A new novelette set in the realms of Kerstin Hall’s acclaimed The Mkalis Cycle series. The 813th realm of Mkalis has fallen to a cruel and mercurial god, but Tahmais, its would-be successor, finds an unlikely ally in her quest to reclaim it at any cost…
Sneak a peek at the cover for Kerstin Hall’s new standalone fantasy novel ASUNDER, coming August 2024 from Tordotcom!
A contentious election and radicalized locals interfere with Canadian recovery workers’ efforts at the site of a catastrophic flood in near-future Mississippi.
This story is set in the same future as The Lost Cause, Cory Doctorow’s new novel, available everywhere on November 14, 2023.
While learning the ropes from a crafty Jazz Age bank robber, a young stowaway discovers their authentic self, a hidden gift, and that there are no straight lines when you run the fox roads…
A new Judge Dee mystery!
While visiting the mysterious castle of Maidstone for an investigation, Judge Dee and Jonathan discover the only thing more menacing than a vampire child is twin vampire children…
On one of their earliest Visigoth assignments, Graff and Ell stumble into each other’s secrets (and one significant surprise) while conducting a recovery mission on a mining asteroid scheduled for imminent pulverization…
The sister of an abducted child is haunted by a sinister figure who may or may not be real. . .
I think this has been the greatest movie year of my lifetime. I still have a long list of films I want to see before New Year’s Day, but so far the pattern has been: go to a movie, be astonished by it, worry that people are going to think I’m a shill because all my reviews are positive. (I promise you, if I think a film is crap I’ll tell you to save your precious money and far more precious time.) But now here we are, today, with me saying that Godzilla Minus One is one of the best movies of the year.
YES, this year, with all those other extraordinary movies in it.
There’s a fight a-brewin’: On September 26th, Emily Wilson’s translation of the ancient Greek epic poem the Iliad was released (published by W.W. Norton), the natural follow-up to her 2018 translation of the Odyssey. That initial project garnered a great deal of attention as being the first published translation of the Odyssey done by a woman—into English. Wilson, for her part, prefers to emphasize her work’s more immediate qualities than her own metahistorical first-ness.
The marketing campaign for Wilson’s Odyssey was very successful, however, due in whatever proportion to usage of the reliable “first woman to ____” narrative, and the book received popular acclaim as well as positive scholarly reviews. To some people, it was their first introduction to the Homeric epic. For others, it was the first time that they really connected to the story, freshly delivered to them in more idiomatically accessible language. In either case, I have anecdotally heard several people say that they first developed a deep personal connection to Homeric poetry and to Odysseus’ story through Wilson’s translation.
Lately I feel like everyone is talking about masculinity and what it means to be a good dude. Last month, I was on a panel at the Pride on the Page book festival with Jacob Tobia (Sissy) who was saying that we’ve spent decades expanding gender roles for women in mainstream society—and women finally won the right to wear pants in the workplace (for now)—but meanwhile, too many guys men remain trapped, unable to express healthy emotions or process all of their trauma.
As someone who was so successful at being a man that I actually graduated, I want to help!
So it’s a really good thing that science fiction and fantasy offer us so many excellent examples of guys who are secure in their masculinity and ready to do the right thing, even when it’s tough.
Looking for a way to make devastating competitive moves against your friends while occupying an imaginative fantasy world? Look no further!
I play board games any chance I get. My friends and I have an unwritten rule that every hardcore gaming session must include at least one new game. This has resulted in a recent onslaught of new board games, many of which take place in unique fantasy worlds or use fantasy concepts in intriguing ways.
Here are five of my favorites—and I hope you’ll recommend your own top fantasy board games in the comments!
If I could manage Miss Treason’s general death arc… that’s what I want, is the point. I want to do that.
There’s a moment about three-quarters of the way through The Boy and the Heron when the young protagonist, Mahito, and a companion, make their way down a rough-hewn stairway carved into a crevasse. A waterfall cascades beside them; other people bustle about. And there, for a few seconds, a rainbow shimmers when light hits the waterfall.
This is not a spoiler. It’s not a pivotal moment, the rainbow doesn’t suddenly turn into a fantastical creature or a portal to another world—it’s just a rainbow (if a rainbow can ever be just a rainbow) but Miyazaki, or a member of his team, took the time to draw and color that rainbow, to get the shading just right. Mahito and his friend don’t even notice it.
It’s there for us.
When Hurston Hill is threatened by a suspiciously powerful urban development firm, Miss l’Abielle steps up to protect her community with the help of a mysterious orphaned girl in this charming follow-up to “St. Valentine, St. Abigail, St. Brigid,” featured on LeVar Burton Reads.
The third and final special featuring the return of DoctorDonna (a.k.a. David Tennant and Catherine Tate) is set to stream on Disney+ in mere days. And while it very likely will be the last time we see the DoctorDonna together (sob!), it will also be the first time we’ve seen Neil Patrick Harris enter the Whoverse.
The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki’s last [???] feature) has received rave reviews. And the movie, which is distributed by the company GKIDS in the U.S., has a star-studded voice cast that includes some unexpected choices.
GKIDS was in charge of pulling the English-speaking ensemble together to dub the film (check out some of the dub in the trailer above), and doing so was a big endeavor, as a new article reveals.
Supernatural fiction abounds with tales of vampires, werewolves, and other uncanny beings living among us, from the paranormally-charged small towns of Charlaine Harris’s fiction to the visceral political thrills of Benjamin Percy’s Red Moon. Cadwell Turnbull’s Convergence Saga—the first book of which was 2021’s No Gods, No Monsters—falls somewhat in this category. It is, by and large, set in a world similar to our own, albeit one where the bulk of the humans residing there have recently become aware that some of their friends and neighbors possess uncanny abilities. Werewolves feature prominently in the series, though they’re far from the only supernatural beings to do so.
Poor Things is a blast. I’m not sure if everyone will like it, but everyone should like it. This world would be a better place if this kind of movie could do Barbenheimer numbers.
The film is a phantasmagorical bildungsroman, which is my fancy way of saying that it happens in a somewhat alternate Europe where their reality is a bit skewed from our own, and we follow a young person going on an adventure of self-discovery.
Head below for the full list of horror, romantasy, and other SFF-crossover titles heading your way in December!
Let’s pop on our helmets and climb into our rocket because we are headed to space. These five underrated backlist titles are all set amongst the stars. Advanced tech? Check. Traversing the galaxy? Check. Unicorns? Uh, what???
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
How many of us can recite this line from memory? I admit, I get tripped up in the details, but the first sentence is gold, and the image it conjures up is even better. For me, it’s one part Peter Jackson, one part Rankin/Bass, one part the way I imagined a hobbit-hole before I’d seen any movies. Tidy. Cozy. Warm. Wood-lined. Part of a tree, part of the earth, close to all the things I cared so fiercely about when I was a small kid hearing The Hobbit read aloud for the first time.
I feel the last few years have seen a flourishing in fantasy novels that explicitly centre the Jewish experience in European history. Or perhaps it’s just that I’m encountering them more in the scattershot sampling of fantasy that I read. Either way, Wrath Becomes Her by Aden Polydoros (The City Beautiful, Bone Weaver) is a book concerned with Jewishness and survival in the face of hostility. It’s also a book that speaks strikingly to queer themes.
Oh, my Cosmere Chickens, we have so much to go over this week! Revelations about AonDor! Budding romance! Sacrifices galore, and so much more! Things are really starting to heat up in Elantris, and Paige and I are champing at the bit to dive in, so won’t you join us?
Have you ever wanted a faster-than-light trip to the future?
We’re thrilled to share the cover of New Adventures in Space Opera, a short fiction anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan—available August 13, 2024 from Tachyon Publications.
The second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is now available on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K-UHD, and it includes over two hours of bonus features, including one where Spock (Ethan Peck) explores a new mastication experience.
