When the seeds rained down from deep space, it may have been the first stage of an alien invasion—or something else entirely. How much time do we have left, and do we even understand what timescale to use? As a slow apocalypse blooms across the Earth, planets and plants, animals and microbes, all live and die and evolve at different scales. Is one human life long enough to unravel the mystery?
After marrying the prince and having her own child, Snow White visits her stepmother—promising to kill her in ever more horrible ways, at the same time attempting to stay away from the mirror that started it all.
After aliens arrive on earth, humans do the unthinkable out of fear. When an alien walks into a human kite maker’s store, coveting her kites, the human struggles with her guilt over her part in the alien massacres, while neo-Nazis draw a violent line between alien and human.
From the wondrous mind of Brooke Bolander, the author of The Only Harmless Great Thing, who “shares literary DNA with Le Guin” (John Scalzi).
After the world’s end, the last young human learns a final lesson from Earth’s remaining animals.
Toby Benson has a chance to make history. The first mind to circle the moon without a body in tow. It’s a golden opportunity, perhaps the only chance for a 19-year-old whose body failed him to become immortal. But as he reaches the dark side of the moon and loses signal from Earth, the cold of space threatens to overwhelm him.
A mother. A son. A virtual world they both share where each could live forever and achieve their fullest potential. Until one of them decides that isn’t enough for life.
Amazon has ordered Robert Jordan’s fantasy epic The Wheel of Time to series, with Sony Pictures TV to co-produce, and Rafe Judkins serving as showrunner.
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Stop!
I see you there, with that novel in your hand. Turning to page 1 (or, given the vagaries of publishers, maybe page 3), are you? Starting with the prologue, or the preface, or good old Chapter 1? Well, I’m here to tell you to turn that page back in the other direction and take a look at what you might find lurking in the front matter of the book. No, I’m not talking about the publication information (though I’m sure the Library of Congress would love to feel appreciated) and not even the acknowledgements and the dedication (though while you’re here, why not find out who the author loves?). I’m talking about the epigraph. The little (often italicized) sayings or quotations nestled in the very beginning, right before the action starts: right ahead of that opening paragraph on page 1 you were about to read.
Read the epigraph. Yes, exactly like the one I put up at the top of this article, why do you ask?
Now, not every book—not even every fantasy novel—is going to have an epigraph. For example, I just checked the romance novel I was reading this afternoon and it doesn’t have one. But when a novel does have an epigraph—when the author has decided to start their book with a little bit of something else—it’s well worth your time to read it. In fact, reading those little italicized words can tell you an awful lot about the book you’re about to experience.
Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s classic book about the Antichrist and Armageddon, is finally getting the TV treatment it always deserved. Fans have been begging for decades for this favorite novel to make it’s way onto our screens. Fancasts have been going around for years on Twitter, Tumblr, and even LiveJournal (that’s how long people have wanted this! It’s practically archaeological!).
For years the biggest names from British TV and film have been thrown around on various fan lists, and now I’m happy to say the real cast of the upcoming six-part series lives up to even the most exacting fan’s standards. Just based on the cast alone, Good Omens is already shaping up to be an incredible show. When you combine some of the best actors from every important genre show in the past ten years, how could it not be?
We want to send you a copy of editor Lisa Yaszek’s The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin, available October 9th from the Library of America!
Space-opera heroines, gender-bending aliens, post-apocalyptic pregnancies, changeling children, interplanetary battles of the sexes, and much more: a groundbreaking new collection of classic American science fiction by women from the 1920s to the 1960s
SF-expert Lisa Yaszek presents the biggest and best survey of the female tradition in American science fiction ever published, a thrilling collection of twenty-five classic tales. From Pulp Era pioneers to New Wave experimentalists, here are over two dozen brilliant writers ripe for discovery and rediscovery, including Leslie F. Stone, Judith Merril, Leigh Brackett, Kit Reed, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., and Ursula K. Le Guin. Imagining strange worlds and unexpected futures, looking into and beyond new technologies and scientific discoveries, in utopian fantasies and tales of cosmic horror, these women created and shaped speculative fiction as surely as their male counterparts. Their provocative, mind-blowing stories combine to form a thrilling multidimensional voyage of literary-feminist exploration and recovery.
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You may have noticed that I’m very interested in books with queer female protagonists. Everything, as a friend of mine said once, is better with lesbians—though I’d just say women who love women, myself.
I suspect some of you reading here have a degree of overlap with this interest of mine. So let me share with you some of the new and forthcoming science fiction and fantasy novels where I’m reliably informed there are queer female protagonists, and where I’m reliably informed that their queerness doesn’t end in tragedy.
For two decades, Jim Killen has served as the science fiction and fantasy book buyer for Barnes & Noble. Every month on Tor.com and the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Jim shares his curated list of the month’s best science fiction & fantasy books.
Originally published as a webcomic (2016-2017), Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam is a fantastical queer coming of age tale. The dual narrative follows Mia across two significant portions of her life, first during her freshman year at the boarding school where she meets Grace, and second, five years later, when she begins her first adult job out of school. She joins a crew who reclaim and restore architecture across the reaches of space: Alma and Char, who are married, as well as Jules and Elliot who are closer in age to Mia. There’s more to the friendly ship’s crew than Mia would’ve guessed at first, though, and a surprising shared history leads their new-made family down a risky but important path.
The chapters alternate in time, developing young Mia’s relationship with Grace while simultaneously exploring her relationship with the crew and, in the end, bringing those two threads together. With as much reflection as it has action, On a Sunbeam takes the reader on a quiet, thoughtful journey through all different shades of love as well as the risks worth taking for it. It’s a meditative and domestic project, human above all even while showing people’s rough edges.
(Some spoilers below.)
Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s classic book about the Antichrist and Armageddon, is finally getting the TV treatment it always deserved. Fans have been begging for decades for this favorite novel to make it’s way onto our screens. Fancasts have been going around for years on Twitter, Tumblr, and even LiveJournal (that’s how long people have wanted this! It’s practically archaeological!).
For years the biggest names from British TV and film have been thrown around on various fan lists, and now I’m happy to say the real cast of the upcoming six-part series lives up to even the most exacting fan’s standards. Just based on the cast alone, Good Omens is already shaping up to be an incredible show. When you combine some of the best actors from every important genre show in the past ten years, how could it not be?
Hulu has released the first trailer for Into the Dark, its horror anthology series with Blumhouse Productions (Get Out, Happy Death Day, The Purge) tackling one holiday-themed horror story a month. It’s like Hallmark, except instead of mistaken identities and happily-ever-afters over Halloween/Valentine’s Day/Mother’s Day, it’s slashers and Final Girls. They wisely chose Halloween for the first installment: The Body follows a professional hitman who finds the perfect cover at a Halloween party.
“How humans decide what to do with their arms on a second-by-second basis, I still have no idea.” (Exit Strategy, p 59.)
When I learned that Tor.com Publishing had offered Martha Wells a contract for a novel that will continue the story of Murderbot, I was utterly delighted. Because Murderbot, the protagonist of four novellas in the Murderbot Diaries, of which Exit Strategy is the fourth and latest, is such an enormous amount of fun to read about that for the series to come to an end just yet would be somewhat disappointing. Murderbot—anxious, insecure, and bedevilled by strong emotions which it deeply dislikes experiencing—is an extremely relatable character, a Security Unit (SecUnit) bot/construct that has achieved its independence (illegally) and finds itself somehow still with the impulse to help people (especially people it feels loyalty towards) despite its best efforts.
Amazon has ordered Robert Jordan’s fantasy epic The Wheel of Time to series, with Sony Pictures TV to co-produce, and Rafe Judkins serving as showrunner.
The first season of Marvel and Hulu’s Runaways took its time building out the events of the first issue of the Marvel Comics series—that is, taking 10 episodes for the children of the villainous Pride to actually, you know, run away from their superpowered and if not evil, then at least very morally ambiguous, parents. By building out the story between when Alex, Nico, and their friends discovered their parents’ secrets and when they went on the run, the series has laid plenty of narrative groundwork for season 2. Judging from the first teaser, that means delving into their inherited superpowers and deciding whether or not they can ever return home.
Ordinarily, dozens of spiders pouring into one small space would be a bad thing, but in the latest trailer for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse it is the best possible scenario. When Kingpin tries out a new inter-dimensional portal, Miles Morales meets Peter Parker for the first time. He figures they’ll swap some web-slinging tips and call it a day—but then Spideys from all different multiverses show up (including Peni Parker and Spider-Man Noir!) and it becomes clear that they’ll have to stop Kingpin before his new toy destroys the fabric of reality.
Or, worse—crushes Brooklyn.
Check out the adorable trailer below!
There is a woman in a forest. Or maybe on a highway by a cornfield. At the doorway of a condemned building.
And she knows that something is wrong.
I have a weird and frivolous complaint to start off week 10 of reading The Great Hunt. And that complaint is; why so many italics? And for that matter, why so many capitalizations? Generally species names aren’t considered proper nouns, but in The Wheel of Time everything from Ogier to Myrddraal to Mashadar gets its own capitalization. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word “human” capitalized, however.
Similarly, italics can be used to indicate words in a different language, so it makes sense, for example, that when Selene calls Loial alantin, that term would get italicized. A lot of Aes Sedai words, like saidir, saidin, angreal, etc, also get italicized, probably because they also come from a different language. But if that’s the case, I’d love to know more about how language works in the world of The Wheel of Time. Is there any memory or record of the languages from which these words come? Are there some words that have become accepted as belonging to modern languages that no longer would get italicized?
I’m probably reading a little too much into this, and the italics are just there to guide the reader as they encounter so many new words. And of course, if I didn’t have to worry so much about typing everything correctly, it’d be easier to gloss over formatting that way. But as I typed out grolm over and over again this week, I just kept asking myself why the italics were there. And for that matter, what the heck is this plot-convenient creature that only seems to exist in the ‘if’ world—or does it exist in Rand’s as well? Selene seems to know all about them, which raises some interesting questions that Rand and his friends have been too busy to think of.
But before I get into that, let’s do the recap and see how Rand fares against his dangers, both seen and unseen.
It is the start of fall and the month of Halloween! The leaves will fall, the pumpkins will appear, and things will start to get creepy… so why not get in the mood?
Dragon’s Code, the continuation of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern written by her daughter Gigi, is available tomorrow from Del Rey! To celebrate, we want to send you a copy of Dragon’s Code—and, in case you want to refresh your memory, a copy of The Dragonriders of Pern, the omnibus containing the first three Dragonriders book!
In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Dragonriders of Pern series, Gigi does her mother proud, adding to the family tradition of spinning unputdownable tales that recount the adventures of the brave inhabitants of a distant planet who battle the pitiless adversary known as Thread.
The last time Thread attacked Pern, the world was unprepared for the fight—until the Oldtimers appeared. These courageous dragonriders arrived from the past, traveling four hundred years to help their descendants survive. But the collision of past and present took its toll. While most of the displaced rescuers adapted to their new reality, others could not abide the jarring change and found themselves in soul-crushing exile, where unhappiness and resentment seethed.
Netflix has been fairly quiet about the forthcoming fifth season of Black Mirror, but a shred of news has come out via Bloomberg, as part of a larger piece about the streaming service experimenting with interactive episodes and movies. According to Bloomberg’s report, Netflix is preparing a slate of programs—including children’s animated series, Black Mirror, and two video-game adaptations—in which the viewer gets to choose where the plot of a given program goes based on a series of branching options. At least one of these will be released by the end of the year… and it could very well be Black Mirror, as Bloomberg reports that season 5 will premiere sometime in December.
