“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.
Divide et impera. Divide and rule: the approach of choice for many historical conquerors, and also a great way to write a novel.
Breaking apart something that was once whole to examine the pieces provides the novelist with an approach fit for a whole range of subjects. I’ve found so many books following that pattern that I couldn’t begin to list them all. But the good news is that I’ve only been asked to talk about five here, so I’ve picked five that have lodged themselves in my brain, and showcase in how many ways the tactic can be used when it comes to the best science fiction and fantasy writing.
A. K. Larkwood’s The Unspoken Name is a stunning debut fantasy about a young priestess sentenced to die, who at the last minute escapes her fate only to become an assassin for the wizard who saved her.
How it works: Subscribers to the Tor.com eBook Club get a free sci-fi/fantasy book periodically throughout the year just by signing up with a valid email address. You’ll get an email when the download window is open.
This week, the Tor.com eBook Club is offering The Unspoken Name by A. K. Larkwood.
To celebrate its 60th anniversary, Saga Press will publish a three-book omnibus of the complete novels within the legendary Elric of Melniboné epic fantasy saga by World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award winner Michael Moorcock. All eleven novels will be published in chronological order, in Moorcock’s preferred editions, for the very first time in the U.S.
Saga will publish one book per month, beginning September 28 with the first volume, Elric of Melniboné, followed by Stormbringer on October 26, and The White Wolf on November 30.
Each volume will feature vivid illustrations from award-winning artists over the decades including Michael Whelan, Brom, Robert Gould, John Picacio, and others.
Check out the covers for all three omnibus editions below!
I started reading Moon Called in a somewhat cranky frame of mind, after the disappointments of Yurth Burden. Oh no, I thought. Another paint-by-numbers plot. Still more rigid dualistic determinism. Much of it, of course, in ancient underground installations full of Evil Rat Things.
Most of that is in fact true. Protagonist Thora is a Chosen One of the Moon Goddess, referred to as HER (sic) and The Lady. She was born with a special birthmark and destined for divine service. She wears a special jewel that serves as a magical weapon, and of course her home and family and apparently her entire order of Moon Priestesses are destroyed by evil pirates right before the story begins. She then proceeds to wander more or less without deliberate purpose, but it’s quickly evident that she’s being moved, game piece fashion, by the Lady.
The Absolute Book arrives in the United States more than a year after its initial publication with New Zealand’s Victoria University Press. Although Elizabeth Knox’s books have always been critically acclaimed, most of her titles have never escaped the Antipodes. Happily for American readers, a rave review by Dan Kois, a Slate critic briefly resident in New Zealand inspired a bidding war for U.S. rights, and now any American can open The Absolute Book. As someone who has been looking forward to it since the Slate review, I’m happy to report that the novel was worth the wait.
The basic four archetypes for a D&D-like party are the Fighter, the Rogue, the Wizard and the Cleric. In secondary world fantasy novels, the first three are very well represented, to the point of many variations and subclasses and versions of same. But the Cleric is far rarer. It’s not that there are none, mind you, but they are far, far less common as protagonists. Why is that? That is perhaps beyond the scope of this piece, but I think I know why
Evil priests of dread Gods as antagonists and cannon fodder to kill? That’s common. But a pious holy woman dedicated to her Goddess as a protagonist? Much fewer in number, especially when you are looking at female protagonists. And that is why H.M. Long’s Hall of Smoke is welcome, as we get front and center Hessa, a priestess of a Goddess of War.
There are two main obsessions in my life: books and music. You can usually find me hunched over a book with a pair of headphones slapped securely over my ears. Both obsessions have lead me to wonderful things; I am an avid writer and a truly abysmal guitar player. They’ve also started to mix together in my weird, wormy brain. Books have begun to take on soundtracks of their own as I read them. Words become notes and chords, narrative themes become bands, and soon I can’t read a certain book without having to pair it with an album or playlist, like pairing wine with a specific dish.
“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.
