A dark fantasy about Jeoffry, a cat who fights demons, a poet, who is Jeoffry’s human confined to an insane asylum, and Satan, who schemes to end the world.
For He Can Creep
io9 Reveals the First Look at the New Star Wars Book Thrawn: Treason
Publishing this month, Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn: Treason is the third installment in the Star Wars: Thrawn series, and takes place before the battle for Lothal’s liberation, as depicted in the series finale of Star Wars: Rebels. And io9 has a first look at the book. Some initial details ahead!
Not only does General Admiral Thrawn find his TIE Defender project on hold in favor of Director Krennic’s future Death Star plans (as depicted in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story), but an unexpected run-in with his former protégé Commander Eli Vanto redirects Thrawn’s attentions back towards his people, the Chiss. Essentially, Thrawn finds his loyalties being tested and split once more.
So, what exactly has Thrawn been up to in the events leading up to Thrawn: Treason?
Heartless: Andre Norton’s Dread Companion
It’s been a while since I remembered any elements of a Norton novel in this reread, but Dread Companion definitely rang some bells. I remembered the names of the children, Oomark and Bartare, and the weird landscape of geometrical shapes in which the protagonist finds herself. I also recognized the scary hairy beast-man when he appeared, though I didn’t recall much of who he was or how he got there.
What I had forgotten, or maybe just didn’t notice, was how dark and ultimately heartless the book is.
Gods of Jade and Shadow Sweepstakes!
The Mayan god of death sends a young woman on a harrowing, life-changing journey in a dark, one-of-a-kind fairy tale inspired by Mexican folklore. Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is full of magic and myth – and we want to send you a copy!
The Jazz Age is in full swing, but Casiopea Tun is too busy cleaning the floors of her wealthy grandfather’s house to listen to any fast tunes. Nevertheless, she dreams of a life far from her dusty small town in southern Mexico. A life she can call her own. Yet this new life seems as distant as the stars, until the day she finds a curious wooden box in her grandfather’s room.
Read an Excerpt from The Gossamer Mage
Only in Tananen do people worship a single deity: the Deathless Goddess. Only in this small, forbidden realm are there those haunted by words of no language known to woman or man. The words are Her Gift, and they summon magic.
Mage scribes learn to write Her words as intentions: spells to make beasts or plants, designed to any purpose. If an intention is flawed, what the mage creates is a gossamer: a magical creature as wild and free as it is costly for the mage. For Her Gift comes at a steep price. Each successful intention ages a mage until they dare no more. But her magic demands to be used; the Deathless Goddess will take her fee, and mages will die.
To end this terrible toll, the greatest mage in Tananen vows to find and destroy Her. He has yet to learn She is all that protects Tananen from what waits outside. And all that keeps magic alive…
The Goassamer Mage, a new fantasy epic from Julie E. Czerneda, is available August 6th from DAW.
5 Questions About the New 007 and the Future of the Bond Franchise
Screenshot: MGM
The news has been keeping a weather eye on the latest James Bond film (currently only known as Bond 25), leading to a sizable leak and subsequent announcement over the weekend that could shake the series all the way to its foundations—and I’m not talking about the obliteration of Bond’s ancestral home, Skyfall.
I’m talking about the new 007.
Drop What You’re Doing and Watch DefunctTV’s Jim Henson Special
Screenshot: Defunctland
We have just under three weeks left until The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance hits Netflix, and what better way to prepare for the long-awaited sequel than a six-part ode to its creator? On Sunday, DefunctTV uploaded the last episode of their miniseries on Jim Henson’s “life and works,” and we’re not hyperbolizing when we say you should drop whatever it is you’re doing and go watch the whole thing right now.
3 Possible Star Trek: Picard Storylines that Are too Depressing to Contemplate
Screenshot: CBS
One of the hallmarks of Star Trek: The Next Generation is its meditative quality; unlike like the excellent, nail-biting action in Star Trek: Discovery, the vast majority of TNG’s best episodes are quiet and more reflective. In fact, current Trek executive producer Alex Kurtzman has described Discovery as a “bullet” contrasting it with the upcoming TNG sequel saying: “Picard is very contemplative show. It will find a balance between the speed of Discovery and the nature of what Next Gen was.” And part of what the show is seemingly contemplating is not just what is happening with Picard in real time, but also what has happened since the events of Star Trek Nemesis. We’ve all got theories, but what if Kurtzman, Michael Chabon, Kirsten Beyer, and Patrick Stewart are willing to go super-dark? Here’s a speculative peek into the Picard possibilities you haven’t even brought yourself to consider yet…
The MCU’s Spidey Is a Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man that Looks Like His Neighborhood
Screenshot: Sony Pictures
Spider-Man has always been inextricably linked with New York City. From his very first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15, he’s been a city kid, though that he was actually in the Big Apple wasn’t specified until later. (Marvel’s earliest superhero comics tended to take place in generic, unidentified cities, or in “Central City” or the like…)
Some of Spidey’s most iconic moments have been part of the city that never sleeps, most notably Gwen Stacy’s death on the Brooklyn Bridge (or the George Washington Bridge, depending on whether you believe the art or the script, though the story really only makes sense at the former, given the geography).
But while his surroundings have always looked like NYC, his supporting cast has never quite lived up to it—at least until the Marvel Cinematic Universe…
[He looks out for the neighborhood, has a dope suit, and I really respect him. … ‘Sup, dickwad?]
The First Trailer for The King’s Man Is Here
Screenshot: 20th Century Fox
Buckle up, kiddos, because The King’s Man is about to take you on a wild ride through history. The first trailer for the Kingsman prequel is here, and it largely consists of Ralph Fiennes narrating the shady (BIG understatement. HUGE.) deeds of the British Empire as things explode in slow-motion.
The Tao of Sir Terry: Pratchett and Political Philosophy
“It wasn’t that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn’t offer many opportunities not to break them.” —Night Watch (2002)
In the Discworld series, Ankh-Morpork is the Ur-city, of which all other cities throughout time and space are mere echoes. But politics is, quite literally, the life of the polis, of the city, as Pratchett himself was keenly aware:
“‘Polis’ used to mean ‘city’, said Carrot. That’s what policeman means: ‘a man for the city’. Not many people knew that.” —Men at Arms (1993)
And again, in the finale of the same book: “Have you ever wondered where the word ‘politician’ comes from?” said the Patrician.” It is therefore little wonder that politics, and political philosophy, is a core subject of most, if not all, of Pratchett’s works at some level or another—and this is especially true of the Discworld novels
Great Lost Civilizations of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Excavated ruins of Mohenjo-daro; Photo: Saqib Qayyum (CC BY-SA 3.0)
As previously discussed, it’s possible to do such a thorough job of destroying a civilization that all knowledge of it is lost…at least until inexplicable relics start to turn up. One example: the real world Indus Valley Civilization, which might have flourished from 3300 to 1300 BC, across territory now found in western and northwestern India, Pakistan and northeastern Afghanistan. It was contemporaneous with the civilizations of Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China. History did a thorough enough job of erasing the Indus Valley Civilization from the records that when modern archaeology began to study it, it wasn’t at all clear whose ruins were being explored. It just goes to show that no matter how great a civilization might be, time is greater.
War, Betrayal, and Dark Secrets in This Summer’s Upcoming Young Adult Speculative Fiction
With the MASSIVE amount of amazing YA science fiction, fantasy, and horror dropping in July, August, and September, I might as well give up on trying to get my TBR queue under control. We’ve got sequels and anthologies, epic journeys and small town horrors, and all kinds of goodies to while away the hot summer nights and long sunny days.
Is Godzilla Technically a Dragon? The Discourse Unfolds on Twitter
Screenshot: Warner Bros.
Tor Books’ blog is currently wrapping up a stirring and fiery Dragon Week and, after publishing a Top 5 Deadliest Dragons article, Tor took to Twitter to ask the essential question: Which is the deadlier dragon, Smaug or Godzilla?
What furious kaiju hell did they release?
“Get off my plains!” — Cowboys & Aliens
Screenshot: Universal Pictures
Platinum Studios released Cowboys & Aliens in 2006. The storyline, conceived by Platinum’s Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, had been in development since 1997, both as a graphic novel and as a film. Universal and Dreamworks bought the rights to the concept, which Rosenberg eventually put out as a 105-page graphic novel written by Fred Van Lente and Andrew Foley, with art by Dennis Calero and Luciano Lima.
The movie finally came out in 2011.
Series: 4-Color to 35-Millimeter: The Great Superhero Movie Rewatch
Paper Girls Comic Series Picked Up by Amazon Studios
Cover art: Cliff Chiang
Amazon Studios has landed a TV series adaptation of Paper Girls, the comic by writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Cliff Chiang, as reported by Deadline.
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