“The Path Through Time” is Jules’s favorite part of the museum, a marvelous exhibit that brings the past to life, from the present all the way back to the prehistoric. Tonight at his aunt’s wedding reception as Jules walks along the path, it comes alive like never before.
Judge Dee is back to solve a brand-new case involving the mysterious death of the vampire Count Werdenfels. The mystery? Who killed him. The twist? Three different people are proudly proclaiming to have committed the crime.
An uncontrollable plague has left the city in ruins and trapped in perpetual quarantine. A thief hires a guide to lead him safely through the city’s many dangers to the one person who can give him the travel papers he needs to escape.
A group of five friends rent a cabin in the woods—the next day only four are alive. What happened and why is something the survivors are desperate to unravel.
In a near-future San Francisco where the gig economy has made work more precarious than ever, Edwina is an average twenty-something scrambling to hold down her job with a major skin care brand. Until her awful boss does something you should never do—angers the fae on social media—and the struggles of her job take on an even nastier shade.
As the Cold War stalls and the threat of nuclear warfare dominates the news, small-town misfits Laurie and Fell bond over a shared love of music and the mystery of the erratic radio messages that hint at the existence of a future worth reaching out for.
The Ursula K. Le Guin Reread explores anew the transformative writing, exciting worlds, and radical stories that changed countless lives. In this final week, we’ll be covering Le Guin’s novel Tehanu (1990).
Last year I embarked on a quest: to reread all of Ursula Le Guin’s works, including story and essay collections, and write about them for Tor.com—a dream come true for any SFF critic. I’ve written about Le Guin for a year, covering her novels, stories, and essays from the beginning of her career (some truly just OK stories) to her first novel of the 1980s, the strange anti-Narnia novel The Beginning Place. That’s nearly two decades of powerful, inquisitive writing that racked up awards and made Le Guin into a household name, an undisputed master of the genre.
As children, with our lives ahead of us, we wonder ‘what if?’—what if that squirrel could talk, what if I had wings, what if Mommy and Daddy disappeared and I could live in my house all alone and eat dessert any time I wanted. As time passes and the past comes to trail behind we turn this sense of fantasy away from the present back to the past. ‘What if’ becomes ‘what if I had’—moved to Panama, quit smoking, walked away that night, told him I loved him. No child ever wished for a pony half so hard as your average adult wishes to have the chance to rectify an error, supplement a conversation, salvage some lost portion of our lives.
It is no wonder, then, that genre fiction has always been interested in memory—which, after all, has a far closer kinship with fantasy than fact. The Seventh Perfection is a book about a woman with perfect recollection seeking to untangle truth from the twisted strands of history (both personal and societal), and the consequences which spring from this single minded obsession.
Here are five other books likewise fascinated (tormented?) by memory.
Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we wrap up our discussion Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, including final thoughts from both of us and a little from Anne on the screen adaptations. Spoilers ahead.
“It hit me like a ton of bricks one day. I remember having a cup of coffee and I went, ‘Well, look, there is a giant canvas in every little town everywhere around the world. And on this giant canvas there are 24 frames of image on that screen every second and it’s the most wonderful living art form.’” –Yahoo Serious, The New York Times, 1989
Okay, so, taking Young Einstein—ahem—seriously may, initially, seem like taking Plan 9 from Outer Space seriously. Roger Ebert gave this film one star, and seemed to begrudge it even this tiny reward. The movie is ridiculous: a fictive debut out of Australia from an art school reject; made on a shoestring budget; produced, starring, and directed by this same art school reject; and no script doctors or test audiences were employed in the making of this film as far as I can tell. It is, at best, a B-movie.
However, the auteur definitely took his subject matter seriously, and saw comedy and his film persona as a way of communicating something deep and powerful through what is a fundamentally goofy and campy lens.
Illustration from The Three Musketeers by Maurice Leloir (D. Appleton & Company, 1911)
It’s never a bad time for adventure fantasy, but I would posit that now is the best time for adventure fantasy.
Here are some of my favourites, hand-selected for escapism, intrigue, high density of swordfights, and sheer enjoyment. Ideal if you have a fire handy to curl up beside. (Surely I am not the only one with a persistent daydream of sitting in a huge wingback armchair before a crackling hearth?)
The Man of Steel might soon fly back into theaters soon. According to Shadow And Act, and backed up by Deadline, Warner Bros. has tapped Ta-Nehisi Coates to write a new superman film, with J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot set to produce.
At the end of its first season, the aliens of Solar Opposites were on the verge of escaping from Earth, where they’d been trapped for a year after fleeing their destroyed homeworld.
Hulu has released a new trailer for the series, and we can see that escape isn’t exactly going well.
It only took six years and most of a season of television to finally give Wanda Maximoff the origin she deserved. Let’s talk about it.
The Shadow Fold is real, and it’s dark as hell. The first full trailer for Shadow and Bone, the Netflix series based on the books by Leigh Bardugo, is here, and it’s just as impressive and epic as anyone could have wished. It’s a perfect introduction to the series’ world, full of dark and light magic, mysterious powers, and the question of how a humble mapmaker has light for blood.
In 2018, HBO won a bidding war for former Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat’s adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife. Audrey Niffenegger’s novel had been adapted once before—into a movie starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams—but Moffat had been in love with the book for years; he wrote “The Girl in the Fireplace” in response to Niffenegger’s story. His adaptation has been chugging along behind the scenes, and now is one step closer to filming with the casting of Theo James (Divergent) as the time-traveling Henry, and Rose Leslie (Game of Thrones, pictured above) as Clare, who meets Henry over and over again at different points in time.
Some hundred years ago, visionary hydroelectric pioneer Adam Beck proposed a grand scheme for electrically powered trains that would service the transit needs of southern Ontario. Such is the blinding speed at which modern society moves that scarcely a century later, something akin to a much-reduced version of Beck’s proposal became reality in the form of Waterloo Region’s Ion Light Rail System. For the most part the Ion is perfectly functional, some curiously patron-hostile stops aside, but an unexpected emergent property of the system very quickly became apparent: Kitchener-Waterloo drivers are terrible at noticing train-sized objects. You’d think a massive, whale-sized object bearing down on your car would draw attention … but apparently not.
Anyone who has read A. J. Deutsch’s 1950 short, “A Subway Named Möbius” could have predicted that something unexpected would happen.
Amazon is still keeping its cards close to its chest with the teasers for The Underground Railroad, Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. The new teaser is barely 30 seconds of beautiful footage, but importantly, it finally reveals the release date for the show.
Jordan Peele’s reboot of The Twilight Zone is ending with its second season, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The series recently wrapped up its run on CBS All Access back in June, and won’t return for a third season.
A long-awaited sequel to Neill Blomkamp’s debut film District 9 is now in the works. On Twitter, the director announced that he, fellow screenwriter (and wife) Terri Tatchell, and actor Sharlto Copley have begun writing the screenplay for District 10.
Okay, we’re back and there are some dragons, so let’s get on with Guards! Guards!
The Handmaid’s Tale has long since left its source material behind. Margaret Atwood’s award-winning 1985 book explored life in the dystopian Gilead, a nation where women have no rights, and handmaids are forced to bear children for high-ranking men. The adaptation’s first season hewed fairly closely to the book, but the second and third seasons went in their own direction, expanding the world and the rebellion against Gilead—which looks to be in full swing in the trailer for season four.
CBS’s streaming service Paramount+ is about to get another big science fiction franchise: Halo. The long-gestating series was originally slated to air on Viacom’s premium network Showtime—with the move comes the announcement that it will debut at some point in early 2022.
Hulu has announced when our favorite big headed villain will be floating onto our screens. Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. series will premiere on May 21st. The release date was accompanied by a brief trailer that gave us another taste of what we can expect from this unconventional comedy.
