Immortality, but at what price, in what form, and how could you be you? In the near future it’s possible to build a new you, a better you, one that could carry on forever. But if you could carry on, if you could make choices about who you would be forever, how much of your past would you bring with you? Would you be tempted to maybe…edit? Adam isn’t all that he used to be, but he wants to be.
In the aftermath of the First Martian War, in the interim between it and what was to come later, England seemed to once again become a green and peaceful place, if one haunted by the terrible events in Surrey that had happened in those early years of the century. Although people hoped and prayed peace had come, they were wrong. Across the gulf of space, plans were being drawn for a return, but before they could bear fruit a terrible discovery was made deep in Holmburgh Wood, one that would tear a family apart and shock the world.
A horror tale about the Witch Bride, second wife of a King, and the discord between her and her young stepson.
A powerful science fiction story about an architect on Earth commissioned to create (via long distance) a masterwork with materials from the last abandoned Martian colony, a monument that will last thousands of years longer than Earth, which is dying.
Xin is an ansible, using her song magic to connect the originworld of the Imperial Authority and its far-flung colonies— a role that is forced upon magically-gifted women “of a certain closeness”. When a dead body comes through her portal at a time of growing rebellion, Xin is drawn deep into a station-wide conspiracy along with Ouyang Suqing, one of the station’s mysterious, high-ranking starmages
For over 25 years, the Wild Cards universe has been thrilling readers the world over.
Once an assassin and spy, superpowered ace Noel Matthews confronts unexpected enemies after discovering a dead body on the job.
Now in development for TV: Rights to develop Wild Cards for TV have been acquired by Universal Cable Productions, the team that brought you The Magicians and Mr. Robot, with the co-editor of Wild Cards, Melinda Snodgrass as executive producer.
We’re summarizing Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series so far, for those who don’t have the time to re-read a couple of thousand-page books and a novella before the release of the third book, Oathbringer, this fall. It should go without saying that this article contains thorough spoilers for the series to date so if you haven’t yet read the books, nope out of here pronto. After all, a good story is more about the Journey than the Destination.
The world of Harry Potter is one that is rich, complex, and detailed. J.K. Rowling made it that way, because that is what J.K. Rowling does. Arguably, one of the greatest strengths of the original seven book series is how totally immersive it is. You can lose yourself completely in Hogwarts, or Wizarding London, or Hogsmeade. It seems to be a big part of the reason so many of us love the books as much as we do. It’s to the point where American muggles in their twenties and thirties strongly identify with the Hogwarts house they know they would have been sorted into. (Myself, I’m a Ravenclaw, though I have great admiration for Hufflepuff House and often wish desperately that I could be a Hufflepuff. It’s just not meant to be, don’t try to comfort me…)
But once you really start digging into this incredibly detailed world, it’s hard to escape the feeling that there is something going on at Gringotts Wizarding Bank. That is, the problem may not even be rooted within the bank itself, but something is certainly amiss in the wizarding economy of London. For reasons impossible to fully understand, magical currency is quickly losing value, and things don’t look good.
Randyll Tarly is not the nicest person on Game of Thrones. He named his son Dickon. He bullied his other son, Samwell, and gave him the choice between joining the Night’s Watch and death. In George R.R. Martin’s books, he’s horrible to Brienne of Tarth — when he’s not tormenting Dickon’s father-in-law or attacking his wife’s family.
But still, Randyll Tarly has had a, shall we say, rough time lately on the TV show. Even by the standards of Game of Thrones, which tortures everyone. And in the process, Randyll provided an answer to the most baffling Thrones question right now.
Spoilers for recent episodes below…
By the time we get to the end of Marvel’s The Defenders, that word (“defenders”) has never been used. It’s kind of fitting, really, since the original comic book version of the Defenders were a so-called “non-team” featuring a rotating and inconsistent cast, and the team was never really formalized or set.
In that same vein, Daredevil, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage never really become a formal team. Hell, the “team,” such as it is, isn’t really just those four, as Claire Temple, Misty Knight, and especially Colleen Wing are important components of the fight, too.
And that is what makes The Defenders particularly strong, as the characterizations of all its players, big and small, is superb.
If only the plot was stronger…
This is a segue of sorts from the Space Equinoids thought experiment, back toward terrestrial horses and the humans who live and work with them. I often call my horses Space Aliens in horse suits, and refer to them as aliens in the pasture. They’re very much their own creatures; even humans for whom they’re nothing but sports equipment or transport will have to understand the basics of equine psychology. Horses are just too big, too strong, and too self-willed to take for granted.
No matter how dominant the human, the horse still outweighs him, and horse instincts and psychology will rule unless the human finds ways to work with them. As the adage says, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”
Well, this is not good.
Am I talking about the events of the episode or the episode itself?
Spoilers for the currently published George R. R. Martin novels are discussed in the review and fair game in the comments. We highly suggest not discussing early preview chapters, but if you must, white it out. Have courtesy for the patient among us who are waiting and waiting (and waiting) for The Winds of Winter. Play nice. Thanks.
Oh, anarchism, what a strange creature you are. Once a major political force all over the world (anarchists outnumbered communists for quite some time in pre-revolutionary China, for example), anarchism is now one of the most misunderstood political ideologies around.
We’re saddened to report that we have lost one the greats of science fiction and fantasy. Brian W. Aldiss was 92 years old.
Mr. Aldiss started out as a bookseller, and began his fiction career writing short pieces for a trade journal. Charles Monteith, an editor at Faber and Faber, liked the pieces enough to ask him to write a novel, and his first book, The Brightfount Diaries, was published in 1955. It was a literary story, told in a series of diary entries, about the daily life of a bookseller. However, he had already begun writing stories with a more speculative flavor, being published in Science Fantasy and New Worlds before winning a contest held by The Observer for a short story set in the year 2500, “Not For An Age.” When he told his literary publishers about his genre work, they surprised him by being excited about it, and he eventually edited anthologies of science fiction and fantasy for them.
By the end his books numbered into the hundreds, with over a dozen non-fiction works, including an autobiography titled, Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith’s: A Writing Life; short stories, including “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” which became the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s original conception of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, anda Doctor Who story called ”Umwelts for Hire;” and finally his novels, which ranged over a dizzying variety of topics. They include multi-award-winning Helliconia Trilogy, the Hugo-winning Hothouse, about life in a super-tropical rainforest on a dying future Earth, Barefoot in the Head, and experimental work about a messianic Serb whose constantly shifting puns and allusions are an homage of Finnegans Wake; The Eighty Minute Hour, a space opera where the characters actually sing; Brothers of the Head, about conjoined-twin rock stars, which was adapted into a film by Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe, and Jocasta, which re-told Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone.
In the early 1960s, he and Harry Harrison founded a journal of science fiction criticism called Strange Horizons, which was the first of its kind. While it only produced two issues, those two issues published work by James Blish and William S. Burroughs, as well as a roundtable discussion between C.S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis, and Aldiss himself. Like many of the great science fiction writers of his generation, he dedicated himself to the genre not only through writing, but also through editing and anthologizing work in an attempt to spread quality speculative fiction. He edited Introducing SF and Best Fantasy Stories for Faber and Faber, a series of anthologies for Penguin, and then some thematic anthologies including Space Opera, Space Odysseys, Galactic Empires, Evil Earths, and Perilous Planets. An artist himself, Aldiss worked on a large format collection, Science Fiction Art, intended to give the great pulp artists the recognition they deserved. He and Harry Harrison also worked on The Year’s Best Science Fiction series for nearly a decade.
Mr. Aldiss was Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1990, a “Permanent Special Guest” at the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) from 1989 through 2008. He received two Hugo Awards, one Nebula Award, and one John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He was named the 18th Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2000, inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2004, and awarded the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to literature in 2005.
Mr. Aldiss will be greatly missed.
Greetings, intrepid adventurer! You have taken on a daunting quest: You venture willingly into the lair of cats in your comrade’s place while they are otherwise detained. But how do you ensure that you escape with no more than an angry scratch or two? And how do you tame the wild Meeple?!
The last book that got its hooks into me struck at Chinggis Khan airport in Ulaanbaatar. A friend and I were returning from a long stay off the grid with Kazakh nomads in Mongolia’s far west. We were saddle sore from a trip across the Altai mountains in a Russian jeep, suffering from intestinal parasites, and reeking of yak dung. But we had Kindles, and something passing (in Mongolia) for Wi-Fi. “Read this,” my friend said, and stuck this opening under my nose:
“If I could tell you one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close.”
Thank God for books. They can take you from anywhere, to anywhere. Not all of them do it as precipitously as Brady Udall’s The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint—there are ways to be transported that don’t involve such a dozy of a first step—but as an author myself I swoon over such writing.
From 2008-2011, Marvel Studios provided an excellent blueprint for setting up what we now refer to as the Marvel Cinematic Universe: two Iron Man films, a Hulk film, a Thor film, and Captain America: The First Avenger. All standalone movies, but with various common elements and through-lines (the Stark family tree, S.H.I.E.L.D., the Infinity Stones) to come together in Avengers, which remains the gold standard. It works as the first Avengers movie as well as the next movie for each of the above characters.
In 2015, Marvel went back to that blueprint for their more ground-level Netflix television series based in New York. Two seasons of Daredevil, and one each of Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist, culminating in The Defenders, now live on Netflix.
Here’s a quick look at the first three episodes and whether or not they bode well for history repeating itself. (There will be a full review on Monday.)
In January, Orbit Books announced that it had acquired three new novels from N. K. Jemisin, including a contemporary fantasy “dealing with themes of race and power in New York City.” In a recent interview with Playboy, Jemisin—who just won the Hugo Award for Best Novel for The Obelisk Gate—shared more about how the novel will grapple with “basically Cthulhu” and the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft.
The Louvre Museum in Paris is an architectural marvel, a palace built upon, renovated, and expanded from its origins as a fortress. Even awe would be an understatement to describe the feeling exploring its vast wings, its incredible Pyramide du Louvre, not to mention the most epic collection of artwork on display in the world. The first time I visited, I got completely lost, in part, because it’s one of the world’s largest museums at over 652,000 square feet. In between trying to track down the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and the Egyptian antiquities, my legs gave out after a half a day of hapless wandering.
The second time I visited (which was almost ten years later), I had a much better experience, knowing exactly where I wanted to go, even getting a good grasp of its layout. This wasn’t the result of having learned my way around during my first visit, but rather because I had the official Nintendo DS Louvre Guide to lead me, complete with a GPS and 3D Imaging designed specifically for the museum—on rent for just five Euros at any of the booths.
We want to send you a copy of Pierre Christin’s Valerian: The Illustrated Treasury, available now from Titan Books!
Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets introduced audiences to a future populated by weird and wonderful aliens and laced with incredible futuristic technology. Now discover the universe of the original Valerian and Laureline comic books!
Valerian: The Illustrated Treasury gives a comprehensive overview of the Valerian and Laureline comic-book universe, featuring information on key locations (including Central Point), transport, galactic anomalies and a timeline of the major events in the series. This richly illustrated book also introduces many of the alien races and characters—friendly and hostile—and there is a special section on the ever-popular Shingouz.
Printed in English for the first time, Valerian: The Illustrated Treasury is a wonderful addition to the Valerian franchise and features full-color artwork by Valerian and Laureline artist Jean-Claude Mézières.
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Eclipses are pretty darn cool even in real life, so it’s fitting that in science fiction and fantasy they get their due as legitimately monumental events. Dragon’s blood shed, the sapping of powers, aliens invading under cover of darkness… a lot can happen when planetary bodies pass between the sun and Earth—or whatever world our heroes inhabit. The six eclipses in these SFF stories mean serious business, with the power to change laws, avoid executions, and break spells. Grab your eclipse glasses!
It’s fitting that the subtitles on the first teaser for Marvel and Netflix’s The Punisher includes a lot of “[muffled grunting]” because that about sums up what we see: Frank Castle wielding a fearsome sledgehammer while voiceover-ing about painful memories and the past being the devil you sold your soul to.
Sometimes a book comes into your life at just the right moment. There’s something in it that speaks to your specific place in space and time, like the heavens aligning for an eclipse.
I spent my 16th year as an exchange student in France, living with a French family, attending a French school, and being completely immersed in the language—which I barely spoke a word of when I arrived. Even though I was an obsessive reader, I left my books at home. The whole point, I’d reasoned, was to forsake English for a year while I learned a different language. I rapidly realized my mistake—I was forlorn without books that I could understand.
So I wrote a letter to my Great Aunt Joan. In my reading life, my Aunt Joan was the Gandalf to my Frodo, the Merlin to my Arthur. She was responsible for most of the great literary loves of my childhood: the Moomins, Oz, the Dark is Rising series—all of them came from her. I wrote to her and I told her how forsaken I felt without any books that spoke to my heart.
In fact, she is like most artists; she is all style, without any sincerity. She would not sacrifice herself for others. She thinks merely of music, and everybody knows that the arts are selfish.
Poet, dramatist and wit Oscar Wilde had a decided taste for fairy tales, even in some of his most mundane work. His play The Importance of Being Earnest, for instance, ends with a scene that could be lifted straight from any of a hundred stories of children lost at birth eventually found by parents, if with more than a touch of Wilde’s mockery: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Take that, all of you abandoned and kidnapped fairy tale princes and princesses!
But his mockery could not hide his genuine love for the genre. He indulged this love in two collections of fairy tales: The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and The House of Pomegranates (1891). “The Nightingale and the Rose,” a response to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Nightingale,” is in the first. Wilde admired the way Andersen used his fairy tales to critique society—something Wilde himself would do in his own tales—but profoundly disagreed with Andersen’s depictions of sacrifice and with Anderson’s preference for the natural over the manufactured and artificial. His own tale takes a decidedly different approach.
