Let’s assume, for the purpose of this post, that you just saw The Avengers and had just as much fun as we did. What happens now? A second Avengers film won’t be coming around for a little while (2015-ish, about the same time as hover technology) but you’d love just a little more from these action and quip-heavy characters.

It’s time to hit the bookstore. Below, we suggest three graphic novels that will give you the exact same thrill that The Avengers did. And provide some much needed context for that post-credits sequence!

Spoilers for The Avengers ahead.

[Read on. Spoilers for The Avengers ahead]

The Avengers is better than it has any right to be.

First things first, if you’re a comic book fan then you’re going to like this movie. It’s the epitome of a big, fun comic book adventure and will not be easily matched in this regard by any ensuing superhero films. The Dark Knight Rises will probably feel as epic, but certainly not as entertaining.

For those who are only familiar with these characters because of the movies, you won’t be taking home any profound messages, symbolism, or themes as they apply to society at large. But you’ll still feel like you had a full experience.

We all have Joss Whedon to thank for this. This is unmistakeably his script and his movie.

[Let’s lose our minds about it. Heavy heavy spoilers ahead.]

The forthcoming movie Avengers movie, the summer’s big kick-off superhero blockbuster, is the culmination of five superhero films released over the past four years, all of them set within the same universe. But if you’re not familiar with the comics world these characters stem from, you may not know that.

Don’t panic! The good news is that you don’t need to see the five previous films to get the full Avengers experience. But if you want to afterwards, I’ll illustrate below how The Avengers has been quietly (and rather brilliantly) building to a head since 2008.

[Five film series, one universe]

So there was this pub, right, that has been in business for over 20 years in London Southampton and calling itself The Hobbit. Then there was this massive forthcoming movie blockbuster, see, and for some reason it hired a Hollywood film firm by the name of the Saul Zaentz Company to shutter anything with the word “Hobbit” on it to such a baffling extent that we’re forced to speculate that they did a Google search for the word “Hobbit” then blindly sent threatening letters to the first ten pages worth of links. Because threatening someone’s livelihood over a movie? That’s pretty shitty.

Luckily, Stephen Fry and Ian McKellen agree and have since stepped in and offered to pay for any fees leveraged against the pub by the movie that they themselves are starring in. This is probably because they’re decent people! (Again, just speculation based on their actions!) You can read more details on the last-minute save on the BBC site.

Paul Cornell is really good at putting us in front of aliens.

The novelist, television and comics writer is launching a new ongoing series today from Vertigo titled Saucer Country, a thriller that marries the intrigue of the campaign trail with the other-worldliness of other worlds.

The story opens as New Mexico Democratic Governor Arcadia Alvarado is considering a run for president while at the same time dealing with near-lucid dreams, trauma, and odd gaps of time in her memory. Suddenly, her path becomes clear to her. Aliens are real, we are being invaded, and she must do everything she can to become president and make this known.

[I am not crazy]

The new online multiplayer game Doctor Who: Worlds in Time was created in a steampunk submarine.

For those unfamiliar, Worlds in Time is an interactive Doctor Who game that was released in preview mode this past December. Players can customize their own avatars based on races that have appeared in Doctor Who in the past (both in the old and new series) and can join the Doctor as his companion in a series of missions with one overarching threat. (You even get your own sonic screwdriver and a room of your own in the TARDIS!) The game and the settings are entirely interactive, so along the way you’ll run into other folks playing through their own missions. Because time has been broken, and it’s going to take a whole lot of you to repair it.

[A game for fans, by fans]

What day is it, again?

Groundhog Day, the 1993 Bill Murray time travel movie, is one of those films that stands the test of time politely. It’s not quite a cult film, with devoted fan bases and a lot of tie-in activities, rather it’s a film that’s more quietly respected. You saw it when it came out (most likely), you found it to be entertaining (again, most likely), it left you wondering what you’d do in the same situation, and you kind of left it at that. Groundhog Day isn’t one of those lost gems of pop culture, it’s more of a pleasant memory.

Nearly twenty years later our hunger for sophisticated and fun time travel fiction is as large as ever, and sated far more often than it was in the early 1990s. So with the uniqueness of the premise somewhat dulled, and without the glaze of nostalgia, does a film like Groundhog Day still hold up?

[This is just the first day of many]

The above video is a fan-made trailer made by Joel Furtado for a non-existent Legend of Zelda game titled “The Lost Oracle.” It’s set in the same style (and perhaps the same world) as The Wind Waker and wonderfully evokes the nostalgiac feeling of playing the very first Zelda game. The appeal is so clear that it makes me wonder just why they haven’t redone the game in Wind Waker style. Obviously, from Furtado’s animation, it would be exciting as hell.

Check out more of Furtado’s stuff at his website.

Chris Lough is the production manager of Tor.com and will often raise items completely above his head during social situations.

Doctor Who has a dual and contradictory appeal; do we love it because it’s childish or because it subverts its inherent immaturity and becomes greater than a sum of its cheesy parts? Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” certainly has a fair amount of cheese, though it’s not a children’s story and is instead a story for everybody that children can enjoy, too. To a lesser extent, C.S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is similar insofar as anyone regardless of age can probably get something out the story, whether it be spectacle or layers of literary intent.

The new Doctor Who Christmas special takes elements of Christmas, C.S Lewis, and itself, but unfortunately chooses the worst parts of each. Because the only way to really get something out of this Who Xmas special is to be a very young child.

[Recap and review below. Spoilers!]

Remember when Liam Neeson was all about releasing krakens and we, as a nation, perhaps a world, we’re right behind him? Good news! This is more of that movie!

And this time there will be monsters with lots of torsos and swords, and a pegasus, and there’s this lady now? She’s got swords, too. In fact, I’m pretty sure the entire title of this film is Clash of the Titans: Wrath of the Titans: Everyone Gets Swords. It took three people to write this movie. I checked. And despite every single thing on that screen telling me This Is A Waste Of Time, I am really excited about this movie. Because it never needed to exist. No one wanted it to exist. And yet it’s giving us a lava monster anyway.

Just watch the trailer. GOOD NIGHT.

Muppet Week has been a fun diversion for us here in the Tor.com office. (And, we hope, for you as well.) We’ve gone batty over the various Muppet movies, from old to new, looked at old science fiction television greats who have partied with the Muppets, enjoyed Farscape, Labyrinth, and The Dark Crystal, and pondered how the world might have been changed if Henson hadn’t gravitated towards puppets.

Some of these articles were just excuses to write about Muppets. (I mean, c’mon, MUPPETS.) But underneath that enthusiasm was an urge to reveal just how much Jim Henson was interested in exploring other worlds. Underneath his large forays into fantasy were a host of small details, little nudges and influences, that echo the same kind of fascination that we have with genre as readers.

[From Harry Potter to The Storyteller to Star Wars and more]

This 1999 cinematic outing by the Muppets, it’s last until tomorrow’s revival, feels like the black sheep of the Muppet movie line-up. Since Henson’s death in 1990, the Muppets had starred in two feature films and an updated version of The Muppet Show (titled Muppets Tonight), and yet they continued to lose relevancy. A part of this is that there hadn’t been a long enough gap for nostalgia to set in. Another part is that the prevailing trend in moviemaking at the time was deeply entrenched in seeing what-CGI-could-do-for-us. Independence Day, Armageddon, The Matrix, and more gave us movie spectacle at the expense of charm. At the time we were all too happy to see where that would take us.

[What a handsome family]

Last night, The Simpsons gave SFF readers and long-ago fans a reason to try and remember that The Simpsons is still on television — maybe still on Sundays, who knows — with an episode focused on young adult book mills featuring Neil Gaiman.

[Read more]

Ryan’s post on science fiction icons who have hung out with The Muppets reminded me of a video I used to torture my officemates with: this mashup of Patrick Stewart’s “B or not a B” Sesame Street segment and Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Don’t worry, it’s safe for work.)

Man, I wish that had really happened in the show.

Let me tell you a little secret that you know already but just forgot: The Great Muppet Caper is the best Muppet movie.

I could stop there and be happy that time and history will reveal this assertion as the ultimate truth — I mean, I’m not getting paid by the word count here — except that would rob you of enlightenment and rob me of something to link to when I repeat this in all caps in my OKCupid profile.

The Muppet Movie is fondly remembered, and rightfully so, but its successor The Great Muppet Caper is the superior effort. Watching it, it’s as if the movie is the result of all the good ideas Henson and company had while making their first film. The jokes are sharper and more relaxed, the songs just as peppy and memorable, and the Muppet performers far more comfortable with a big screen outing. In short, The Great Muppet Caper is The Muppets perfected.

[“Renoir! Renoir!”]

Welcome to the Wheel of Time Roundtable! In this new weekly mini-series from Tor.com, we’ll be asking a panel of Wheel of Time experts a number of questions that look at the upcoming final volume in this long-running fantasy series: A Memory of Light.

The questions will range from the specific, to the silly, to the broad, eventually encompassing the Wheel of Time’s legacy itself.

Each week a different question will be posed to our panelists, then you, the commenters, will be invited to join in. Let’s meet our panel, and read the first question, below.

[Undead Trollocs! Pudding mines! And how we would kill Rand]

Electricity lights the houses of noblemen, an Allomancer does well to keep their gun at the ready, and the railroad will take you most any place you want to go. Not bad for a fantasy world that was drowning in ash and mist and slavery just three hundred years before.

After reading The Alloy of Law, this kind of departure makes a lot of sense. Of course this would be where the Mistborn universe goes next. I’m on record here as greatly enjoying the first Mistborn novel, mostly due to how it subverts fantasy tropes while still giving the reader an exciting fantasy story. And Sanderson himself has gone on record as believing that fantasy as a genre can encompass any other genre that an author feels fit to instill within it.

The Alloy of Law, out today, is the money put into that particular mouth.

[Read more. No spoilers for The Alloy of Law]

The new series of Doctor Who and loud melodrama are best friends. Since the show began again in 2005, you can count on any season delivering at least one explosion, one moment of universal peril, and/or one tragic character twist. The new show has filled the skies with Daleks, set Gallifrey aflame, torn the Doctor from everyone he loves, killed Rory, and kissed Kylie Minogue. Doctor Who has no qualms about going straight for our panic button and pressing it hard.

And we enjoy it, otherwise we wouldn’t be watching. But lost in all the noise and ditching of Rose with Blue Suit Ten are small, lovely moments that are just as impactful; that portray just as much in only seconds. Below is a collection of our favorite, greatest, smallest moments from Doctor Who.

[Read more]

When more and more literary authors adopt science fiction tropes, are we heading to a point where genre will, stripped of its commercial importance, cease to be a useful classification?

The Center for Fiction kicked off its month-long Big Read on Monday evening with a discussion of utopia and dystopia with authors Anna North (America/Pacifica), Kathleen Ann Goonan (This Shared Dream), and Charles Yu (How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe). Moderated by DongWon Song, an editor at Orbit Books, the discussion quickly turned to the science fiction genre as it applies itself increasingly to books that would be considered literary, or mainstream.

The discussion benefited greatly from the dual perspectives of North and Yu, who are just beginning their careers from outside SFF, and Kathleen Ann Goonan, who brought a wealth of experience within SFF to the table. By the end, one had to wonder whether literary books might, in years to come, be considered a gateway to SFF.

[Read more]