When an illicit trade deal goes wrong and Quandary is blamed for it, she goes on the run to avoid the crosshairs of a bioengineered killer that only lives for 24 hours. If Q can evade it for that long, she just might survive.
A night of food, fun, and festivities quickly turns sour. But what else can you expect when your ancestors say you will choke?
An unexpected encounter with a mysterious life form turns a simple trip to Mercury into a historic event. Both for ship Captain Victory Citrus and human civilisation as we know it.
The Hero journeys across the desert to capture The Thief Of Memory and retrieve her stolen memories. What she finds in the end may destroy her.
When the elitist institution of Ozymandias Academy and its headmaster, Vamon Kinctuarin, can’t find a solution to the city’s worsening drought, 2 self-taught magicians, Noah and his partner Manny, take it upon themselves to find a solution to the crisis.
An artist’s work attracts the eye of Andrey Porgee, a notorious gangster, who becomes her best customer.
But when he commissions a painting based on a childhood photograph, the artist fears his reaction to the final product.
There’s a particular subgenre of speculative fiction that scratches an itch for me like no other. It’s where you find yourself in a world very much like our own, except one thing is slightly… off. Perhaps there’s a movie theater that plays only memories, or the story centers on a child who learns the language of cats. Or in this familiar-yet-unfamiliar world, everyone wears electronic bracelets that monitor their moods.
These stories place the fantastic alongside the mundane, yet their speculative elements feel subtle compared to other works classified as fantasy or science fiction. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, for example, has a contemporary setting that features one distinct speculative element: the titular midnight library, which is a manifestation of purgatory that allows the main character to travel along alternate life paths.
It’s a fantasy novel, certainly, but to group it with the fantasy worlds of Brandon Sanderson or Robin Hobb feels akin to calling cereal a soup. They’re related but distinct categories.
This week in episode six of The Rings of Power, Arondir and Bronwyn fight back against the orcs, and we learn the truth about Adar and what the evil blade is for. Also, the Númenóreans spend a lot of time in transit. Which is fine, Mordor wasn’t built in a day…
[Humility has saved entire kingdoms that the proud have all but led to ruin.]
I recently happened across a Twitter conversation in which an author asserted, with the unwavering confidence of a person about to denounce the heliocentric model of the Solar System, that mystery/detective/police or legal procedurals are antithetical to horror/fantasy. This is a claim for which I am grateful. My quest for inspiration is endless and nothing serves me quite as well as a bar so low it requires a trench.
The assertion is unsurprisingly related to a debate back in the 1950s about whether science fiction mysteries were possible, given that detectives could easily solve the mystery with futuristic technology in a manner the reader could not duplicate. As one might expect from writers, a number of them took this as a challenge. Thus, a small flurry of science fiction mysteries appeared in the 1950s. Perhaps most remarkable was Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, which chose as its setting one in which getting away with murder should be impossible, before depicting how one might go about doing just that in a society filled with telepaths.
In this case, the easiest disproof seems to be to provide at least one example of the eight combinations of mystery, detective, police, and legal procedurals with fantasy and horror.
Episode 7 is a masterful, edge-of-your-seat bottle episode where all the major characters wrestle with grief, dread, and the generational trauma that has spread from Alicent and Rhaenyra to their children. Nearly the entire episode is spent in a pair of lengthy scenes that have the entire cast on screen, roiling with tension, hatred, and frustration. As we move towards the end of the season, we’ll talk about more changes from the source material, most of them for the better, and the ways in which House of the Dragon continues to cleverly introduce intriguing details from Martin’s extensive world.
“Future Tense”
Written by Mike Sussman & Phyllis Strong
Directed by James Whitmore Jr.
Season 2, Episode 16
Production episode 042
Original air date: February 19, 2003
Date: unknown
Captain’s star log. Enterprise comes across a pod floating in space. They take it on board and get it open (which requires a phaser, as the hatch is welded shut) only to find what appears to be a human corpse inside.
Return to the world of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn as its second era, which began with The Alloy of Law, comes to its conclusion in The Lost Metal.
Tor.com is serializing The Lost Metal from now until its release on November 15. New chapters will go live every Monday at 12pm ET.
I recently happened across a Twitter conversation in which an author asserted, with the unwavering confidence of a person about to denounce the heliocentric model of the Solar System, that mystery/detective/police or legal procedurals are antithetical to horror/fantasy. This is a claim for which I am grateful. My quest for inspiration is endless and nothing serves me quite as well as a bar so low it requires a trench.
The assertion is unsurprisingly related to a debate back in the 1950s about whether science fiction mysteries were possible, given that detectives could easily solve the mystery with futuristic technology in a manner the reader could not duplicate. As one might expect from writers, a number of them took this as a challenge. Thus, a small flurry of science fiction mysteries appeared in the 1950s. Perhaps most remarkable was Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, which chose as its setting one in which getting away with murder should be impossible, before depicting how one might go about doing just that in a society filled with telepaths.
In this case, the easiest disproof seems to be to provide at least one example of the eight combinations of mystery, detective, police, and legal procedurals with fantasy and horror.
In September of 2020, publishing phenomenon Christopher Paolini made his adult science fiction debut with the instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller To Sleep in a Sea of Stars. Now, Tor Publishing Group is proud to announce that they will be publishing Fractal Noise, the next standalone entry in Paolini’s Fractalverse series. Fractal Noise will be edited by Editorial Director William Hinton.
Martha Wells’ Three Worlds are a bravura achievement. They’re a single planet populated by literally hundreds of different species, many of them sentient, and most more or less able to coexist—with a few notable exceptions. The “worlds” themselves are the three realms which people and animals inhabit: sea, land, air. Various species move back and forth by various means, but it’s generally clear which of the realms they primarily belong to.
The central species, the one around which Wells’ novels and stories revolve, is the Raksura. Originally they were two species, a winged predator and an arboreal omnivore; by magic and genetic engineering, they combined into one. By the time of the books, they’re thoroughly amalgamated into colonies or courts, ruled by queens.
There are many ways to start a week off right, and one of them is with this trailer. Building on July’s emotional teaser, the latest look at director Ryan Coogler’s next movie is full of glimpses of a new conflict—this one between the people of Wakanda, who are still mourning the loss of T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), and the people of Atlantis and their leader, half-Atlantean Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner (Tenoch Huerta).
We’ve finally got a full blown trailer for Netflix’s Cabinet of Curiosities, an anthology series created and curated by Guillermo del Toro that looks suitably scary—no surprise given that other scary talent such as Babadook director Jennifer Kent and Hannibal director Vincenzo Natali are involved in creating eight terrifying tales.
Robert Eggers, the writer-director behind The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman, has always wanted to do a movie about that blood-sucking creature of the night, (The?) Nosferatu, a.k.a. Dracula. While previous attempts have failed, it looks like his dream project is moving forward once again.
This week in episode six of The Rings of Power, Arondir and Bronwyn fight back against the orcs, and we learn the truth about Adar and what the evil blade is for. Also, the Númenóreans spend a lot of time in transit. Which is fine, Mordor wasn’t built in a day…
[Humility has saved entire kingdoms that the proud have all but led to ruin.]
Poor Ponder. He doesn’t deserve this.
Photo: Timothy Eberly [via Unsplash]
A Night in the Lonesome October is Roger Zelazny’s last novel and still stands as both my favorite Zelazny and my favorite book to open when it’s time for a fall reread, leading up to Halloween. It’s broken into chapters for each day of the month of October—which not only makes it eminently rereadable, but also means it’s the perfect autumnal treat to go along with my pumpkin spice latte. In fact, I encourage everyone I know to read or reread it along with me every Halloween—won’t you join me?
As a half-goddess possessing magic, Yaga is used to living on her own, her prior entanglements with mortals having led to heartbreak.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Witch and the Tsar by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore, out now from Ace. [Read more]
John Carpenter, the mind behind the characters from the Halloween franchise and The Thing (ed. note: not to mention my personal fave, The Fog), will add movie marathon host to his list of titles. The filmmaker and composer will be guiding us through Shout! Factory TV’s Masters of Monsters weekend in November, where he’ll share his love of all things Godzilla.
It’s a culmination of the last couple of years—as well as the last couple of months for me, personally—that’s led to me being drawn to books hyperfocused on death. You don’t need to look far lately to find books with themes on grief, death, and horror, especially in the YA genre. There’s a boom happening here with standouts across all genres, and Adalyn Grace’s Belladonna is an enticing romantic gothic fantasy that carves out its own space among the macabre.
