Tor.com | Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects.

Original Fiction

Skin Deep

Wed Jul 21, 2021 9:00am 8 comments 15 Favorites [+]

The Wild Cards universe has been thrilling readers for over 25 years. In Alan Brennert’s “Skin Deep,” we see for the first time the events of September 15, 1946 from the viewpoint of someone living on the West Coast of the United States. Trina Nelson is a pretty, popular sixteen-year-old high school student whose idyllic life took a turn for the tragic because of the Wild Cards virus. Now, she wants nothing more than to live out her days in the shadowy anonymity of the Jokertown on the Santa Monica Pier. But life, it turns out, has still another wild card to deal Trina…

Series: Wild Cards on Tor.com

Original Fiction

Black Leg

Wed Jul 14, 2021 9:00am 6 comments 8 Favorites [+]

Haunted by stories he hears while on jury duty, a documentary filmmaker finds himself in an abandoned mall at the dead of night.

Original Fiction

Now We Paint Worlds

Matthew Kressel

Wed Jul 7, 2021 9:00am 9 comments 25 Favorites [+]

Orna, a representative of a universe-wide trade union, undergoes a drastic change in perspective while investigating the disappearance of three planets and their inhabitants on a newly terraformed world.

Original Fiction

The Red Mother

Wed Jun 23, 2021 9:00am 10 comments 29 Favorites [+]

Auga, a wandering sorcerer, follows his brother’s fate-thread into the village of Ormsfjoll, where he expects to deliver good news and continue his travels. What he doesn’t anticipate is that to meet his brother he must first contend with the truth at the heart of the volcano that wreaks havoc on Ormsfjoll.

Original Fiction

The Far Side of the Universe

noc

Wed Jun 16, 2021 9:00am 5 comments 9 Favorites [+]

When young Ira arrives for her appointment, she is prepared to be transported to The Gateway to Heaven, 6,070 light years away. But the technicians shepherding her through the process fear there’s more to it than what’s advertised.

“The Far Side of the Universe” was translated from Chinese by Michelle Deeter.
[Read more]

Original Fiction

An Easy Job

Wed Jun 9, 2021 9:00am 7 comments 23 Favorites [+]

This is a prequel to “Sinew and Steel and What They Told”, published in 2020 and available to read here.

Graff’s official role is muscle for the Visigoth – but his personal mission is internally cataloguing all of his experiences to relay to the other beings from his home planet when they cross paths. His professional life rarely clashes with his identity, but when he realizes his newest job is to take down one of his kind, everything becomes a bit less simple.

Highlights from the Blog

The Wheel of Time

A Darkness in Us: Lan Mandragoran and Depression

Sylas K Barrett

Tue Jul 20, 2021 11:00am 17 comments 11 Favorites [+]

“We are alike in many ways, you and I. There is a darkness in us. Darkness, pain, death. They radiate from us.”—Lan to Rand, The Fires of Heaven (ch. 53)

Throughout Reading the Wheel of Time, I have been very hard on al’Lan “I have nothing to offer but widow’s clothes” Mandragoran. The genre trope in which a hero has to spurn the woman he loves because being a hero is just so terrible and dangerous is one that I particularly dislike. It is very overused in fiction in general, and the trope is often employed as an easy way to show how heavy the hero’s burden is, while reducing the love interest to little more than a set piece whose function is to illustrate another aspect of the hero’s Great Pain.

But while this is often a problem in fiction, there is much that is different, and more interesting, about Lan and Nynaeve. She is certainly not set dressing in his story; in fact Nynaeve is much more a main character in The Wheel of Time novels than Lan is. And I think that my desire to address issues of gendered tropes and authorial intent have led me to not be entirely fair to Lan. Now, as I pick up New Spring in preparation for the next installment of Reading the Wheel of Time, I find myself eager to put myself into Lan’s mind. To walk a mile in his boots, so to speak. And in doing so, I have found a new empathy and connection with the Last King of the Malkieri.

Series: Reading The Wheel of Time

book recommendations

Five Captivating SFF Mystery Novels

James Davis Nicoll

Wed Jul 21, 2021 1:00pm 36 comments 4 Favorites [+]

I’ve noticed that many of my friends who read SFF also read mysteries. Not only that—authors who publish in SFF sometimes publish mysteries as well (which are often more profitable). Indeed, some authors even write SFF mysteries. Here are five recent SFF mysteries I liked.

reading

There’s No Wrong Way to Read a Book

Molly Templeton

Thu Jul 22, 2021 11:00am 50 comments 22 Favorites [+]

It’s like clockwork, if you have a very repetitive and broken clock: Every so often, on one social platform or another, an argument kicks up about what counts as reading a book. A long time ago, people would occasionally argue about whether ebooks were real books—a line of fruitless discourse that seems almost funny now. (Somewhere, someone is probably still arguing about this. Let’s ignore them.)

The one that keeps coming around, a broken clock with a discordant chime, is audiobooks. There’s a semantics argument buried in here about reading vs. listening, but that’s picking a disinteresting nit. Audiobooks count as reading. Listening to an audiobook is no better or worse than reading a book on paper or a screen. You’ve still experienced the same story, just in a different format.

[There’s no wrong—or right—way to read a book.]

news

A24 Is Adapting Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower

Mon Jul 26, 2021 4:43pm 1 comment Favorite This

Parable of the Sower cover art by John Jude Palencar

A new adaptation of one of Octavia Butler’s books is on its way. Deadline reports that A24 has acquired the rights to her novels Parable of the Sower, and tapped Garrett Bradley to direct.

SFF Equines

A Horse by Any Other Name: Anne McCaffrey’s Dragons

Mon Jul 26, 2021 3:00pm Post a comment Favorite This

I’ve talked before about how Anne McCaffrey modeled her famous dragons on horses, and specifically the Lipizzan horses of the Spanish Riding School of Vienna. What I hadn’t done at that time was sit down and do a reread of a bunch of dragon books.

Recently I got the urge. There happened to be an eBook sale, one of those short-term grab ’em with the first volume deals, and I was looking for some high-quality work avoidance. Bonus chance to find out if I remembered the horseness of dragons correctly? Bring it on. [Dragons vs. Horses…]

Excerpts

Read an Excerpt From The Wild Ones

Mon Jul 26, 2021 2:00pm Post a comment Favorite This

We are the Wild Ones, and we will not be silenced.

From author Nafiza Azad comes a thrilling, feminist fantasy about a group of teenage girls endowed with special powers who must band together to save the life of the boy whose magic saved them all. Read an excerpt below from The Wild Ones, available August 3rd from Margaret K. McElderry Books.

trailers

Zombies Tear a Town Apart in Syfy’s Day of the Dead Series

Molly Templeton

Mon Jul 26, 2021 1:24pm Post a comment Favorite This

Syfy’s upcoming Day of the Dead series is described as “the ultimate love letter to the godfather of zombies, George A. Romero,” but it’s not really clear where the love is in this trailer. A mix of jokes that don’t quite land and generic zombie gore, the two-minute peek at the 10-episode series is less than inspiring.

Star Trek: Voyager

Star Trek: Voyager Rewatch: Sixth Season Overview

Keith R.A. DeCandido

Mon Jul 26, 2021 1:00pm 9 comments 3 Favorites [+]

Screenshot: CBS

Star Trek: Voyager Sixth Season
Original air dates: September 1999 – May 2000
Executive Producers: Rick Berman, Brannon Braga

Captain’s log. By the sixth season, Voyager had settled into its role as the spiritual successor to The Next Generation. While the general backstory of trying to get back to Earth was always there, the actual day-to-day adventures that they had were mostly unrelated to that, instead focusing on two catch-phrases that have been associated with Trek for ages: “to seek out new life and new civilizations” and “the human adventure is just beginning.”

[It was a fire hazard…]

Series: Star Trek: Voyager Rewatch

hippos

Do Hippos Count as Dragons: An Examination of Identity and Taxonomy

Mon Jul 26, 2021 12:00pm 2 comments 2 Favorites [+]

American Hippo cover art by Gregory Manchess

Someone recently asked me a fun question: Do hippos count as dragons?

When I was a kid, I mean a real little kid, I had this toy, it was a long white board with five white pegs sticking up off it, and there were shapes with holes in the middle of them—stars, triangles, squares, circles, and hearts—and each shape came in five colors—red green yellow blue purple—and I would sit there for hours sorting them onto the pegs. All the same colors together, or all the same shapes together, or all different colors and shapes in a very particular order. I treated the game like a puzzle I was intended to solve, only of course, there was no way to solve it. One of my earliest memories is of the realization that this was not a thing that would reveal an answer to me, and that was the last day I played with it.

book reviews

Fairy Tale Magic in Elizabeth Lim’s Six Crimson Cranes

Mon Jul 26, 2021 11:30am 1 comment Favorite This

I’ve always loved fairy tales. Like many people my age, I grew up on the Disney fluff and stayed on the fairy tale train for the darker, Into the Woods style takes. Then, I fell into anime and started learning about fairy tales, folk tales, and mythologies from other cultures. Fairy tale retellings and reimaginings are nothing new in the young adult world, but that doesn’t stop me from getting my hands on every single one that I can. Sometimes, they’re fairly predictable but still fun to read. Other times, they completely blow you away.

I loved Elizabeth Lim’s Blood of Stars duology, and Six Crimson Cranes immediately rocketed up to the top of my most anticipated reads list. I am so thrilled to say that Lim’s new novel, Six Crimson Cranes, exceeded all hype and expectations.

SFF Linguistics

Were We Wrong All Along? Interspecies Relations in CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner Series

Mon Jul 26, 2021 11:00am 1 comment Favorite This

Bren is back from space, but he has to go to the human enclave of Mospheira to deliver a copy of the kyo treaty to President Tyers and make the arrangements for the first Reunioner families to land on the planet. For the first time, he goes to Mospheira as an atevi lord and diplomat, and that means his bodyguards and a few staff go with him. The majority of these four books (Convergence, Emergence, Resurgence, Divergence) is about atevi politics, but the first two show how Bren’s bodyguard reacts to Mospheira and how the structure of the atevi studies department at the university is, in fact, a hindrance to human-atevi relations. [Read more]

movies

Why? Seriously, WHY? An Investigation Into A Quiet Place Parts I & II

Leah Schnelbach

Mon Jul 26, 2021 10:00am 14 comments Favorite This

Screenshot: Paramount Pictures

For various reasons, I’ve missed a lot of pop culture over the last few years. I’m behind on… everything really. Even after months of lockdown, with all my careful quarantining and marathons of TV and deep dives into directors’ entire oeuvres, I have giant holes in my current knowledge. Which is why I spent a few hours this weekend watching the first two films in the saga known as: A Quiet Place.

And my question is a dramatically screamwhispered: WHYYYY? WHY ARE THESE MOVIES?

news

Watch the Trailer for Doctor Who’s 13th Season

Mon Jul 26, 2021 9:30am 1 comment Favorite This

Over the weekend, the BBC debuted a first look at the upcoming thirteenth season of Doctor Who, confirming that Jodie Whitaker’s version of the Doctor will indeed grace our screens sometime later this year, while also showing off some brief glimpses of new characters and adventures.

Science Fiction

Five Classic SFF Novels About Environmental Disaster

James Davis Nicoll

Mon Jul 26, 2021 9:00am 11 comments 4 Favorites [+]

As astonishing as this may now sound, industrial development far outran environmental regulation until surprisingly recently. However, by the early 1970s various issues—water pollution, air pollution, resource depletion, the alarming discovery that the main difference between polyester clothing and napalm is the absence of a spark—became so obvious that visionaries like Richard M. Nixon (later noted for innovations in hospitality services such as those offered by the Watergate Hotel) created agencies whose task it was to enforce environmental preservation laws. Presumably this was the end of the matter. Indeed, so confident am I that it was so that I will not even glance out the window to see if these efforts succeeded. No need to even smell the air.

Nevertheless, while nattering nabobs of negativism might have muttered about mass extinctions, anti-terraforming, and the potential self-extermination of the human species, one cannot deny that rising alarm about the changing environment inspired some classic SFF novels.

The Wheel of Time Will Premiere on Amazon in November

Molly Templeton

Fri Jul 23, 2021 2:19pm 13 comments 2 Favorites [+]

Amazon Studios

We’re one step closer to an actual release date: At today’s [email protected] panel, Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins revealed the series will debut in November. So mark your whole November calendar, I guess? Just write WHEEL OF TIME over the whole thing.

Amazon also released a first poster for the series, showing Moraine (Rosamund Pike) standing in a Waygate.

Getting Pooped Out By An Alien Is Just Part of the Job in Star Trek: Lower Decks’ New Trailer

Molly Templeton

Fri Jul 23, 2021 1:52pm 11 comments 1 Favorite [+]

The Star Trek treats keep coming from San Diego [email protected] This year’s Star Trek Universe presentations focused on the animated shows, so it’s no surprise that a new trailer for Star Trek: Lower Decks followed on the heels of our first look at Star Trek: Prodigy. And this one’s more than a minute long!

Here’s Your First Glimpse at Star Trek: Prodigy

Molly Templeton

Fri Jul 23, 2021 1:29pm 11 comments 1 Favorite [+]

A year ago at San Diego [email protected], we learned the name of the first Star Trek series aimed at a young audience: Star Trek: Prodigy. And now SDCC provides again with a one-minute teaser for the show—along with a release season, if not a date. It’s coming this fall!

book recommendations

Five Great Alternative Histories of WWII and the Space Race

Fri Jul 23, 2021 12:00pm 19 comments 6 Favorites [+]

"Earthrise" (NASA/Bill Anders, 1968)

More often than not, authors make the imagined compatible with the real. The world around us continues to exist while we read, even if we believe everything the author tells us. In A History of What Comes Next, the Kibsu insert themselves into history in their bid to take us to the stars, but the resulting timeline is the one we know. There are few, if any, verifiable facts that would contradict the storyline and, conversely, nothing in our present would change if it all happened to be true. There are those, however, who aren’t so kind to our reality, authors whose stories mess with past events and take a wrecking ball to our timeline.