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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

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News Fraggle Rock

Change is in the Air in the New Trailer for Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock

Dance your cares away! Even the ones about radishes

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Published on March 18, 2024

Fraggles in Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock

Did you know there was a new Fraggle Rock show on Apple TV+ and that this new show, titled Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock will soon have a second season?

Whether you answered “yes” or “no” to the question above, we have a trailer for Season Two that sets up some stakes for the upcoming episodes. The Fraggles, along with the Doozers and Gorgs, have to learn to adapt to a changing world, one where all the Fraggles’ radishes were wiped out by a dust storm, leading them to explore a new crop of “sweet radishes” (aka strawberries). There’s also singing and dancing, as is expected in the Jim Henson Company Fraggle Rock production.

Season Two of Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock features several guest stars, including the return of Daveed Diggs as Jamdolin, Ariana DeBose, Brett Goldstein, Catherine O’Hara, Adam Lambert, and K-pop group aespa. Who the guest stars will be voicing beyond Diggs, who is reprising a character he played in Season One, is a mystery that we can solve by watching the upcoming episodes.

All thirteen episodes of the second season of Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock will premiere on Apple TV+ on March 29, 2024. Want to catch up before then? The first season is currently streaming there, as well as the holiday special, Night of the Lights, the original 1980s Fraggle Rock series, and the specials Down at Fraggle Rock, Doozer Music, and Fraggle Songs.

Check out the trailer for Season Two below. [end-mark]

News monkey man

Monkey Man: Jordan Peele Loves Dev Patel’s Action-Adventure Movie and Wants You to See It

we yearn for a new tales of Hanuman

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Published on March 18, 2024

Dev Patel in Monkey Man

Dev Patel’s directorial debut, Monkey Man, will hit theaters in a few weeks, and, as you may have heard, we have Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us, Nope) to thank for that.

Monkey Man was reportedly scheduled for a streaming release, but Peele saw the movie and loved it so much that he had his production company, Monkeypaw, work with Universal Pictures to distribute it in theaters. In a new featurette for the film, we see Peele express his love for the movie firsthand, interspersed with some behind-the-scenes footage as well as some snippets of the movie’s action sequences.  

“Dev created a world that’s gritty and tragic, but cinematically beautiful,” Peele says in the clip, as we see Patel working behind and in front of the camera. Peele went on to add that he was especially drawn to the film because it follows Patel’s character turning from a revenger to an avenger.

Here’s the official synopsis, if you’re intrigued:

Inspired by the legend of Hanuman, an icon embodying strength and courage, Monkey Man stars Patel as Kid, an anonymous young man who ekes out a meager living in an underground fight club where, night after night, wearing a gorilla mask, he is beaten bloody by more popular fighters for cash.

After years of suppressed rage, Kid discovers a way to infiltrate the enclave of the city’s sinister elite. As his childhood trauma boils over, his mysteriously scarred hands unleash an explosive campaign of retribution to settle the score with the men who took everything from him.

Check out the featurette below to see Peele promising that you’ll lose you’ll shit if you see this movie on the big screen.

Monkey Man premieres in theaters on April 5, 2024. [end-mark]

News The Cat in the Hat

A Cat in the Hat Animated Feature Is in the Works, with Bill Hader Voicing the Titular Cat

Going from Barry to this makes sense actually

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Published on March 18, 2024

Mike Myers as The Cat in the Hat, absolutely terrifying a pair of innocent children with his antics.

There’s been an animated feature adaptation in the works centered on Dr. Suess’ The Cat in the Hat, and today we found out that it has an impressive voice cast and will grace a screen near you… in about two years.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Bill Hader (Barry, It: Chapter Two) is on board to play The Cat himself, an anthropomorphic feline who sports a red-and-white-striped top hat and brings adventurous chaos to unwitting children. Hader’s vocal talents will be joined by Quinta Brunson (Abbott Elementary), Bowen Yang (SNL), Xochitl Gomez (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), Matt Berry (What We Do in The Shadows), and Paula Pell (Girls5eva).

This, of course, is not the first time The Cat and the Cat has been adapted for the big screen. In 2003, we were subjected to a live-action adaptation, with Mike Myers playing the lead cat (pictured above). The children’s movie was, in a word, terrible. On the bright side, the bar is low for this animated adaptation to be better than the one that came twenty years before it.

The Cat in the Hat animated adaptation is written and directed by Alessandro Carloni, an animation veteran who directed Kung Fu Panda 3, and Erica Rivinoja, whose previous credits include writing the screenplay for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm(!) and 2016’s Trolls. Warner Bros. Pictures Animation is partnering with Dr. Suess Enterprises to make this movie happen, and The Cat in the Cat is reportedly the first of multiple projects the two companies will be working on together.

“We are overjoyed to partner with our friends at Dr. Seuss to take audiences of all ages on an adventure into the beloved world of The Cat in the Hat,Warner Bros. Animation president Bill Damaschke said in a statement. “With this incredible voice cast led by Bill Hader as the fun-loving, agent of chaos himself and our filmmakers Alessandro and Erica at the helm, we look forward to sharing this Seussian cinematic spectacle with audiences everywhere in 2026.”

The Cat in the Hat is scheduled to hit theaters on March 6, 2026. [end-mark]

Column

Bigfoot Around the World: Finding Bigfoot Goes Overseas

The search for the Yowie in Australia, the Orang Pendek in Sumatra, the Tari in Viet Nam, the Yeren in China, and the Yeti in Nepal…

By

Published on March 18, 2024

Still from a CGI recreation of a Bigfoot sighting, from the TV series "Finding Bigfoot"

So far in this chapter of the SFF Bestiary I’ve focused more on the humans who hunt Bigfoot that on the cryptid itself. Bigfooters are an interesting subculture, not least for the persistence of their belief in a creature for which there is no convincing scientific evidence. And yet, there are all those stories, all over the world.

The Finding Bigfoot team concentrated primarily on North America, but from Season 3 onward, once or twice each season they ventured overseas in search of other fabled primates. They searched for the Yowie in Australia, the Orang Pendek in Sumatra, the Tari in Viet Nam, the Yeren in China, the Yeti in Nepal, and somewhat anticlimactically, a combination of medieval legends and modern sightings of big hairy man-apes in the UK. The last featured two very American males in a Scottish forest at night, in kilts, in the worst infestation of midges in thirty years. Which pretty well sums up the experience of hunting the legendary Wild Man in the British Isles.

It’s striking how consistent the stories are, and how old they purport to be. Native Americans and First Nations in North America knew various forms of the Sasquatch before European colonization. The Yowie is an Aboriginal tradition. In Asia, the stories are supposedly centuries old.

The animal they describe is bipedal and covered in black or brown or reddish hair; Hollywood and graphic novels notwithstanding, the Yeti is the same color as the rest of its relatives, not white or light grey. Sasquatch appears to be the largest, but the Yowie is close, and the Yeren and the Tari and the Yeti are not much smaller. The Orang Pendek is more like what we might expect a known primate to be: about four feet tall, but massive and powerful, with huge arms.

The Finding Bigfoot team keeps noting how similar each subspecies is to the Sasquatch. There are variations, but they’re fairly minor. Bigfoot vocalizations are not that far off the hoots and howls of the Yowie or the Tari or the Yeti, or the birdlike chittering of the Yeti or the Yeren. And of course there are the very large, very wide tracks that give Bigfoot its best-known name.

All of these primates seem to gravitate toward mountains and forests. Even the Yeti or Abominable Snowman does not actually live in the snows of the Himalayas. It lives in the deep, richly forested, well-watered valleys below the peaks.

Sasquatch is an omnivore, and most of its cousins seem to be as well. The Orang Pendek may be an outlier: it raids farmsteads on the edges of the jungle, and steals the farmers’ crops, which indicates it may be vegetarian. There are stories of the Yowie stealing goats and gutting them and hanging them in trees, but it may also graze on plants. The Yeti has been seen beside rivers or ponds, hunting for frogs.

The Tari, it’s said, will grab you by the arm in daylight and hold you until dark, and then eat you; but that’s unusual in Bigfoot lore. Bigfoot in general is a peaceable creature, shy and elusive, much more likely to run away from a human than to attack. It’s so elusive in fact that no one has been able to prove its existence. There’s no concrete evidence.

With one controversial exception. The Finding Bigfoot crew travels to Pangboche Monastery in Nepal, which guards a unique treasure: an arm and part of a skull that purports to be that of a Yeti. The arm is large, long, with long, skeletal fingers, and the skull is a pointed dome with a rim of short reddish hair.

Peter Byrne, one of the first Westerners to make a career of hunting the Yeti, claims to have stolen one of the fingers and taken it back to London, where it was determined to be human. The crew doesn’t believe it, of course. The proportions are too far off. The fingers are too long. It has to be a Yeti.

The skull is definitely not human. Its shape is similar to that of the Sasquatch, tall and pointed. Matt has a theory about it. The head shape evolved, he opines, for living in rainy areas, “like a peaked roof.”

The episode glosses over a truly wild saga, naming only Yeti hunters Peter Byrne and Tom Slick, and not even mentioning a possible connection with actor Jimmy Stewart and his wife Gloria. The upshot is that the relics are most probably faked, and at least part of the hand is human. The whole thing seems to owe more to the ethos of P.T. Barnum than to credible science.

And yet, as resident skeptic and field biologist Ranae notes, it’s not entirely unlikely that an unknown primate might exist in the remoter parts of the world, which would include the Australian rain forest, the Indonesian jungle, and the valleys of the Himalayas. Her teammate Cliff Barackman points out the recent discovery in Southeast Asia of a largeish bovid, the Saola or Vu Quang ox. If an animal the size of a good-sized cow can hide in the jungle, why not a large ape?

Both Viet Nam and China have lent official credence to the existence of their countries’ respective forms of Bigfoot. Viet Nam has a national park designated as a reserve for the Tari, despite the lack of concrete evidence that the creature exists. The Chinese government has mounted expeditions to search for the Yeren, and welcomed the team with great ceremony when they arrived in Shennongjia in the mountains of central China. It’s a sharp contrast with the skepticism they met elsewhere.

I’m indebted to the Finding Bigfoot team for compiling all these stories and traveling to the places where they’re told. It’s a great summary of the lore, and a solid overview of the big-hairy-primate variety of cryptid. Wherever the story comes from, whatever it’s based on, it goes way, way back. Who knows; maybe it’s a memory of a time when more than one species of hominid lived in the world.[end-mark]

News Little Shop of Halloween Horrors

Little Shop of Horrors To Get a “Reimagining” Titled Little Shop of Halloween Horrors

Will Audrey II feed again?

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Published on March 15, 2024

Seymour feeds Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors

Little Shop of Horrors is getting another reboot, and this one has some heavy horror hitters behind it.

According to Deadline, Gremlins and The Howling director Joe Dante, Little Shop of Horrors writer and prolific producer Roger Corman, and producer Brad Krevoy are reimagining the cult horror classic in a film called Little Shop of Halloween Horrors. The hope, according to the trade, is that it will spawn a whole new franchise. It will see Dante directing, Cormon and Kevoy co-producing, and writer Charles S. Haas (Gremlins 2: The New Batch) penning the script.

1960’s Little Shop of Horrors centers on a florist named Seymour (Jonathan Haze) who uncovers a plant with a penchant for consuming human flesh. The movie, which also features a cameo from a young Jack Nicholson, became a cult classic, earning it a musical stage adaptation in 1982 that was then adapted for film in a 1986 feature directed by Frank Oz and starring Rick Moranis.

This latest iteration appears to be a different project than the one announced in 2020 with Greg Berlanti at the helm (which also held rumors that Chris Evans would star). That project, if it is still in the works, appears to be a reboot of the 1986 flick, which was an adaptation of the musical, not the original 1960 film. (Are you still with me? I hope so.)

This project is still in its early days, so no news yet on casting or release date, much less how Little Shop of Halloween Horrors will reimagine its source material.  [end-mark]

News The Greatest Hits

Death! Romance! Time Travel! The Greatest Hits Trailer Has It All, Whether You Want It or Not

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Published on March 15, 2024

Lucy Boynton and David Corenswet in The Greatest Hits

“If something happened to you, and I could stop it, but it would mean we would never meet, would you want me to?”

That’s a question that Lucy Boynton’s character, Harriett, asks the new Superman (aka actor David Corenswet, aka a character named Max in this movie) in the trailer for The Greatest Hits. The question isn’t rhetorical: Harriett’s life is a mess two years after Max died in a car crash. Somehow, however, listening to certain records literally transports her back in time.

(Just records, mind you. There’s no skipping along the space-time continuum while jamming to your favorite playlist on Spotify. Who knew time travel was such a hipster snob?)

In her time jumps, Max is still alive, and she is working to try to change the past and keep him on this mortal plane. Harriett, however, meets someone new in the present (After Yang and The Umbrella Academy’s Justin H. Min), and can’t help but feel like she’s cheating on her dead boyfriend who she still visits in the past when she finds the right record. Time travel angst ensues.

The Greatest Hits comes from writer-director Ned Benson, whose previous credits include developing the story for Black Widow. The movie comes out in select theaters on April 5, 2024 and begins streaming on Hulu on April 12.

Check out the trailer below. [end-mark]

News Among Us

Series Adaptation of Among Us Snags Elijah Wood and Other Nerd-Known Names

By

Published on March 15, 2024

Among Us character from game

Among Us, the popular mobile video game (and the bane of Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion), has had an animated series adaptation in the works at CBS Studios. That project appears to have been steadily moving forward, as Variety reported today that four well-known actors have signed up to lend their vocal talents to the production.

According to the trade, Elijah Wood (Yellowjackets, Lord of the Rings), Yvette Nicole Brown (Community, Inside Out 2), Randall Park (WandaVision, Blue Eye Samurai), and Ashley Johnson (The Last of Us, Critical Role) will star in the series, and shared their character descriptions as well.

Before we get to those, here’s the logline of the show, which might be helpful to those who haven’t played the game (though if you’ve played Mafia or Werewolf before, you already know the premise):

Members of your crew have been replaced by an alien shapeshifter intent on causing confusion, sabotaging the ship, and killing everyone. Root out the “Impostor” or fall victim to its murderous designs.

Here are the descriptions of the actors’ characters, per Variety:

Randall Park will voice ‘Red’ – Captain of The Skeld
People-pleaser, blowhard
Task: leadership, confidence
Fun Fact: failed upwards

Ashley Johnson will voice ‘Purple’ – Chief of Security
Safety, suspicion, sarcasm
Task: wet blanket
Fun Fact: trust issues

Yvette Nicole Brown will voice ‘Orange’ – HR
Spineless corporate shill
Task: eliminate redundancy, redundantly
Fun Fact: fires you over email

Elijah Wood will voice ‘Green’ – Unpaid Intern
Happy to be there
Task: whatever they’re told
Fun Fact: gets paid in pizza

There’s no news yet on when the series will make its way to a television screen near you (and we also currently don’t know what network/streamer the show will host the crew). [end-mark]

Movies & TV The American Society of Magical Negroes

The American Society of Magical Negroes Fails Its Satirical Premise

An ungainly romance and a failure to commit to its concept makes this film an unfortunate dud.

By

Published on March 18, 2024

Image: Focus Features / Universal Pictures

Scene from The American Society of Magical Negroes, featuring Justice Smith and David Alan Grier

Image: Focus Features / Universal Pictures

The best thing I can say about The American Society of Magical Negroes is that it has an intriguing premise. A satire about the Magical Negro trope with a bit of magic and romance thrown in sounded fun. Then came the trailer. The function of a trailer is to get butts in seats, but all this one did was make me want to run away. If I hadn’t already agreed to review it, I would’ve skipped it. Hopefully you will make better choices than I did.

Aren (Justice Smith) is afraid of upsetting white people. He’s passive and apologetic with enough self-loathing that he should probably see a therapist. That makes him a prime candidate for The American Society of Magical Negroes, a historic, secret group of Black Americans who have dedicated their lives to making white people feel better. (A group founded by enslaved Africans at Monticello, in case you needed a reason to scream.) An angry white person is a risk to Black lives, so, the thinking goes, let’s make sure white people are always comfortable. “We’re showing the client the parts of ourselves that make them feel good, and nothing more.” The Magical Negro is a trope where a Black person, often a man, exists solely to offer support and comfort, often of a mystical nature, to a white person. It’s on the same spectrum as the Sassy/Token Black Friend and the Mammy. The Magical Negro is a counter to the post-Reconstruction era trope of the Black Buck, an aggressive, violent, large Black man usually found threatening the virtue of innocent white women (see Birth of a Nation, or, better yet, don’t waste your time) and the Tragic Mulatto (or quadroon or octoroon) where a Black woman with a white father cannot fit into either Black or white society and dies as a result.

Aren is brought into the fold by Roger (David Alan Grier), an old hand at the white fragility game. Aren thrives in his new role. His first client, Jason (Drew Tarver), is a mediocre white man careening through his career at a Facebook-esque tech company with unearned confidence. As the story progresses, Jason’s entitlement shifts from annoying to suffocating, especially as both men pursue Lizzie (An-Li Bogan), their biracial white and Asian coworker. Eventually, Aren is forced to choose between his job and his love life. All this culminates in a confrontation hampered by confounding editing choices and a speech that undermines and misunderstands everything that came before.

The only things we know about Aren’s background is that he has a white mother and that he went to the Rhode Island School of Design (a school that as far as I can tell has few Black students and a lot of white ones). He’s financially well off enough to afford a spacious studio apartment in downtown Los Angeles despite being a failed yarn artist. Aren is a blank space where a person should be. Every other character is just as poorly developed. It’s hard to care about any of these people if we know hardly anything about them. What does Lizzie like about Aren? What does he like about her? Writer and director Kobi Libii doesn’t seem to care. Smith and Bogan have chemistry, but it has nowhere to go in the script. Even Los Angeles barely exists as a place. They shot multiple scenes on location, but they might as well have been on a sound stage for all the impact the city had on the characters. The magic makes no sense and feels more like the script had the note “INSERT SOMETHING ABOUT MAGIC HERE” instead of actual worldbuilding.

Proximity to whiteness is a real problem with this movie. I spent the entire hour and forty-four minutes alternately cringing and desperately wanting Aren to speak to another Black person outside the Society. Any Black person. Literally any. Los Angeles is only 8.6% Black (and 48% Latinx) but Aren exclusively spends time in spaces predominately white spaces. Truly a feat in a region as racially diverse as Southern California. As someone who has spent most of my life living and working in predominately white spaces, I’m well acquainted with having to balance my sanity with white fragility. But I also know the first thing you do when you get a job like that is find the other BIPOC and form a community. You need someone to talk to when white people and Pick Mes get out of hand. There are two Black people at his job, and Aren never even acknowledges them. The movie isn’t invested enough in its premise to bother exploring it that deeply.

The movie’s worst crime, however, is its reliance on individual solutions to systemic problems. Bear with me here because we have to go back to Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Washington and Du Bois are often seen as two sides of the same coin: very basically, assimilation and economic independence on the Washington side, education and civil rights on the other. Both wanted the same thing, equality, but one believed we could earn it by being productive members of society and following the rules set forth by whiteness while the other believed the Talented Tenth was the key to freedom.

The movie intentionally signals these outdated approaches to civil rights. The clothing and accouterments of the Society are all late 19th and early 20th century, when both men were active. Society members all seem to believe they can respectability politics their way into safety. They believe they are saving the world and their own lives by making white people happy. They believe that if Black folks can manage enough white feelings, Black people will be safe. How you hold onto that in the face of Jim Crow and the pushback against the Civil Rights Movement and BLM is beyond me, and the film never brings it up. Nor does it bring up the fact that the Society was founded during the height of the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan (here comes Birth of a Nation again). During this era, a lot of white people found happiness in violence against Black folks. They held picnics at lynchings, posed for photos with their children smiling ear to ear with a body hanging in the middle, and sold off pieces of their victims as souveniers. Keeping white folks happy didn’t keep Black folks alive back then and doesn’t now because the problem isn’t individual white people but the entire damn system.

That disconnect is ripe for exploration. However, that requires the script to be willing to dive head first into satire, and it either can’t or won’t. It is an unsuccessful satire that veers too often into sincerity. It pulls its punches and seems to fundamentally misunderstand the trope it’s trying to deconstruct and what good critique looks like. It wants to be insightful without having any real insight into the Black experience. There are kernels of truth here and there, but every time it comes close to addressing one it instead sails right past. Sometimes it tries to be an intracommunity conversation about identity and navigating whiteness, but it wanders away from that conversation every time Lizzie shows up.

Ultimately, it’s better than the trailer let on to be, but that’s a low bar to cross. It is neither a good satire nor a good romcom. It has nothing to say and nothing to show.[end-mark]

News Snowpiercer

The Previously Scrapped Fourth Season of Snowpiercer Will Take to the Rails After All

The former TNT series moves to AMC

By

Published on March 15, 2024

Jennifer Connelly in Snowpiercer

More than a year after TNT decided not to air the completed fourth season of Snowpiercer, the post-apocalyptic train drama has found a new home. In early 2025, AMC and AMC+ will air the fourth and final season of the series.

Snowpiercer was always kind of an odd one: a series adaptation based on Bong Joon-ho’s movie adaptation of the French graphic novel by by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette. It took years to move from development to pilot to series order—but its 2020 premiere was an instant hit, and presumably just not because in 2020 we were all extremely sympathetic to the idea of a story about being stuck in a very limited space while the world went to hell even faster than expected.

The series was created by Graeme Manson (Orphan Black) and Josh Friedman (The Sarah Connor Chronicles); the fourth season has Paul Zbyszewski (Helstrom, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) as showrunner. It stars Daveed Diggs, Jennifer Connelly, Mickey Sumner, Iddo Goldberg, Alison Wright,  and Sean Bean. Clark Gregg and Michael Aronov joined the cast for the fourth season.

Later this year, AMC will add the show’s first three seasons to its streaming lineup, in anticipation of season four’s 2025 arrival. [end-mark]

News Doctor Who

Ncuti Gatwa’s First Season of Doctor Who Gets a May Premiere Date

Join the best Ken on a cosmic joyride

By

Published on March 15, 2024

Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson in Doctor Who

The Doctor may be able to watch his television shows whenever he likes—the benefits of having a time-traveling police box—but the rest of us are subject to the whims of linear time (and massive corporations). Disney has just announced the premiere date for the extremely anticipated new season of Doctor Who—the first season with Russell T. Davies back at the helm, and Ncuti Gatwa starring as the Fifteenth Doctor.

In the US and most of the world, the Doctor arrives on May 10th at 7 pm EDT, on Disney+. Somewhat confusingly, a press release says “audiences will return to ‘The Church on Ruby Road,’ which premiered last December, and journey through two all-new episodes.” (“The Church on Ruby Road” is already on Disney+, so I’m unclear why we will “return” to it then.) In the UK, the season begins on BBC iPlayer at 12 am GMT on Saturday, May 11, and appears on BBC One “later that day.”

A very brief summary of the coming season says:

This season of Doctor Who follows the Doctor and Ruby Sunday through infinite adventures across time and space in the TARDIS. From the Regency era in England to war-torn futures, the duo champion the forces of good while encountering incredible friends and dangerous foes.

This season stars Gatwa as the Doctor and Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday; Gibson will spend only a season on the TARDIS, as Andor’s Varada Sethu will step in as companion for Gatwa’s second go-round. This season also has quite the list of guest stars, including Aneurin Barnard, Anita Dobson, Yasmin Finney, Michelle Greenidge, Jonathan Groff, Bonnie Langford, Genesis Lynea, Jemma Redgrave, Lenny Rush, Indira Varma and Angela Wynter.

The trailer for the upcoming season will arrive next Friday, March 22nd. [end-mark]

Movies & TV Babylon 5

Introducing the Babylon 5 Rewatch

Welcome to a new weekly rewatch of J. Michael Straczynski’s groundbreaking science fiction series!

By

Published on March 18, 2024

Babylon 5 Rewatch

Three decades ago, in the wake of the success of Star Trek: The Next Generation in first-run syndication, there was a plethora of shows that were released in that form—not beholden to a particular network, but sold to individual markets separately. Into that boom stepped Warner Bros., who formed a sort-of syndicated network: the Prime Time Entertainment Network, which would syndicate a series of shows to various markets: Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Pointman, Time Trax, a few miniseries, documentaries, and TV movies, and a science fiction show from the mind of J. Michael Straczynski: Babylon 5.

Straczynski had an ambitious plan: to do a science fiction show that would succeed on a reasonable budget and also that would tell a complete story—a novel in television form, as it were. While such serialized storytelling is de rigeur now, it was very rare on television in the 1990s, seen mostly in places like soap operas, as well as the occasional drama like Hill Street Blues.

B5 was planned as a five-year arc. Straczynski simplified budget concerns in two ways. One was to have the action all in the same location rather than hopping from planet to planet, as most screen science fiction shows did.

Another was to do the effects entirely via a process that is almost universal in the 2020s but which was virtually unheard of in the 1990s: Computer Generated Images. B5 was a pioneer in CGI, using the Video Toaster for the Amiga to create the visual effects rather than models and miniatures. This meant that episodes of B5 could be produced for less than half the budget of an episode of TNG.

B5 debuted in 1993 with a television movie, The Gathering. It had the misfortune to air the same week as the World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993, which put the antenna atop the WTC out of commission, keeping the movie from being broadcast in certain parts of the New York metropolitan area. Despite this ratings hit, the movie did well enough for Warner Bros. to order a series, which debuted exactly thirty years ago on PTEN.

Straczynski’s five-year plan hit a few roadblocks, including losing his main protagonist. Series lead Michael O’Hare, who played the Babylon 5 station’s commanding officer Jeffrey Sinclair, was suffering from severe mental illness, and departed the show after the first season to seek treatment. (At O’Hare’s request, Straczynski kept the real reason for O’Hare’s departure secret until the actor’s death in 2012.)

Other real-world issues with various actors caused rewrites and rejiggers of the plotline, but perhaps the biggest was PTEN’s collapse in 1997, with B5 still in its fourth season. Straczynski wound up cramming a lot of the planned storyline for seasons four and five into season four—only to then have the show rescued by TNT (also at this stage owned by Warner Bros.’ parent company, Time Warner), which not only aired the fifth season, but also commissioned several TV movies and a spinoff series. Alas, the spinoff, Crusade, only lasted one season. Straczynski created another pilot movie, Legend of the Rangers, for what was then called the Sci-Fi Channel, but it was not picked up for a series.

In addition to being a CGI pioneer, Straczynski’s B5 was also an early forerunner of viral Internet marketing, using CompuServe, Usenet, and especially the GEnie bulletin board to create buzz for the show. In tribute to the support of the show prior to its airing on GEnie, Babylon 5 station’s coordinates were Grid Epsilon 470/18/22. Grid Epsilon was a reference to GE, the company that ran GEnie, while B5’s bulletin board was on page 470 (one of the three Science Fiction Roundtables, specifically the one dedicated to screen productions), category 18, topic 22. (Your humble rewatcher was a regular presence on GEnie in those days, under the username KEITH.D.)

In September 2021, Straczynski announced that he was rebooting B5. That’s still in development at the moment, delayed at least in part by the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023. Also in 2023, Warner Bros. released an animated film, The Road Home.

Partly in honor of this reboot, partly in honor of the TV series’ thirtieth anniversary, and partly because I’ve been wanting to rewatch the show for the first time since its initial airing, next Monday will kick off The Babylon 5 Rewatch here on Reactor. We’ll be covering everything, starting with The Gathering, continuing to the five seasons of the TV series, the one season of Crusade, and each of the various movies, from In the Beginning all the way to The Road Home. I might cover some ancillary material, too…

Like my rewatches of the first five Star Trek shows, of the 1966 Batman, and of the Stargate franchise, each entry will be broken down into categories. A few will be familiar, though most will be new.

It was the dawn of the third age… A summary of the plot.

Nothing’s the same anymore. Jeffrey Sinclair’s role in the story.

Get the hell out of our galaxy! John Sheridan’s role in the story.

I’m not subtle, I’m not pretty. Matthew Gideon’s role in the story.

Ivanova is God. Susan Ivanova’s role in the story.

Never work with your ex. Elizabeth Lochley’s role in the story.

The household god of frustration. Michael Garibaldi’s role in the story.

If you value your lives, be somewhere else. In general, the role of the Minbari in the story, as well as the specific roles of Delenn, Lennier, and the Grey Council.

In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… In general, the role of the Centauri Republic in the story, as well as the specific roles of Londo Mollari and Vir Cotto.

Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. In general, the role of the Narn Regime in the story, as well as the specific roles of G’Kar and Na’Toth.

We live for the one, we die for the one. In general, the role of the Rangers in the story, as well as the specific role of Marcus Cole.

The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. In general, the role of telepathy, telepaths, and Psi-Corps in the story, as well as the specific roles of Lyta Alexander, Talia Winters, John Matheson, and Alfred Bester.

Never contradict a technomage when he’s saving your life—again. In general, the role of technomages in the story, as well as the specific role of Galen.

The Shadowy Vorlons. The role played by one or both of the Shadows and the Vorlons, the two ancient foes whose conflict makes up the tapestry of much of the series, in the story, particularly the uses of Kosh and Morden.

Looking ahead. B5 made copious use of foreshadowing by way of flash-forwards and prophecies, and this category will show when they’re used, and also when they later come to fruition (often not in the way you expect).

No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. A chronicle of the romantic and/or sexual exploits seen in the story.

Welcome aboard. The guest stars in the story.

Trivial matters. Various bits of trivia, ephemera, connections, revelations, etc. seen in the story.

The echoes of all of our conversations. A particularly good quote from the story.

The name of the place is Babylon 5. A review of the story.

Note that this rewatch will not have a 1-10 rating of each story. My least favorite part of prior rewatches has been having that silly rating system, which removes all nuance from the words that appear above it. I inherited it from the first Star Trek Re-Watch that appeared on this site back from 2009-2011, so I reluctantly continued it through all the Trek rewatches. I managed to not have to use it for the Great Superhero Movie Rewatch or the Stargate Rewatch, and I’m just as happy to avoid it here.

It’s possible I will think of other categories to add. I tried to anticipate all the various changes we’ll see throughout the various series, but I may have missed something that is worth having its own category. And I’m aware that not every character gets their own category, and in response I’ll just say that Jim Kirk, Jean-Luc Picard, William Riker, Miles O’Brien, Julian Bashir, and Chakotay are among the major characters in the Trek rewatches that didn’t get their own categories. It happens.

We’ll be back next week with The Gathering![end-mark]

Featured Essays Ambrose Bierce

The Weirdness of Ambrose Bierce: From “Owl Creek Bridge” to Horror and Satire

Bierce left an indelible mark on American literature, even if he’s mainly remembered for just one famous story…

By

Published on March 18, 2024

Scene from a short film adaptation of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge": a man and woman stand in mid-embrace.

Ernest Hemingway did it. Jasper Fforde did it. So did Philip K. Dick, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov. Ditto Black Mirror, Boardwalk Empire, The Twilight Zone, Titanic, and Jacob’s Ladder. Lost kind of did it, as did Newhart, the second of Bob’s shows. There is a Star Wars story (“The Longest Fall”) that is exactly it, though the time and place are a little different. The Irish writer Lord Dunsany was one of the first to do it, but not the first, missing that honor by about twenty years. And with everything else he puts up with, Batman has faced this, too. Twice. 

I am speaking of the Dying Dream trope. It’s where a tale is revealed in the end to be the dream or hallucination of the main character, especially as he or she is about to die. I’m sure that, if you think about it, you can come up with lots more examples of this device. What, as far as we know, was the first instance? The ur-example? The foundational text?

The 1890 story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” by Ambrose Bierce.

Born in an Ohio log cabin in 1842, Bierce (rhymes with “fierce,” appropriately enough) was one of thirteen children. His siblings were named Abigail, Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius, Augustus, Andrew—their parents were those parents. He attended the Kentucky Military Institute until it burned down, after which he enlisted in the Union Army’s 9th Indiana Infantry. He fought in a number of battles, eventually becoming a first lieutenant. On June 23, 1864, at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in northern Georgia, he was shot in the head. The bullet fractured Bierce’s temporal lobe and lodged in his skull, behind his left ear, giving him headaches and, if you’re the nurture-over-nature sort, accounting for the cynicism and irascibility he displayed in his best journalism as well as that masterpiece The Devil’s Dictionary. 

What finally killed Ambrose Bierce, “one of American literature’s great stubborn bastards”? No one knows. In 1913, at the age of 71, he went to Mexico to get involved in the Mexican Revolution, joining Pancho Villa’s forces as a sort of journalistic attaché. On December 26, 1913, he concluded a letter to a friend, Blanche Partington, with the words, “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.” He was never heard from again. There are many notions about his disappearance, some plausible (he died in an accident or was killed by Mexican forces), some outré (he died by suicide or escaped under an assumed identity; one source mentions “the possibility of alien abduction”). 

Whatever happened to “Bitter Bierce,” as he was often called, he left behind a celebrated body of work. I’ve already mentioned The Devil’s Dictionary, a collection of the satirical definitions that he had been sprinkling into his essays, columns, and letters for decades. Humor was not alien to the dictionary world. Both Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster snuck in a few japes: one of Johnson’s most famous was “Oats, noun:A Grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” Bierce, though, played chess to Johnson’s checkers, as in this entry: “DOG, n. A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world’s worship. This Divine Being in some of his smaller and silkier incarnations takes, in the affection of Woman, the place to which there is no human male aspirant. The Dog is a survival—an anachronism. He toils not, neither does he spin, yet Solomon in all his glory never lay upon a door-mat all day long, sun-soaked and fly-fed and fat, while his master worked for the means wherewith to purchase the idle wag of the Solomonic tail, seasoned with a look of tolerant recognition.” A Renaissance man, Bierce wrote poetry, journalism, memoir, fables, fiction, and lots and lots of letters. Much of his fiction, like “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” drew on his background as a Civil War soldier. Others showcased his prodigious imagination.

Like his horror stories. 

Washington Post critic Michael Dirda called Bierce the most important American writer of horror fiction between Poe and Lovecraft. Lovecraft himself approved of Bierce’s “grim and savage short stories,” arguing that some of them “stand out as permanent mountain-peaks of American weird writing.” Pretty high praise!  Moreover, Bierce has specific Lovecraft connections. His story “Haïta the Shepherd” (1891) includes an entity called Hastur, described as “the god of shepherds.” Robert W. Chambers used the name in several ways in his story collection The King in Yellow, which Lovecraft admired. He admired it so much that he mentioned Hastur in his own story “The Whisperer in Darkness.” Hastur also appears in August Derleth’s story “The Gable Window,” where he is described as “Lord of the Interstellar Spaces.” (Hastur has appeared in many other places, too. Fans of Good Omens will recognize him as a Duke of Hell who tries to kill Crowley and gets trapped in the latter’s answering machine, among other indignities.) The city of Carcosa, another Bierce creation, also made its way into The King in Yellow and clearly inspired Lovecraft: how many of his characters trudge through ancient, haunted municipalities? 

One of Bierce’s standout stories is “Chickamauga” (1889), about a six-year-old boy who gets lost in the woods near his plantation home. As he tries to find his way back, he encounters hundreds of zombie-like soldiers crawling on the ground, with “singularly white” faces that are “streaked and gouted with red.” The boy tries to play with the men, holding aloft his toy sword and pretending to lead them. They move through the trees toward a red glow that turns out to be a house on fire. His house. Worse, lying on the ground is a woman, presumably his mother. Her clothes are ripped; blood clots her hair. “The greater part of the forehead,” Bierce writes, “was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.” 

Bierce had been in the real Battle of Chickamauga, which, with nearly 35,000 casualties, was second only to Gettysburg for carnage. This endowed the story with a vividness that would lead to Bierce being called “one of the greatest masters in depicting the horrors of war.” A more overtly supernatural story is “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” which, according to H.P. Lovecraft, the writer Frederic Taber Cooper thought was “the most fiendishly ghastly tale in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race.” Frayser is a peculiar Californian who is wandering the woods and comes face-to-face with the “blank, dead eyes of his own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave.” Through flashback, we learn that Frayser and his mother had an unusually close (and possibly incestuous) relationship back in his Tennessee hometown until his decision to leave for California. The day after he meets his mother’s reanimated corpse, a detective and a deputy sheriff find Frayser’s body and realize he is a man they have been looking for—a man accused of killing his own mother. 

The Damned Thing” (1893) is a hybrid: it reads a bit like Lovecraft meets Zane Grey (though of course it was published before either of those authors had established their own writing careers). It begins in Hugh Morgan’s cabin, where an inquest is about to be held into his strange, violent death. William Harker, who was with Morgan when he died, describes a hunting trip into the California wilderness where the pair encounters an unseen creature that Morgan calls “that Damned Thing.” The creature, which is invisible, attacks Morgan and shreds his body. The jury, thinking Harker is insane, rules that a mountain lion killed Morgan, but Harker knows the truth. The story concludes with a passage from Morgan’s diary, in which he plans to invite Harker to help him kill the creature. Morgan speculates that, as there are sounds that human ears cannot hear, so must there be colors that human eyes cannot see. “And, God help me!” Morgan writes, “the Damned Thing is of such a color!” 

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is by far Bierce’s most famous story. It’s been adapted into several short films, one of which was modified and aired on The Twilight Zone. At least two music videos have been based on the story, as has an episode American Dad! It has also been the subject of a one-act opera, a radio drama starring Vincent Price, and an issue of Eerie. The story isn’t horror per se, but I think it meets Lovecraft’s definition of “weird fiction”: “A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”

The story centers on Peyton Farquhar, a plantation owner who is about to be hanged by the Union army from an Alabama railroad bridge. His offense? Trying to burn down the bridge. He had learned it was vulnerable from a Union scout disguised as a Confederate soldier. The order is given, and Farquhar, his neck in a noose, is pushed to his death—except the rope breaks, plunging him into the creek. Dodging bullets from above, Farquhar swims downstream, climbs out of the creek, and disappears into the woods. He walks all day, plagued by strange noises and visions, and finally arrives at his house, where his wife rushes out to meet him. Suddenly, he feels a blow on his neck and hears a sound “like the shock of a cannon.” Then comes the story’s final line: “Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge.”

The narrative that surges through Farquhar’s mind during his final seconds, his Dying Dream, is an early example of stream of consciousness, a term popularized by William James in The Principles of Psychology: “consciousness, then, does not appear to itself as chopped up in bits … it is nothing joined; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let’s call it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.” When did James publish this observation? 1890—the same year as “Owl Creek.” It became one of the defining ideas of modernism; today, the technique remains omnipresent in fiction, songs, film—everything. 

You can see this focus on interiority at the sentence level. Bierce was a writer of his time, often using sesquipedalian words and long, winding sentences. This story, however, largely eschews that rococo style. The critic David Mason writes, “There is not a wasted detail here, including the opening description of the hanging rope: ‘It was attached to a stout cross-timber above his head and the slack fell to the level of his knees.’” In part III, Bierce seems to relapse, crafting lines such as, “Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fiber of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity.” Why the switch? To show the reader Farquhar’s mind at work. To immerse us in the loss of lucidity and flights of fancy that come with death—his death, anyway, for Farquhar is the center of his own universe (as most of us are). And so in this moment, Bierce employs the heightened language and dramatic sensibilities of a man who sees himself as worthy of distinction and a greater destiny (“No service was too humble for him to perform in the aid of the South, no adventure too perilous…,” etc.).

Details are, of course, a large part of what make mediocre writing better and good writing great. Bierce opens the story by informing us that “[a] sentinel at each end of the bridge stood with his rifle in the position known as ‘support,’ that is to say, vertical in front of the left shoulder, the hammer resting on the forearm thrown straight across the chest—a formal and unnatural position, enforcing an erect carriage of the body.” This sort of military jargon enhances the mise en scène. A few lines later, he offers a similarly definitive description of “parade rest.” 

Later, in part III, we get dreamlike passages such as “he saw the very insects upon [the leaves]: the locusts, the brilliant bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon flies’ wings, the strokes of the water spiders’ legs, like oars which had lifted their boat—all these made audible music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the rush of its body parting the water.” These lines recall the nature imagery of another Civil War chronicler, Walt Whitman, who, like Bierce, was both poet and journalist. One of Whitman’s best poems observes how “a noiseless patient spider” sends forth “filament, filament, filament, out of itself” in the same way that the poet’s own soul flings out bits of itself “Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, / Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere.” Bierce’s images, however, are not uplifting; they are death throes, mocking Farquhar as he, too, unspools on his fatal descent. 

Yet there is quite a lot Bierce leaves out. We don’t know, for instance, the names of the characters. Or when the story takes place. Or really any location beyond “Alabama.” Moreover, we are missing one of the most important details: exactly what Farquhar did to deserve hanging. The Federal scout says that the driftwood collected around the bridge “is now dry and would burn like tinder,” but we are not told that Farquhar actually tried to ignite it. For that matter, why did the Army set such a trap for Farquhar? Surely there were thousands of other plantation owners who might offer resistance. What made him worthy of entrapment and execution? 

Neglecting to answer such questions while focusing instead on imagery is a very poetic thing to do. A very modernist thing to do. Bierce is often compared to Lovecraft (for horror) and Stephen Crane (for Civil War writing, a comparison he didn’t relish), but maybe those aren’t his most direct analogues. Modernist writing—Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, The Awakening—emphasizes character over plot, which fits here: how much plot is there, really, in “Owl Creek”? Some critics might call the story a character study, but other than being a Southern sympathizer who longs for “the opportunity for distinction,” what do we learn about Peyton Farquhar? Not much. “Owl Creek,” for the most part, offers us complete immersion in a single moment of existence. Maybe “short story” is the wrong genre; maybe it’s a prose poem. 

Whatever it is, Ambrose Bierce deserves to be revered alongside Whitman, Crane, Herman Melville, and his other contemporaries. Perhaps if he had written some novels instead of satire and short stories, his work would be read and discussed more often in our current time—and yet, his influence cannot be denied. There is no evidence he and Lovecraft corresponded, but if they had, I bet he would have been welcomed into the latter’s circle. Would he have wanted to join? Good question. Always a prickly iconoclast, Bierce broke many molds. He did his own thing, up to and including his life-imitating-art disappearance… so why not give the man himself the final word on existence, and what it all means?

LIFE, n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed. The question, “Is life worth living?” has been much discussed; particularly by those who think it is not, many of whom have written at great length in support of their view and by careful observance of the laws of health enjoyed for long terms of years the honors of successful controversy.

What are your thoughts on Bierce’s fiction? Have you read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” or are you more familiar with the many adaptations and other works that have been inspired by the story? If you have a favorite example of the “Dying Dream” trope or similar twists, sound off in the comments.[end-mark]

News Nebula Awards

Here Are the Finalists for the 2023 Nebula Awards

Congratulations to the writers!

By

Published on March 15, 2024

Nebula Awards logo

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has announced the finalists for the 59th Nebula Awards, which recognize excellent works of science fiction and fantasy published in 2023.

The awards will be presented on June 8th at the 2024 Nebula Conference in Pasadena, California. The winners are determined by the members of SFWA.

Congratulations to all the finalists!

Nebula Award for Novel

  • The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom)
  • The Water Outlaws, S.L. Huang (Tordotcom; Solaris UK)
  • Translation State, Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
  • The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz (Tor; Orbit UK)
  • Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, Wole Talabi (DAW, Gollancz)
  • Witch King, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)

Nebula Award for Novella

  • The Crane Husband,  Kelly Barnhill (Tordotcom)
  • “Linghun,”  Ai Jiang (Linghun)
  • Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher (Tor Books; Titan UK)
  • Untethered Sky,  Fonda Lee (Tordotcom)
  • The Mimicking of Known Successes,  Malka Older (Tordotcom)
  • Mammoths at the Gates,  Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)

Nebula Award for Novelette

  • “A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair,” Renan Bernardo (Samovar 2/23)
  • I Am AI, Ai Jiang (Shortwave)
  • “The Year Without Sunshine,” Naomi Kritzer (Uncanny 11-12/23) 
  • “Imagine: Purple-Haired Girl Shooting Down The Moon,”  Angela Liu (Clarkesworld 6/23)
  • “Saturday’s Song,” Wole Talabi (Lightspeed 5/23)
  • “Six Versions of My Brother Found Under the Bridge,” Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny 9-10/23)

Nebula Award for Short Story

  • “Once Upon a Time at The Oakmont,” P.A. Cornell (Fantasy 10/23)
  • “Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200,” R.S.A Garcia (Uncanny 7-8/23)
  • “Window Boy,” Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld 8/23)
  • “The Sound of Children Screaming,”  Rachael K. Jones (Nightmare 10/23)
  • “Better Living Through Algorithms,” Naomi Kritzer (Clarkesworld 5/23)
  • “Bad Doors,” John Wiswell (Uncanny 1-2/23)

Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction

  • To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose (Del Rey) 
  • The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern, J. Dianne Dotson (Android)
  • Liberty’s Daughter, Naomi Kritzer (Fairwood) 
  • The Ghost Job, Greg van Eekhout (Harper)

Nebula Award for Game Writing

  • The Bread Must RiseStewart C Baker, James Beamon (Choice of Games)
  • Alan Wake II, Sam Lake, Clay Murphy, Tyler Burton Smith, Sinikka Annala (Remedy Entertainment, Epic Games Publishing)
  • Ninefox Gambit: Machineries of Empire Roleplaying Game, Yoon Ha Lee, Marie Brennan (Android) 
  • Dredge, Joel Mason (Black Salt Games, Team 17)
  • Chants of Sennaar, Julien Moya, Thomas Panuel (Rundisc, Focus Entertainment)
  • Baldur’s Gate 3, Adam Smith, Adrienne Law, Baudelaire Welch, Chrystal Ding, Ella McConnell, Ine Van Hamme, Jan Van Dosselaer, John Corocran, Kevin VanOrd, Lawrence Schick, Martin Docherty, Rachel Quirke, Ruairí Moore, Sarah Baylus, Stephen Rooney, Swen Vincke (Larian Studios) 

Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

  • Nimona, Robert L. Baird, Lloyd Taylor, Pamela Ribon, Marc Haimes, Nick Bruno, Troy Quane, Keith Bunin, Nate Stevenson (Annapurna Animation, Annapurna Pictures)
  • The Last of Us: “Long, Long Time,” Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin (HBOMax)
  • Barbie, Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach (Warner Bros., Heyday Films, LuckyChap Entertainment)
  • Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Michael Gilio, Chris McKay (Paramount Pictures, Entertainment One, Allspark Pictures)
  • Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Dave Callaham (Columbia Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, Avi Arad Productions)
  • The Boy and the Heron,  Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli, Toho Company)

As was previously announced, Susan Cooper will be honored with this year’s Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.

The Nebula Awards announcement also notes, “Author Martha Wells has graciously declined her nomination as a novel finalist this year for System Collapse published by Tordotcom. In 2022, Wells also declined a nomination for novella and felt that the Murderbot Diaries series has already received incredible praise from her industry peers and wanted to open the floor to highlight other works within the community.”

News The Ugly Chickens

Adaptation of Howard Waldrop’s “The Ugly Chickens” Stars Felicia Day and Will Hit Festivals

I was idly leafing through Greenway’s Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World.

By

Published on March 14, 2024

Dodo in The Ugly Chickens short

George R.R. Martin has been working on producing a short film adaptation of Howard Waldrop’s “The Ugly Chickens,” and it looks like it’s complete and heading out to the festivals.

Martin announced on his blog that The Ugly Chickens is now finished and stars Felicia Day (MST3K, The Guild, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as the protagonist of Waldrop’s award-winning short story featuring Dodos. The short is directed by Mark Raso and is based on a screenplay by Michael Cassutt.

This is just one of the shorts based on Waldrop’s stories that Martin has produced, with the others being the 2022 adaptation of “Night of the Cooters” starring Vincent D’Onofrio, and a recently completed animated short based on “Mary-Margaret Road Grader.”

Waldrop sadly passed away this January, but according to Martin, the author saw a rough cut of The Ugly Chickens before he died. “He liked it, which pleases me no end,” Martin wrote. “I only wish we had been able to screen the final cut for him.”

The Ugly Chickens as well as Mary-Margaret Road Grader will hit the festival circuit soon, and Martin has promised to share any updates on when we’ll be able to see them in their entirety.

In the meantime, we have trailers for both. Check them out below. [end-mark]

News Black Mirror

Next Season of Black Mirror Will See the Return of the USS Callister

Infinite virtual space awaits

By

Published on March 14, 2024

Black Mirror "USS Callister" television review Star Trek homage tropes critique male nerd fantasies

One of the most popular episodes of Black Mirror was season four’s “USS Callister.” In it, a CTO of a tech company named Daly (Jesse Plemons) escapes via VR to a Star Trek-like starship that he commands. All well and good, I suppose, except Daly stole DNA from his co-workers (including parts played by Cristin Milioti, Jimmi Simpson, and Michaela Coel) and created sentient genetic clones inside the program—prisoners to his every whim.

The 74-minute episode had a definitive ending, but today, Netflix shared (via Deadline) that the seventh season of the anthology series will see another episode centered around the surviving characters. “USS Callister will return… Robert Daly is dead, but for the crew of the USS Callister, their problems are just beginning,” said a teaser Netflix released in London at their See What’s Next Event.

The original episode was directed by Toby Haynes and written by Charlie Brooker, who is helming the seventh season of Black Mirror along with Annabel Jones. No news yet on who will pen the upcoming episode featuring the USS Callister again, but odds are good it will be Brooker. We also don’t know what challenges the digital survivors will face—when we last saw them, they had escaped the confines of Daly’s pocket universe and were free to explore the virtual Infinity that exists outside it. Where we’ll meet up with them on their adventures is uncertain, but odds are good it will be an engaging-yet-disturbing story, as most Black Mirror episodes are.

In the meantime, we can watch the first six seasons of Black Mirror, including “USS Callister,” on Netflix. [end-mark]