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.
The story of how I came to write Origins of the Wheel of Time begins with my first reading of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World as a lad, not long after it came out. I didn’t see the whole picture at that point, but it was enough to have an inkling that there was a bigger story behind the story of the Wheel.
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.
These last two episodes of The Rings of Power sure did some things, didn’t they? Have they changed my overall opinion of the show? Only a little, because I’m still compartmentalizing this thing. Have episodes 4 and 5 made my trust in the showrunners waver somewhat? Yes. Do I retain hope that the show will “survive” this recent stumble, and go on to still be excellent overall? Yes, I’ve still got some hope. But it’s Amdir hope, not Estel hope. I’ll explain.
So here follows another opinion-riddled discussion of the last two episodes, filled to the brim with spoilers.
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.
The next installment in the Planet of the Ape movies is coming at us, and Freya Allan, who plays Ciri on Netflix’s The Witcher, is on board in the leading non-ape (a.k.a. human) role.
The weird thing about Bones and All, the much-lauded second movie in which Luca Guadagnino directs Timothée Chalamet (after Call Me By Your Name), is that the book it’s based on seems to be… not really about his character. Camille DeAngelis’ novel is described as “at once a gorgeously written horror story as well as a mesmerizing meditation on female power and sexuality.”
This looks like something else.
Books and textual artifacts have been frequent catalysts in Gothic and horror literature. H.P. Lovecraft’s characters have The Necronomicon and Francis Wayland Thurston discovers dark truths he cannot live with in his dead uncle’s notes in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928), while the Overlook Hotel seduces Jack Torrance with a pile of historical documents in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977). Offering detailed chronicles of the past—whether recent or ancient—and forbidden knowledge that can be achieved in no other way, these books serve as both repositories and doorways.
Books bursting with dark secrets play a similarly pivotal role in Sinclair Smith’s The Diary (1994; also published as Let Me Tell You How I Died) and Peter Lerangis’ The Yearbook (1994).
I have a lot of questions about Emil Blonsky.
Since 2020, the Secret Hideout Trek shows on Paramount+ have shown us the fates several of the characters from the twenty-fourth-century spinoffs: TNG’s Jean-Luc Picard, William Riker, Deanna Troi, Wes Crusher, and Data and Voyager’s Seven of Nine on Picard (with TNG’s Worf, Beverly Crusher, and Geordi La Forge to be seen in the upcoming third season); Voyager’s Kathryn Janeway and Chakotay on Prodigy; Riker and Troi again and Voyager’s Tom Paris on Lower Decks.
Conspicuously absent from that list is anyone from DS9 (though Quark has been mentioned more than once on both Picard and LD), but this week’s LD makes up for that lack in spades, and it’s my favorite episode of LD so far. (Note, this doesn’t mean it’s the best. Just that it’s my favorite, which is as much my love for DS9 as anything…)
If you forgot that a Taika Waititi-directed Time Bandits series was coming to Apple TV+, well, you’re not alone. It’s been three and a half years since Waititi’s involvement was announced. But the adaptation of Terry Gilliam’s 1981 film (pictured above) is real! Real enough to be well into the casting process, anyway. Variety reports that the main cast is set—and it’s an intriguing lineup.
There’s comfort in immersing yourself in a story you know—but there’s a certain thrill in seeing that story come to life in a new way.
