Nothing tears two women apart like the men who want and take indiscriminately. In this retelling of “The Crane Wife”, a makeup artist and her actress lover struggle to stay together as the glitz and glamour of old Hollywood transforms into a cruel and manipulative beast that threatens to pluck them apart.
Content warning: This story contains fictional depictions of domestic violence.
An acclaimed musician and her apprentice travel to the newly freed country of Skinnere to play a complex and culturally fraught song that will lay bare the wounds of empire, occupation, and sacrifice of its players and listeners.
We are overjoyed to be reprinting “The Angel of Khan el-Khalili” by P. Djèlí Clark, set in the same world as Master of Djinn, out on May 11!
The story first appeared in the anthology Clockwork Cairo: Steampunk Tales of Egypt, edited by Matthew Bright and published by Twopenny Press.
Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory was originally given free to readers who pre-ordered Martha’s Murderbot novel, Network Effect. The story is set just after the 4th novella, Exit Strategy.
The latest Murderbot book, Fugitive Telemetry, is published next week (4/27/21). Pre-order it here.
An act of indiscretion from her immortal trickster companion sends Annie and her league of ladies-in-waiting on a time-defying adventure that becomes the inspiration for William Shakespeare.
We are thrilled to reprint the Spanish translation of Naomi Kritzer’s Tor.com original story “Little Free Library”, first published in SuperSonic‘s February 2021 issue. Many thanks to Naomi, Cristina Jurado, Marcheto, and the SuperSonic team!
The Provost’s Dog trilogy by Tamora Pierce tackles the difficult relationship between the police force and civilians in a fantasy medieval society. Sixteen-year-old Rebekah Cooper is a police officer in a community where the police are still forming their own moral code; therefore, the road between law and lawlessness is full of twists and turns. Criminals are common in the poor neighborhood Beka patrols, and her job is made more difficult by criminals assuming they deserve something from the upper classes.
Beka Cooper’s stories are part of Pierce’s young adult fantasy Tortall universe, named after the fictional country where much of the action takes place. Pierce’s first (and arguably most famous) series, Song of the Lioness, features Alanna of Trebond, a noble girl, as she fights to train as a knight in a time when only men are allowed to do so. Lioness focuses on the nobility, while Provost’s Dog skirts around it, dealing mostly with commoners in the poorest section of the capital, the Lower City of Corus.
There are a fair number of SF novels that focus not on individual characters but on the society of which they are a part. Often the novels do so by focusing on the development of those cultures over time. Societies evolve; individuals come and go like mayflies. There’s a narrative, but not the sort of narrative we usually expect to enjoy.
You might think that it would be hard to make such books interesting. (I don’t think that anyone has ever described The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a cracking thrill ride: “Could not put it down!”) The following five novels show that it is possible to write interesting works that take the long view.
New York Times bestselling author Steven Erikson continues the beloved Malazan Book of the Fallen with The God Is Not Willing, first in the thrilling new Witness sequel trilogy—publishing November 9, 2021 with Tor Books. We’re thrilled to share an excerpt below!
If you think of early Gothic women writers, your mind probably leaps to Mary Shelley. She does tend to get all of the attention: her own books, her own films, cameos in Doctor Who… you can’t help but be happy that a woman writer is getting the attention she deserves.
It’s clear why Mary Shelley’s become a Gothic pinup. You don’t get much more Goth than sex on your mother’s grave and keeping your husband’s heart in a drawer. And that’s not to mention the fact that she came up with one of the most famous Gothic novels of all time. It doesn’t hurt that she did it in a ghost story competition with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley where she showed them exactly where they could stick their monstrous egos.
This is not the face that launched a thousand ships because that’s hyperbole, kids. It’s time to finish up Faust Eric!
I like the small things in fantasy, by which I mean I like germs and figuring out if the characters know about them. People in the real world didn’t know about germs for a long time, either (though many people put forth theories about spores, contagions, and small bodies and how to prevent their spread). Our previous theories and treatments made sense given what we could observe, and many fantasies draw from the centuries before we put names to the things that cause and spread illness.
There’s a terrifying tinge of dramatic irony to injuries in fantasy, especially when the reader knows the limits of the world’s medicine and magic. It is easy to cast aside the scientific history of a fantasy world when the focus of the story isn’t medical in nature, but good books still hint at their world’s medical knowledge. This part of world building can be so small that it’s nearly imperceptible, but as in medicine, small things can make all the difference.
Here are a few incredible fantasies where magic and medicine combine.
The African Speculative Fiction Society is a collective of science fiction, fantasy, and horror authors and editors who are part of the larger African diaspora. Since 2016, the ASFS has released an annual slate of awards for works written by African authors—here is the finalist list for the 2021 Nommo Awards.
Brenda Peynado’s debut book, The Rock Eaters, a short-story collection that bounces around genres such as speculative fiction, science fiction and straight fiction, will definitely leave you deeply unsettled, though perhaps not always in a good way.
The CW’s robust lineup of DC Comics-based shows—oft dubbed the Arrowverse—can be a lot to keep up with. Join us weekly as Andrew Tejada keeps you current on all that goes on in their corner of TV Land!
A new hero arrives that may help Batwoman, Supergirl and Black Lightning ramp up towards their series finales, The Flash deals with issues of parenthood and the Legends warns us about the dangers of fast food on:
This Week in the Arrowverse! (May 9th-11th)
[Spoilers Ahead] [Read more]
A group of mercenaries is hired to deliver a church’s ultimate power—a sacred oracle…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Hollow, an epic odyssey from author B. Catling—publishing June 1st with Vintage Books.
Amazon has announced a new director that will be working on its upcoming Middle-earth series: Charlotte Brändström, who has previously directed on Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, and Netflix’s The Witcher and Jupiter’s Legacy.
“One Small Step”
Written by Mike Wollaeger & Jessica Scott and Bryan Fuller & Michael Taylor
Directed by Robert Picardo
Season 6, Episode 8
Production episode 228
Original air date: November 17, 1999
Stardate: 53292.7
Captain’s log. We open in October 2032 on Mars. Lieutenant John Kelly is in orbit in Ares IV while communicating with the two astronauts on the surface, Rose Kumagawa and Andrei Novakovich. Something appears in orbit, which winds up consuming Ares IV.
After four years, Saw returns to the big screen this week with Spiral: From the Book of Saw. Although the franchise doesn’t quite command the same excitement that it did during its 2000s heyday, when moviegoers flocked to cinemas every October to watch the new entry, it remains to be seen whether audiences are anxious to see what stars Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson can bring to the famously low-budget series.
Although fans certainly love Saw movies for their gory death traps and their soap-opera plotting, the franchise’s true greatest asset is its primary villain, John Kramer, the Jigsaw killer. Played by Tobin Bell with an intensity that belies his sleepy features, Kramer is a consummate evil genius. A brilliant engineer who learns to cherish life only after his cancer diagnosis (or a failed suicide attempt, or the death of his unborn child, or his divorce… the story changes a lot), Kramer tortures those he considers ungrateful in order to force them to appreciate their lives. Before the victims participate in his deadly traps, Kramer first subjects them to moralizing monologues, in which he explains why he has chosen the victim and how the torture will help them.
As much as the series’ detractors dismiss the Saw franchise as ushering in the era of torture porn, arguably the nadir of horror cinema, its roots go back to one of the true titans of the genre: Vincent Price.
Each year, Pembroke College in Oxford—the university where J.R.R. Tolkien taught Anglo-Saxon literature—holds an annual public lecture series in honor of the late author and professor.
Fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay delivered this year’s lecture, titled “Just Enough Light: Some Thoughts on Fantasy and Literature.”
In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement.
The Compleat Enchanter is a complete delight from beginning to end. The subtitle, The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea, does a pretty good job of summarizing what occurs: Psychologist Harold Shea discovers a means of using scientific formulae to transport himself to parallel worlds based on myth and fantasy. He can’t always control where he goes, can’t use technology from our world, and has only a sketchy ability to control the magic so common in these worlds. But everyone dreams of being able to jump into the middle of their favorite stories, and Harold Shea is able to do just that. With co-author Fletcher Pratt, L. Sprague de Camp gives us a series of adventures that sparkle with energy and humor—if these two weren’t having a ball when they wrote these, I’ll eat my hat.
The Sun follows a solitary path through the Milky Way. This cannot be said of a significant fraction of the stars in the galaxy. Many stars have companions—some distant, others quite close.
In the latter case, SF authors crafting a plausible setting may need to take into account the effect of a stellar partner on habitable worlds. For example, the distance between Alpha Centauri A and B varies from 35.6 astronomical units to 11.2 AU. At their closest, A would add about 1 percent to the energy budget of a hypothetical habitable world orbiting B, while B would add 4/10th of a percent to a similar world around A. Not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but sufficient to have measurable effects on climate over the course of A and B’s eighty-year mutual orbit.
SF authors being what they are, those whose works feature climate forcing due to companion stars tend to prefer dramatic oscillations rather than low, single percent wobbles. One might expect that such works would have first shown up in these times of worry over anthropogenic climate change. Not so! This was already a well-established genre. Consider the following works from times of yore:
We are thrilled the share the cover for Spear, a glorious queer retelling of Arthurian legend, full of dazzling magic and intoxicating adventure, from the Nebula and Lambda Award-winning author Nicola Griffith. Spear will be available from Tordotcom Publishing on April 19, 2022.
Happy Thursday, Cosmere Chickens! This week’s installment of the Stormlight Archive reread deals with a whole lot of betrayal. Shallan and company arrive at Lasting Integrity, and things… well, go exactly as well as was predicted, with the additional roadblock of Shallan having to deal with a truly nasty revelation about who’s been talking to the Ghostbloods behind her back.
[They’re not going to listen to you, Brightlord. They’re going to arrest you.]
