The year is 1915, and a young man hired to shout the words on title cards for silent films experiences the magic of movies. This spurs him to edit some of the worst dialog, leading him in a weird direction that utterly changes his life.
A forlorn teenager’s monotonous life is interrupted when a stranger draws him into the hunt for a vampiric serial killer. He will learn that while monsters are much more real than he thought, there is no such thing as heroes.
All its life, a small monster with emerald scales has been a source of never-ending food to larger and more powerful creatures who feast on the small monster’s limbs each time one regrows. This is the story of how the small monster meets an industrious artist and re-forms into someone new—someone who can’t be eaten.
When Suzy was born, her parents filled her mouth with sand. But this is normal and natural and the way things are always done.
And if she finds it uncomfortable to keep it there, to eat with it there, to talk with it there, she’s just going to have to learn to live with it.
“Sand” is a heart-wrenching tale about generational trauma and healing.
For the residents of this mycological ecosystem, creating art feeds the World around you and requires working in harmony with your inner voice. When one artist’s voice begins screaming, he’s forced to travel farther than he ever has before to reconcile with the noise in his head and find his true place in society before it’s too late.
As the holidays approach, the “spending quality time with your loved ones” refrain resounds in greeting cards, corporate emails, ads and commercials. The winter season bursts at the seams with family-focused language and occasional jokes about how long, exactly, you can keep up with Uncle Gary’s questionable-at-best post-dinner ravings.
Within the sci-fi and fantasy world, of course, we find myriad tales about families and familial relationships, though they’re not always the people you’d clamor to spend a holiday with. Just look at poor Harry Potter, who eschews his blood relatives in favor of the caring and entertaining Weasley clan. Our favorite SFF protagonists tend to form their own circles, building communities with those that love them for who they are. Around the holidays, these stories offer a gentle reminder that there are many ways to define family, and plenty of reasons to spend time bonding with the people who mean the most to you even if you’re not strictly related.
This holiday season, enjoy these five stories featuring found families and the wonderful, unconventional love they share.
The Cowboy Bebop of the 1990s was a delightful show, following Jet and Spike as they bounced from job to job, met Ein, ended up adopting Ein, me Faye, ended up adopting Faye, and finally met Ed, and ended up adopting Ed. The show gave us the adventures of a found family of misfits as they slowly learned to depend on each other. Those adventures were fun, fast-moving, sometimes very violent, and gloried in that decade’s love of mash-up and retro homage. But like fellow ’90s classics The X-Files and Due South, Bebop threaded larger, more serious stories through all the cases of the week and ridiculous banter. Part of why the anime has endured, I think, is that the story of Jet’s old partner, Faye’s pre-cryosleep life, and Spike’s operatic relationships with Vicious and Julia give the hangout episodes a tragic undertone.
Netflix’s update of the show has reconfigured that old balance, sometimes to great effect, but also often to the series’ detriment. Join me for some thoughts and some spoilers!
We’ve only seen women channel so far in The Wheel of Time. But oh, my friends, that is about to change.
(These reviews might contain some minor spoilers for the Wheel of Time book series. Please note that the comment section may also contain spoilers for those unfamiliar with the book series.)
[Please note that comments will be temporarily closed over the weekend, but will be open for discussion on Monday morning.]
We’ve only seen women channel so far in The Wheel of Time. But oh, my friends, that is about to change.
(These reviews might contain some minor spoilers for the Wheel of Time book series. Please note that the comment section may also contain spoilers for those unfamiliar with the book series.)
[Please note that comments will be temporarily closed over the weekend, but will be open for discussion on Monday morning.]
Stubby and the Tor.com staff are taking a break for the holiday weekend, but we’ll be back and beaming more content your way on Monday. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Star Trek has, historically, been really really terrible with consequences.
On the original series, Kirk was present for the deaths of several important people to him: his best friend, his brother and sister-in-law, and two of the great loves of his life, one of whom was pregnant with his child. Yet he was never seen to feel any trauma beyond the episodes where those things happened.
And it wasn’t much better in the first wave of spinoffs. But if the trend toward serialization has given us nothing else, it’s given us TV writers who are willing to examine long-term consequences.
In Marvel’s Hawkeye, the everyday family man of the Avenger’s team is finally given his own story as he teams up with eager fan and archer protegee Kate Bishop to stop an underground criminal organization in New York City.
Thirty-three years ago, on November 24, 1988, Mystery Science Theater 3000 premiered on KTMA, a cable access channel in Minneapolis. In human years, the show is out of college by now (probably), maybe trying to buy a home, or start a family. It bristles when Cheers calls it a millennial—it’s always felt like an old soul, with the references to Get Christie Love and Charlie McCarthy, and-three it gets frustrated when other shows consider it shallow. It’s not just a reference factory, after all. There’s real depth and heart here, if you know how to pay attention.
I’ve been asked if I cook as well as I write about cooking.
It’s a fair question: I’ve been cooking almost as long as I’ve been writing. Writing was something I fell into, much like Alice down the rabbit-hole, when I was fourteen. I sat down one day to write myself a story instead of reading one, and thirty-two pages later—pencil and lined paper tablet—I finished my tale and realized that my predictable world had expanded wildly, enormously, with endlessly diverging and intriguing paths running every which way into an unknown I suddenly knew existed. Having ended one story (which is locked away, guarded by dragons and evil-eyed basilisks, and will never see the light of day if I have anything to say about it), I wanted to start all over again on another.
When or why I decided I needed to inflict culinary disasters on my long-suffering family and others, I don’t remember.
Hear me out.
We all remember that scene in The Neverending Story—which is a ridiculously apropos title for this conversation, by the way—where Bastian takes out his sandwich and, while hiding in the school attic, reading his stolen tome, stops himself after one bite, saying, “No. Not too much. We’ve still got a long way to go.”
That’s my reading life, in a nutshell. While I can count on one hand the times I have thrown restraint to the wind and finished an amazing book in one or two sittings, it is more often that I’ve started reading something, appreciated it, and taken months to finish. Better still are the times I’ve started a book, realized I love it on a deep bone level, and, lamenting the progress I am making toward completing it, set it down.
Because I love it too much.
This is a thing that happens.
You can tell an epic story at any length; sometimes a standalone fantasy can traverse just as much narrative space as an entire trilogy. But when it comes to fantasy worlds that we can explore every inch of, we are particularly fond of series with nine books or more. Yep, you heard us: we want trilogies upon trilogies (with the occasional side duology/quartet) in our favorite long-running SFF series. From alternate histories to fantasy that slowly becomes science fiction, from lady knights to more than a few telepathic dragons, from sagas that span one generation to multiple centuries, these series are so expansive and immersive that reading them feels not just like visiting a new world, but like coming home.
It’s hard to believe that Star Trek: First Contact came out 25 years ago, but here we are. The movie—the second one with The Next Generation crew led by Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart)—had the Borg set on using time travel to assimilate Earth at an earlier date, with the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise (E) the only ones to stop them.
The Hollywood Reporter recently interviewed the film’s co-writer Ron Moore about the film’s production, including some key circumstances that got flipped around during the writing process.
In Darcie Little Badger’s second novel, the National Book Award longlisted A Snake Falls to Earth, Lipan Apache teen protagonist Nina lives in near future Texas and is smart, funny and adamant to translate her great grandmother Rosita’s ‘fanciful, ancient stories about the days when humans and spirits lived together’. Rosita was ‘the keeper of ten thousand stories, each stranger than the last’, and when she was almost impossibly old, Nina recorded her stories into an advanced translation app which is confused by the language Rosita spoken in, partly a Lipan dialect that no one can speak any longer. Nina, it seems, has to work a lot harder to understand the things her great grandmother was trying to tell her.
Who’s been nominated for a Grammy? It’s been Agatha, all along! That’s right, the catchy tune from Marvel’s WandaVision is getting the recognition it deserves.
Jurassic World: Dominion, the next movie in the Jurassic Park franchise, is still several months away. For those who need their dinosaur fix for the holiday season, however, Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment released a new five-minute video prologue that goes way, way back in time.
The empire fights for coal and iron, but the Hron fight for their way of life…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Margaret Killjoy’s A Country of Ghosts—available from AK Press.
Cytonic, the third book in Brandon Sanderson’s Cytoverse series, released on November 23. The adventures of Spensa Nightshade and her AI companion M-Bot continue into the unknown. After becoming the DDF’s top pilot and learning to be a spy, Spensa is now trying to return home by navigating the Nowhere and all its secrets.
I have a lot of fruit trees on my little, suburban lot. It’s a postage stamp lot, and packed in as tight as can be are six citrus trees, two pomegranates, two pears, two plums, two peaches, a jujube, three grapevines, a barbados cherry, two olive trees, a loquat, an elderberry, passionfruit vines, blackberries, raspberry… Let me think. I think that’s most of them. Papayas come and go, as well as other annual fruits and vegetables, and I love to draw bees and butterflies with flowers and herbs, but when I think of my garden, the first thing I think about is the lemon tree next to my front door that blooms in the spring and hands me hundreds of golden jewels in the dark days of winter.
I think about the astonishing bloom of the passion vines, which have yet to produce edible fruit but should, and the bird nest hidden deep in my orange tree. I think about the fig tree, that rambling beast eager to consume all available landspace, and beating her back into her corner. I think about the season of the fruit trees, where I prune in the spring, where I watch the flowers and leaves break through the bark in a burst of life right when I am most thoroughly weary of even our mild winter, down in south Texas, to the long season of fruiting, and then harvest, and then sleep.
I think about how every day I go into my yard and without much effort encounter a butterfly or wild bee, there. I think about how many fantasy novels are written and read by people who don’t take even a moment to think about what the weather and landscape mean to available food. In some ways, the conspicuous absence when I read fantasy is found in the way food is grown, harvested, prepared.
