Citizens are distraught to learn of the latest decree from their leaders: each person is to be evaluated as to whether they deserve to live. Those found “unnecessary for life” will be asked to “leave life within 24 hours.”
Panic is alleviated when citizens learn that Ak, “a luminous person,” will be in charge of the panels that are to evaluate citizens. Surely, only the “human rubbish” would be eliminated.
“The Tale of Ak and Humanity” was translated from Russian by Alex Shvartsman
An alien fungal infection has ravaged a faraway planet, turning all but six of the
colonists into ravenous arinkiris. Inyama, a mycologist, is her species’ last hope. But it’s not expertise her fellow survivors want from her.
“One spark. Two sparks. Three. This is what it takes to ignite a revolution.”
A reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairytale, “The Tinder Box” tells the story of a witch at the heart of an incipient rebellion—and all of those to come.
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.
The country of Calormen, located to the southeast of Narnia, appears twice in the seven Chronicles of Narnia books, but not once in the movies. It’s the stage for some of the most exciting parts of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia stories—and also some of the most controversial.
Throughout the only book where characters actually set foot in Calormen, The Horse and His Boy, C.S. Lewis can’t seem to decide how to treat it. He describes it as “one of the wonders of the world” with “orange trees and lemon trees, roof-gardens, balconies, deep archways, pillared colonnades, spires, battlements, minarets, pinnacles…” And yet, the Calormene people “were not the fair-haired men of Narnia: they were dark, bearded men from Calormen, that great and cruel country” who smelled “of garlic and onions, their white eyes flashing dreadfully in their brown faces.”
Finally—and perhaps most ominously for a book series that is transparently a Christian allegory—“they have a god called Tash. They say he has four arms and the head of a vulture.”
Welcome to Close Reads! In this series, Leah Schnelbach and their guests dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, Leah Schnelbach meditates upon that most terrifying of topics…REAL ESTATE.
When you think of Batman Returns, what do you think of?
Catwoman deadpanning “Meow” as a building explodes behind her?
The Penguin eating raw fish in his campaign office?
The Penguin biting a staffer’s nose?
The Penguin commanding an army of militarized actual penguins?
OK, it turns out there was a lot of rad shit in that movie. But what I find myself thinking about most is Selina Kyle’s apartment.
Who doesn’t like to escape into a story where the stakes are impossibly high, and the entire world is out to get you? Growing up, I craved books with non-stop action and adventure, anything to take me out of my dull teenage existence in small town Louisiana. My younger self devoured all kinds of books with survival elements, from Julie of the Wolves to A Wrinkle in Time. But no matter the genre, I always found myself wanting to fall into a fast-paced story where one wrong move could mean the difference between life and death.
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 Christopher Caldwell’s “The Calcified Heart of Saint Ignace Battiste,” first published in the January/February 2022 issue of Uncanny Magazine. Spoilers ahead, but go ahead and read this one yourself!
[“The Mother arrives on foot. She is small and slight, and hidden beneath her veils…”]
We’ve known that there will be at least three seasons of Star Trek: Picard for awhile, but we didn’t know for sure if the series would end there.
In an interview with SFX Magazine, Jean-Luc himself (aka Sir Patrick Stewart) confirmed that the third season will be the final one of the show.
Maren Walker told herself she wouldn’t need to sell pills for long, that it was only means to an end…
We’re thrilled to share the opening chapter of Where I Can’t Follow by Ashley Blooms, available from Sourcebooks Landmark on February 15.
We’re back with… well, it’s basically just an episode of The Mandalorian! Who coulda seen that coming.
Neither God nor the Devil will be making a return appearance for the second season of Good Omens—at least not as we previously knew them. Frances McDormand and Benedict Cumberbatch are not among the actors set to appear in Amazon’s sequel series, though many familiar faces will be back, including Derek Jacobi (still playing Metatron), Mark Gatiss, Miranda Richardson, and Jon Hamm.
A handful of new cast members have also joined the series, though most of their roles remain a celestial mystery.
The teens of ‘90s horror get into plenty of trouble at home, but this is nothing compared to what they find when they hit the road. There are several books in which roving groups of teens are sent off on their own, entrusted with a wealthy friend’s parents’ beach house or vacation home for a long weekend, with no adult supervision at all. In both Christopher Pike’s Slumber Party (1985) and Carol Ellis’s The Window (1992), teens head out on ski trips, excited to get away from home, have some fun, and hit the slopes.
In his novel Men at Arms, Terry Pratchett detailed the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness,” which crisply explained how expensive it is to be poor. In short, “A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time,” Pratchett wrote, “while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
Now, the Pratchett estate has given Jack Monroe, a writer in the UK, permission to use Vimes’ name for the Vimes Boots Index, a price index that will track the “insidiously creeping prices of the most basic versions of essential items at the supermarket.”
Ransom realizes soon after his arrival in Perelandra that he is not on an ordinary adventure: “If a naked man and a wise dragon were indeed the sole inhabitants of this floating paradise, then this also was fitting, for at that moment he had a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth.” The echoes of Eden, of the story of Jesus, are not a mistake in Ransom’s world, not even a coincidence. He’s in a Passion Play—the medieval drama in which the players tell the story of the life and death and resurrection of the Christ.
It’s not an allegory; Lewis bristled at those who suggested this interpretation.
It might be comforting to tell oneself that eugenics—the conviction that one can breed one’s way to better humans by encouraging the fitter ones to have more children and those considered to be less fit to have fewer—was a horrible fad that went out of fashion after the unpleasantness in the mid-20th century. Of course, that’s not true. State sanctioned sterilization of those deemed inferior continues to the modern day.
It’s not surprising that science fiction authors have not always resisted the lure of eugenics as a plot starter. Why not apply to humans the same techniques that transformed the humble wolf into the majestic chihuahua? Here are five stories that engage with the notion in different ways.
Citizens are distraught to learn of the latest decree from their leaders: each person is to be evaluated as to whether they deserve to live. Those found “unnecessary for life” will be asked to “leave life within 24 hours.”
Panic is alleviated when citizens learn that Ak, “a luminous person,” will be in charge of the panels that are to evaluate citizens. Surely, only the “human rubbish” would be eliminated.
“The Tale of Ak and Humanity” was translated from Russian by Alex Shvartsman
BREAKING NEWS! Matt Reeves, the director of The Batman, the upcoming Warner Bros. film with Robert Pattinson as the aforementioned Bat, answers the question that no one was thinking—why is Pattinson shown wearing so much dark eye makeup in the press photo displayed above?
Seven Mercies, the second novel-length collaboration between Elizabeth May and Laura Lam, is the conclusion to the space opera duology that began with 2020’s Seven Devils. A small and ragged band of rebels stand against the might of a murderous empire and the AI that’s capable of controlling the minds of its citizens. The results are explosive.
If you’re watching Peacemaker and/or have been on the internet lately, you might have seen the show’s opening number, where the actors—led by John Cena—do a weird, complicated-looking dance with a bald eagle named Eagly flying in at the very end.
The dance is a mesmerizing one, and choreographer Charissa-Lee Barton recently shared how she put the moves together, which include filming her husband Alan Tudyk cutting a rug to see if a non-dancing actor could pull them off.
You can absolutely forget the Percy Jackson movies, now, if you so desire. Percy Jackson and the Olympians—a series adaptation of Rick Riordan’s books that was announced in 2020—officially has the green light at Disney+.
A clearly enthusiastic Riordan announced the news via Disney+’s YouTube channel, saying, “The wait is over, demigods. I am thrilled to be the first to tell you that Percy Jackson and the Olympians is really, truly, and for sure coming to your screens.”
What if you once had a painful memory removed? And what if you were offered the chance to get it back?
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Tell Me an Ending, the dystopian debut novel by Jo Harkin—out from Scribner on March 1st.
