joel Osment, Adria Arjona, Geena Davis, Simon Rex, and Liz Caribel. It's in theaters August 23rd.[end-mark]
The Pablo Berger-written and directed film premiered last year at Cannes, and since then has garnered rave reviews and also the Annie Award for Best Independent Feature. This latest trailer focuses on the lighter side of Dog and Robot’s relationship, when the two grow feelings for each other (and maybe… start holding hands?!) while exploring their version of New York City.
Things, however, take a sad turn. The expanded synopsis of the movie below teases how:
A tender, affecting tale of friendship, the animated Robot Dreams—adapted from the graphic novel of the same name by Sara Varon—is set in a 1980s NYC populated solely by pigs, birds, cats, and other animal clans. Yet Dog leads a lonely existence, eating TV dinners in his East Village walkup. When he sees an infomercial for a robot-building kit, he seizes the chance for the perfect city buddy: Dog and Robot eat hot dogs together on 5th Avenue, roller skate in Central Park, venture to Coney Island—to the groove of their song, Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.” But when Robot gets stranded at the beach, Dog is helpless to rescue him; and, as the seasons change, they both endure a separation that will change them forever.
Will the ending be sad? Bittersweet? Happy? I’m still in the dark about that, but if Guillermo del Toro describes the film as “beautiful, unexpected, and tender,” it will be a worthy watch.
The U.S. theatrical premiere of Robot Dreams will happen on May 31, 2024, at Film Forum.
Very few things involving two-way mirrors are good, and the big mirror in The Watchers, the directorial debut of Ishana Night Shyamalan, is no exception. When Mina (Dakota Fanning) finds herself stranded (with her bird!) in an Irish forest, there are noises, vibrations, weird happenings—and a door. She has five seconds to get inside before something bad clearly happens.
The Watchers is produced by M. Night Shyamalan; Ishana is his daughter. The movie is based on the book by Irish writer A.M. Shine. The new trailer is creepy and baffling: How is all this weirdness contained to one forest? What is real? What the heck is going on? Why does the bird kind of sound robotic? (I still don't want anything to happen to the bird.) Does this mirror-walled room have an attached bathroom or are we in a typical science fiction prison situation here where no one ever has to pee?
In a recent interview, Shyamalan said that her film “is a journey of suspense that hopefully leads into a feeling of wonder at the end. My hope is it’s an experience that plays on that sense of unease—then takes you to a bigger, wonderful place.”
We're thrilled to share an excerpt from To a Darker Shore, a new young adult fantasy novel by Leanne Schwartz, out from Page Street Publishing on April 30th.
Plain, poor, plus-size, and autistic, Alesta grew up trying to convince her beauty-obsessed kingdom that she’s too useful to be sacrificed. Their god blessed their island Soladisa as a haven for his followers, but to keep the devil at bay, the church sends a child sacrifice to hell’s entrance every season―often poor or plain girls just like Alesta.
With a head full of ideas for inventions, Alesta knows her best shot at making it to adulthood is to design something impressive for the festival exhibition so she might win a spot in the university―acceptance could guarantee her safety. But Alesta’s flying machine demonstration goes awry, a failure that will surely mean death. What happens is worse: Her best friend and heir to the throne, Kyrian, takes the blame expecting leniency but ends up sacrificed in her place.
To stop the sacrifices forever, Alesta plans to kill the monster that killed her friend. Prepared to save her kingdom or die trying, she travels to the depths of hell only to find Kyrian―alive, but monstrously transformed.
There is no escaping hell or their growing feelings for one another, and the deeper they descend into hell, the closer they come to uncovering a truth about the sacrifices that threatens to invoke the wrath of not only monsters but the gods as well.
Chapter One
An Unholy Hunger
Alesta expected monsters.
She grew distracted only a moment, watching the terns soar over the bright blue sea, wondering how their wings kept them aloft. The birds pulled her gaze along the coast and to the sky.
That’s when the branzono must have crept over the low cliff and rocky dunes.
It drew up as tall as Alesta on its two legs, wicked fins jutting from its calves and back, skin pulled taut over wide, boney shoulders and too-long arms—green like the headland, but the visceral wrongness of it here in Soladisa’s garden paradise turned the warm salt air on her tongue to an acid tang of fear.
The monster shambled nearer the grassy stretch of grazing land Alesta’s flock was abandoning with violent bleats, more strident warning than the bells up at the Towers. Shaken from her reverie, Alesta dodged sheep, spooked and scattering and heedless of any bellwether. She raced for the branzono.
Herder’s staff in hand, skirts flying, she cursed herself for having taken her eyes off the ground. Branzonos were a common enough threat, especially on this side of the island, facing the monster’s rock, where the sea was full of them—and worse. She and Nonnina couldn’t afford to lose a single sheep to a monster’s spiny teeth.
Wariness of the hunger of monsters lived deep in Alesta’s bones. Wasn’t it the appetite of the greatest devil of them all out on that cursed rock that was devouring Alesta’s hope for any real future?
With a swell of frustration at that reality coursing through her limbs, she cracked her staff against the monster’s side before it could reach its claws toward any of the panicked animals. “Oh, no you don’t.”
It gave a strangled scream and clutched at the staff, dragging Alesta off-balance. Not easy, considering her sturdy build—this thing was strong. She took advantage, letting it pull her and throwing all of her weight into the staff, driving the creature back on its webbed feet. They both toppled over, her crook trumbling from their grasps. Alesta reached for the knife at her belt as she rolled. She twisted over the beast to thrust the blade down, aiming for the monster’s shriveled heart.
The branzono grabbed her wrist. Against her tan skin, the webbing between its long white claws shimmered like seaweed, like most of its slimy body. But hell burned in the devil even as it yet dripped with seawater; the leathery hide over its upper arms and shoulders blistered and peeled away from seeping, deeper layers of skin, even muscle, in black-crusted folds. The unholy steam coming off them seared her skin as she strained against the branzono’s hold. The monster stared up at Alesta, pale eyes cast with terrible longing, vast and vacant as the sky.
Just hunger. And she was no one’s meal. Not yet. Not today.
Alesta drove her elbow down into the branzono’s chest. It gave a startling crack. The creature swiped out at her wildly with its free hand. Its claws missed her eye, thank Hektorus, but tore through her hair. Its knuckles bashed against her cheekbone with that monstrous strength. She shouted. But the branzono, in greater pain, loosened its grip. Alesta pushed the rest of her outrage into her final blow, wrapping both hands about her knife’s simple wooden hilt and plunging its blade deep through monster skin and sinew and muscle.
She shoved herself back, but dark blood spurted from the wound, and the wind off the sea carried a mist of it into her face. With a grimace, Alesta let herself fall fully into the damp grass, chest heaving against her leather bodice’s laces, mangled hair sticking to her face with sweat and blood.
Which was the perfect moment, of course, for the future king of Soladisa to find her.
His low voice, out of breath and raked through with concern, came from just behind her. “You all right?”
She tilted her chin to squint up at him. His tall silhouette was nearly lost in the afternoon sun’s sharp beams. “Never better.”
He strode to her side, careful to avoid where the branzono still twitched, and threw out a hand to help her up.
She wiped her bloody palm on her overskirt—already stained with grass and dark with sandy earth—before accepting. For a moment, her insides pinched with worry that she’d be too heavy for the boy to pull her to her feet without a struggle. Then she was up, looking straight into Kyr’s eyes. Holding his hand.
She dropped it and wiped her hair from her face, trying to smooth it down. The vanity of it made her feel foolish, though, so she played it off, and with the affectation of a lady of the Towers, said, “By Hektorus’ breath, you do meet all sorts out here on the headland.”
His concerned face broke into a slight smile. “I hope I’m a more welcome sight than a branzono.” One dimple flickered into existence. “You perfect calamity.”
She scrunched her face as if considering his glossy, dark curls kissed with golden highlights, his long straight nose, his strong jaw and sharp cheekbones. Her heart twitched a little, like the monster at her feet, but she shrugged, acting unimpressed. “At least you don’t try to eat my sheep.”
His smile—that wide, full mouth—turned wry. “Unless Nonnina’s invited me to dinner.” The light in his brown eyes dimmed a little. His voice went flat, like it always did when he was being serious. “You need to go to the Arbor at once to be absolved.” His thumb scraped back and forth over the worn embossing of the book he held.
She sighed and crouched beside the monster to pull her knife from its stilled chest. One more reason she hated the things. Now she had to trudge up to the Towers and submit to the ministrations of an albero, to cleanse her of the killing, when she was already so short on time, still desperate to think up an invention to present at this year’s Festival of Virtues. Though, as long as she had killed this one—“Look at the gills.” She tilted her head and used the tip of her knife to pull one set apart to better see where the skin turned pale and sieve-like. “I wonder if the structure could have applications for cleansing water in the aqueducts? And this webbing…” She prodded at the skin with her own finger. It stretched easily over her nail. Kyr made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. “It’s actually translucent, but still strong.”
“Alesta.”
That stopped her. She lifted her gaze from the carcass to Kyr, now backlit by the glittering sea like the fractured glass worked into the murals in the Towers’ courtyard walls.
“Within the hour of a devil’s dispatching—” he recited at her. His hand left off the book to worry one of the shining buttons on his colorful, embroidered jacket.
She sucked her teeth. “If I try to haul this home or get cleaned up before going to the Towers, you’re just going to get twitchier, aren’t you?”
He screwed up his face the same considering way she had, then nodded emphatically. “My twitchiest.”
Always such a stickler. She slapped her palm to a thigh and blew out a breath as she rose. “Fine. But you’re coming with me.” She sheathed her knife.
“Of course. I was on my way to spend the afternoon with you. Here or there.” He shrugged, as if it made no difference to him.
She knew he was avoiding the Towers, though, even more than usual. It was a tithing moon.
Normally they didn’t pretend with each other, not about anything important. But Kyr never wanted to talk about the tithing. He swallowed and held the book out to her. “Brought this for you.”
A kindness. Even if he couldn’t admit it aloud, they were both aware what was coming in mere weeks, and how the threat of each season’s tithing weighed upon some more than others. How frantic Alesta had been growing to prove herself at the festival before this particular axe could fall. Warmth flooded her insides as she took the volume—old enough for Kyr to be passing on to his poor tenant friend, so it wasn’t as if her smudged hands could hurt its cracked leather binding.
And when she asked him about it, as they set off, she got to see Kyr’s face light up, eyes rounding, tan skin aglow. With great sweeps of his hands he told her about the story writ in verse, his words coming so fast, sometimes they stuttered from his mouth. He paused only when they passed Alesta’s neighbor, brought off his field by the commotion of fleeing sheep. Vittore offered to gather and pen them for Alesta while she was absolved. They’d traded favors since she and her grandmother were left to run their farm on their own—Vittore and his children helping with the harvest, Alesta fixing his plow and remaking his olive press to be more effective. Not to mention killing branzonos before they could make their way further inland and onto his fields.
Kyr fidgeted with a stray thread at the elbow of his jacket until Alesta got moving again. Through rolling green hills and along the edges of orchards, they filled their hike up to the city with talk of monster slaying, or the wingspan of terns, or the latest landscape Kyr had finished painting.
As they passed through the cobblestone streets of the city, winding closer to the Towers, Kyr grew straighter-spined and more reserved. No more animated explanations or questions to Alesta. His hands no longer flew about like birds but trapped one another at the small of his back. Tradespeople nodded to him, and he nodded back with precision.
The city made its demands upon everyone in its own way.
Too soon, the front entrance to the Towers loomed before them—an intimidating expanse of granite steps Kyr didn’t hesitate striding up. Alesta forced herself to match his pace. Inside the Towers’ stately halls, she wanted to walk to one side, off the plush rugs with their elaborate weaves and out of the way of courtiers in their billowing, elegant dresses. Yet Kyr walked straight down their center, and she stuck beside him.
He was used to the place, but Alesta’s eyes roved hungrily over the swooping reliefs decorating the stone halls, the glittering lamps aglow with eternal-burning kharis. Each carving was like a toehold for her to climb, each glint a blade sharpening her ambition. Someday she’d belong here as much as any of these courtiers, whose faces beamed as Kyr passed, who bowed and curtsied and exchanged brief pleasantries with him as he ushered Alesta through the network of corridors and staircases and courtyards.
“My lord Kyrian!” one dark-haired girl sang out. She waved her fan and elbow in a sinuous greeting.
Kyr bowed in return. “My lady Rina.”
He made as if to continue down the hall, but Rina swished her skirts in front of him and launched into a gleeful recitation of courtly gossip, barely stopping for breath. “It’s been ages; you’ve missed so much. And when, pray tell, are you finally going to paint my portrait? Our lord Silvio’s recently had his done, and the court is all abuzz about it—”
“Anytime you wish, my lady. Only just now—”
“—though you must allow me to tell you what was said about it at our lady Francesca’s dinner last night—” Rina rushed on, black eyes twinkling. The daughter of the most powerful clairvoyant of Soladisa and the admiral of its royal fleet, Rina looked like she belonged in these halls, where every surface and structure had been made into art. Her hair was bound in complex braids, with strings of pearls winding through her tresses. Tiny jewels dotted each of her clean, polished nails. No calluses marred her silky brown skin. Her full, melon-colored skirts fell all the way past her dainty, embroidered slippers to the floor, because she only ever walked the clean-swept marble tiles and spotless rugs of the Towers. Alesta tugged at her own stained skirts that came to her calves, feeling like a child instead of a grown girl of seventeen— one who would not reach eighteen unless she got moving and let the alberos berate and shrive her.
Kyr had completed his transformation. As he murmured vague responses to Rina’s litany of minor scandals, he matched the other courtiers’ posture, mirrored their cultivated gestures, mimicked their dulcet inflection. He was always one of the Towers set, really, but living down the island at his mother’s villa, he had spent more time running wild with Alesta than with them.
Then King Enzo’s only son was killed by a branzono two years ago, and everyone assumed the king would name his eldest nephew his new heir. Kyr’s mother sent him regularly to study alongside his younger cousins living in the noble apartments at the Towers, and Kyr had taken it upon himself to learn everything he would need someday to be a proper king.
Alesta shifted uncomfortably beside him and Rina. A much different fate awaited her, if she didn’t watch out sharp for herself. Earning a place here at the Towers—the seat of Soladisa’s government, religion and, most importantly, university—was the surest alternative, but right now, feeling frumpish and mussed, she wished she were far away. Or invisible.
Perhaps Rina had begun Seeing like her mother, because she seemed to pick up on Alesta’s embarrassment at that very moment. “Lessie! It’s such—a pleasure to see you.” Her enthusiastic words slowed the further she got in her greeting, as if she were a mechanical doll winding down. Her courtly manners faltered as her eyes roamed over Alesta’s face and clothes.
Alesta was used to searching looks, even when she wasn’t covered in branzono blood and dirt. Not the appreciative glances some might enjoy, but arrested stares. Like she was an abomination and not a girl.
Whispers often followed, behind her back, from certain other youths after weekly chapel—her body showed gluttony and laziness, her face could scare monsters away. Always couched in tones of righteous concern for her and her immortal spirit. As if being pretty was a chore Alesta had foolishly neglected. She couldn’t even bash the whisperers with her herding staff unless she wanted the alberos piling more sins at her feet. After all, those youths were only echoing the Arbor’s stories of Hektorus blighting those who strayed too near the devil—who shirked their duty to the Arbor and its absolution—and blessing the virtuous with beauty that shone like their goodness, making them in his image.
She preferred the way most people pretended they didn’t see her at all.
Don your best sleuthing cloaks, adjust your deerstalker hats, and prepare for adventure! Today, we’re investigating the nebulous space between genres. SFF and mysteries often share common threads: dastardly villains, fateful twists, and plucky problem-solvers. When the two genres combine, readers get to enjoy all manner of speculative twists on the mystery genre with sci-fi and fantasy threads woven throughout. If you love following breadcrumbs, uncovering clues, and discovering the culprit in the epic climax, these SFF mysteries should be right up your alley!
Robert Jackson Bennett has long been a must-read author for me, starting with his Divine Cities trilogy (my all-time favorite series) and carrying on to The Founders Trilogy, which I’d love to see adapted for TV.
His latest endeavor is the Shadow of the Leviathan series, which begins with The Tainted Cup. Released in February 2024, The Tainted Cup combines Bennett’s lifelong love for mystery novels with the detailed character work and worldbuilding he is known for.
The Tainted Cup followsDinios Kol, aka Din, and his quirky-but-brilliant mentor Ana Dolabra. Din is an engraver—a magically enhanced human who can perfectly recall memories and experiences. The magic system allows citizens of the world to be altered (“grafted”) in order to drastically improve certain skills or attributes. At the behest of Ana, Din applies his engraving talents to a particularly gruesome murder case, in which a high-ranking official exploded into a grotesque tree under suspicious circumstances. Din and Ana set out to unravel what happened to the victim and hopefully catch the person (or people) responsible.
The core mystery and investigation of The Tainted Cup is a delight from beginning to end, and as revelations unfold toward the end of the novel, the reveals have a similar feel to Benjamin Blanc’s deductive monologues in the Knives Out films. But it’s the world that Bennett’s created that makes this story so special. Leviathans—massive sea beasts— constantly threaten the outer rims of the empire. During a specific season each year, Leviathans could come ashore and destroy wide swatches of the Empire.
This results in a fully realized atmosphere and setting in which the denizens of the outer reaches of the Empire are under constant danger of destruction, while the richest of them remain safe and sound, miles away from the immediate Leviathan threat. Bennett explores what impact this has on the people who live in the heart of the danger, and this detailed worldbuilding threads nicely into the central mystery of the book.
Arthur C. Clarke is one of the undisputed masters of hard science fiction, rooting his plots in semi-feasible concepts and building the speculative elements from there. In Childhood’s End, alien ships appear over many of the world’s cities, and the beings initiate communication with humanity’s leaders. The mystery doesn’t necessarily lie in the aliens’ motives. They seem genuinely invested in preserving humanity, and their actions—carried out through human liaisons—appear benevolent and well-intentioned.
The mystery, instead, comes from the aliens’ reticence to show themselves. The primary alien liaison to earth, the Overlord Karellen, only speaks to humans from behind a blackout screen, and nobody on Earth knows what Karellen looks like. Naturally, this worries humans, and it deepens the rifts between opposing factions. Some dislike Karellen and his species’ interference on earth while others wish to expedite the ongoing improvement of Earth and its inhabitants.
Karellen’s hesitance to show himself is the heart of the Childhood’s End mystery, and its resolution is one of my single favorite reveals in all of sci-fi. It also plays well with the book’s other themes. Clarke explores humanity’s future in relation to its past and crafts a singular vision for our species’ fate.
We’ve reached the middle of this list, and clearly we need some Jim Butcher in the mix, so consider this entry more of a recommendation for The Dresden Files as a whole. Wizard Harry Dresden openly practices magic in Chicago (my hometown!). He assists the police with supernatural cases and occasionally works as a private investigator for people who have nowhere else to turn.
The Dresden Files is an excellent blend of pulpy detective fiction and fantasy. The series takes place in our world, but magic exists behind the curtain, and those who dabble in it aren’t always benevolent. Dresden uses his magical talents to suss out the more nefarious of Chicago’s magical practitioners. His adventures in the series bring him to face to face with Fae Courts, vampire dens, and werewolf packs.
Storm Front is an excellent entry point, not only because it’s the first book in the series. The mystery is small and well-contained, providing a solid intro to Dresden’s world. Fans of classic thriller and mystery novels will find a lot to enjoy, and the fantasy elements add flavor and excitement to the tried-and-true formula.
Here we are with another SFF mystery I’d love to see on screen. Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe injects our world with the magic of Lipan Apache folklore. Mythical creatures abound, and the protagonist—Ellie, short for Elatsoe—has a unique ability. She can speak with the spirits of dead animals.
Humans are animals, sure, but human ghosts are remarkably dangerous, and Ellie avoids them at all costs. But when the spirit of her cousin appears to her and asks Ellie to find his killer, she finds herself mixed up in a murder case. It brings Ellie to the off-kilter town of Willowbee, Texas. Something fishy is going on in the little town, and Ellie starts to investigate with the help of Kirby (the spirit of her deceased dog) and other friends. As the mystery is revealed, we learn more about Ellie’s past, her powers, and the forces at work around her. Elatsoe is a fantastic mystery story that also embraces elements of self-discovery and a healthy dose of mysticism.
The Three-Body Problem features one of the biggest mysteries on this list, in terms of sheer scope. For some readers (myself included) it can take some effort to stick with the story until it gains momentum. But once it hits its stride, The Three-Body Problem offers layered and dense mysteries that unlock the wonders of the imagined cosmos within.
There's a reason Cixin Liu’s seminal work is so popular—popular enough to be adapted into a new Netflix series. The sweeping epic grapples with very real concepts laid over a fictional plot. It’s not so much a capital-M mystery of the sort you’d find in Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle’s work. Instead, The Three-BodyProblem’s mysteries are deeply rooted in science and driven by massive, loaded “What if?” questions: What if an alien species discovered Earth? What if they fled their dying planet to pay us a visit? What if that visit wasn’t exactly friendly in nature?
Those questions are the heart of The Three-Body Problem’s mystery, and the characters unravel the tangled clues and revelations at different rates until the big picture becomes clear. Cixin Liu and translator Ken Liu do a phenomenal job of letting the mysteries unwind while interlacing them with the key concepts necessary to make the story work. If you like hard sci-fi and don’t mind getting a crash course in physics and astronomy in service of the story, The Three-Body Problem is a perfect SFF mystery for you.
And just in case you can’t get enough SFF mysteries, check out this list of sci-fi fantasy murder mysteries from Elisa Shoenberger! And if you’re interested in expanding the search to other media, here are just a few of my favorite speculative mysteries to watch and to play:
True Detective: Night Country (limited series on MAX)
The Case Of The Golden Idol (video game for PC, Mac, and Nintendo Switch)
1899 (limited series on Netflix)
Severance (series on Apple TV)
The Return of the Obra Dinn (video game for various platforms)
Inscryption (video game for various platforms)
Of course, this list only touches on a few highlights in a vast field of possibilities—please share your own recommendations for SFF mystery books (and stories, movies, TV shows, games, etc.) in the comments below![end-mark]
Recently, Inverse had a nice chat with screenwriter Brian Helgeland, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the film Man on Fire. Helgeland has written and/or directed quite a few other movies you might have heard of, among them the Heath Ledger-starring A Knight's Tale. And as it turns out, once upon a time, there were sequel ideas for that film.
One was, er, perhaps not the most stellar idea (it involved kidnapping and a tattooed map and pirates). The other was a somewhat predictable but well-intentioned concept apparently come up with by Paul Bettany (who played Chaucer in the film) and Alan Tudyk (who played Wat). The story would have followed the teen daughter of William (Ledger's character), who wished to joust but was not allowed to, being a girl and all. (Side note: If you are going to make historically anachronistic movies, you can leave out the sexism! Just saying!) But there was someone—or rather, something—standing in the way. As Helgeland says:
I pitched it to Sony because they own the rights, and it seemed like they were interested in making it with Netflix, releasing it as a Netflix movie. My understanding is that Netflix tested this sequel idea through their algorithms, which indicated that it would not be successful. A Knight’s Tale seems to get more popular with every passing year; it’s the strangest thing.
The computer said no. We live in a very depressing timeline.
Helgeland also goes into his plans for a Game of Thrones spinoff, Ten Thousand Ships, that seems unlikely to ever happen; he was working on the story of Queen Nymeria, and created a story in which she and her people live on a floating city-state. "My work is still there if HBO wants to pick it up. I enjoyed my time developing it, and you just never know," he says. That is a lot of ships, though. [end-mark]
In 2009, Seanan McGuire published her debut novel, Rosemary and Rue, to great acclaim. This novel not only launched the enduringly popular October Daye urban fantasy series, but formed the bedrock upon which Seanan’s career would bloom. Since this auspicious beginning, Seanan has so far published 18 novels in the series, alongside novellas and shorter fiction.
Three years later, Seanan would publish Discount Armageddon, the first book in her equally-popular InCryptid series, and one which has so far reached 13 novels, plus novellas and shorter works.
As the publisher of three more of Seanan’s series (Wayward Children, Alchemical Journeys and the Up-and-Under books), we could not be more delighted to welcome October Daye and InCryptid into the Tor Publishing Group family.
Tor Executive Editor Lee Harris said:
“When I joined Tor, Seanan was right at the top of my list of authors I wanted to bring on board. In the last eight years I’ve worked with her on eighteen books and a handful of short stories, and she remains not only one of my favourite people to work with, but one of my favourite people to read. Bringing Toby Daye and InCryptid to Tor is a dream come true, because all the Seanan is just the right amount. I’ll be working with my brilliant colleague Oliver Dougherty to make sure Seanan’s books are given all the love they deserve.”
Seanan said:
“I am absolutely delighted to be continuing these dear-to-my-heart series with Lee, and with the wonderful editorial team at Tor. I know I will be in good hands, and I'm so excited for all my readers to see what's coming next. Big things ahead. Big, wonderful, terrible things....”
The first Tor book in the InCryptid, Installment Immortality, will be published in spring 2025, followed by our first October Daye book in the fall of that year.
The deal for North American rights for both series was brokered between Tor Executive Editor Lee Harris and Diana Fox of Fox Literary.
“Infection” Written by J. Michael Straczynski Directed by Richard Compton Season 1, Episode 4 Production episode 101 Original air date: February 16, 1994
It was the dawn of the third age… A reporter from Interstellar Network News (which, for some reason, is abbreviated ISN), Mary Ann Cramer, has arrived on B5 in order to interview Sinclair, an interview he is ducking. It’s the second anniversary of B5 going live, and ISN wants to interview the guy in charge. Garibaldi is stuck running interference with her.
Franklin is surprised to get a visit from his mentor, Dr. Vance Hendricks, who promises him a grand adventure like nothing he’s ever seen before, so that can’t be good. Meantime in the docking bay, a customs officer questions Hendricks’ partner, Nelson Drake, suspecting him of smuggling something. Drake eventually kills the customs officer due to the fact that he is smuggling something.
Garibaldi investigates the death of the customs officer, the cause of which seems to be a simple heart attack, though Garibaldi still thinks it suspicious.
Hendricks explains that he and Drake retrieved some artifacts from Ikarra VII. They were sponsored by Interplanetary Expeditions. What they found are thousands of years old, but in perfect shape—and are also organic, which is why Hendricks brought them to Franklin to examine. This may give them the breakthrough to create organic technology like what the Vorlons and Minbari have. Hendricks also lies and says that the items went through quarantine at their previous stop on the way to B5.
While unpacking some items, one glows and hits Drake with a massive electric discharge, throwing him across the cabin into the bulkhead. Drake does not report this to anyone, nor do Franklin or Hendricks notice his bizarre subsequent behavior.
Sinclair continues to duck Cramer. Garibaldi’s attempt to get her to talk to him results in her asking him probing questions about all the prior jobs he’s been fired from, at which point he, too, ducks her.
Franklin goes to MedLab to find it darkened and a transformed Drake inside. The latter says, “Protect!” and fires a nasty ray-beam at Franklin. Hendricks says that it appears that one of the devices they found bonds to a person, enhancing them. He promises to do more research. He also says that Drake handled all the paperwork for getting them through customs.
Drake kills two people in downbelow. The zappy thing gets more powerful with each shot, to the point that CinC can pick up the blasts on scanners. But his first confrontation with security ends with Drake blasting through a bulkhead and escaping.
It’s quickly determined that the zappy thing needs time to recharge, but that time decreases with each shot, plus it gets more powerful each time.
Hendricks and Franklin’s research reveals that the tech they found was constructed in order to create soldiers who would defend only “pure Ikarrans,” basing its programming on ideology rather than science. The problem was that there was no such thing as a “pure Ikarran,” and eventually the soldiers wiped out everyone, even the ones on their side.
Sinclair lures Drake away from populated areas, and also taunts him, saying he failed, and finally gets him to access the host’s memories, as Drake has been to Ikarra VII as it is today: a dead world. The tech figures out that it failed and discorporates in a puff of illogic.
Franklin found a device for cardiac stimulation in Drake’s things that matches two markings on the customs officer’s neck. If used on a healthy person, it would induce a heart attack. Drake is guilty of murder. Hendricks offers Franklin half the money he’ll get from IPX—which, he says, is a front for a bio-weapons developer—if he doesn’t turn him in. But Franklin called security before he confronted Hendricks. Later, two people from EarthDome show up to confiscate the bio-tech.
Finally, Sinclair sits down with Cramer and speaks his mind—including why he thinks, despite the expense and the skepticism of many back on Earth—it’s vital that humanity continue to go out into space.
Nothing’s the same anymore. Garibaldi calls Sinclair on his constant need to barge in and do all the rough missions his own self, making it clear that it’s not just because he’s the top-billed character but also because he still hasn’t figured out how to stop fighting in a war.
Ivanova is God. When Cramer tries to barge her way into CinC during a crisis, Ivanova gets rid of her by standing in front of her and very calmly saying, “Don’t—you’re too young to experience that much pain.” Cramer immediately departs.
The household god of frustration. Sinclair tells Garibaldi that he’s avoiding Cramer because the last time he gave an interview to a journalist and spoke his mind, he was transferred to a distant outpost. Garibaldi tells him that he shouldn’t fret—just speak his mind again, and worst case, he’s transferred out and Garibaldi gets his job. What’s the problem?????
Welcome aboard. Marshall Teague plays his first of three roles in the franchise, as Drake; he’ll return in the recurring role of Ta’Lon throughout seasons two to five, and again in Crusade’s “The Long Road” as Captain Daniels. Patricia Healy makes her first of two appearances as Cramer; she’ll be back in “By Any Means Necessary.”
But the big guest is our first Robert Knepper moment of the B5 Rewatch, as I had totally forgotten that the late great David McCallum played Hendricks. McCallum is, of course, best known for his iconic role of Ilya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and his long-running final role as Dr. “Ducky” Mallard for the first two decades of NCIS.
Trivial matters. This episode has the first mention of the possibly very dodgy Interplanetary Expeditions, which will be seen a bunch more again.
This was the first episode written and produced once the show went to series, though it was never intended to be the first aired.
Only four of the ten people listed in the opening credits appear in this episode. Bill Mumy and Caitlin Brown have yet to make their first appearances, despite being credited.
The echoes of all of our conversations.
“There’s one thing that every scientist on the planet agrees on: whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us—it’ll take Marilyn Monroe and Laozi and Einstein and Morobuto and Buddy Holly and Aristophanes, and all of this… all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars.”
—Sinclair’s answer to Cramer’s interview question, and also the only worthwhile part of the episode.
The name of the place is Babylon 5. “What’s the worst that could happen?” It’s never a good sign when an episode of B5 doesn’t have any of the three most interesting characters in it. Delenn, G’Kar, and Mollari are the heart and soul of this show, and that none of them appear in this episode is but one of a billion problems with it, the biggest of them being that it’s awful.
Seriously, this script would make for one of the weaker episodes of Space: 1999 or Buck Rogers in the 25th Century or the original Battlestar Galactica or Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, much less the show that promised to be the vanguard of a new age of great SF TV. B5 got some great guest stars over its run, and I thought I remembered all the good ones, but I’d totally forgotten that David McCallum was ever on this show. It’s a testament to how truly dreadful this episode is that it made me forget that McCallum was in it.
“Infection” is a tiresome collection of weak clichés, boring action, and tired tropes, from the mentor-gone-evil to the manly hero avoiding the plucky female journalist who just wants to ask him some questions to the laughable look of Drake after being transformed.
It does have one redeeming feature, but the problem is, you have suffer through the entire crappy episode to get to it. Sinclair’s answer to Cramer’s question about whether humanity should continue to go into space or stay home where it’s safe and only has humans in it is brilliant (and quoted in “The echoes of all our conversations” above), erudite, and, most of all, quite true. (I wish half the people he cited weren’t from twentieth-century Western civilization, but I also love that his list included the creators of both the Tao Te Ching and “Peggy Sue.”)
Some might say that Garibaldi’s come-to-Jesus speech to Sinclair is a redeeming feature, too, but I’m not one of them. It’s a legitimate complaint from Garibaldi, and it certainly provides justification for Sinclair being at the forefront of the action all the time. But it feels too much like Straczynski came up with a Marvel No-Prize to explain why the guy at the top of the opening credits does all the cool actiony stuff, rather than an actual bit of characterization.
We've had post-credits scenes, we've had unexpected mutant powers, we've had that bit in Multiverse of Madness with Professor X. But now we—in the sense of Disney and the MCU—are all in on the X-Men. Welcome, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds); welcome, some other, even grumpier Wolverine (Hugh Jackman); welcome, Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), who appears in this new Deadpool and Wolverine trailer and immediate smashes Wolverine into the floor. As one does, if one is, well... her.
Cassandra is an early-2000s Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely creation with a very, very troubled relationship to Charles Xavier. (If you aren't familiar with her backstory, maybe don't read up on it; the Deadpool take is sure to be entertaining. And probably upsetting.) What her arrival means for the X-Men and the MCU should be very interesting—if it doesn't all just get wiped away in some multiversal hijinks.
According to Variety, Deadpool and Wolverine "sees Deadpool arrive in the MCU after being kidnapped by the Time Variance Authority, the multiverse manager last seen in Loki, and finding himself in the same world as the Avengers."
This movie is the first time this Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) gets to play in the same universe as the Avengers and the X-Men, as Disney bought 20th Century Fox in the years since the last Deadpool movie. (See also: the giant 20th Century Fox logo toppled in the desert in this trailer.)
It's always nice to see Wolverine getting picked up in a bar, even if he's having a very bad time of it. Deadpool and Wolverine is directed by Shawn Levy, and is in theaters July 26th.[end-mark]
