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.
In the final paragraphs of the 1977 short story “The Screwfly Solution” by Raccoona Sheldon (aka James Tiptree Jr, aka Alice Bradley Sheldon), the world has succumbed to an apparent plague of violent misogyny, leaving the story’s protagonist, Anne, the last woman alive. Scuttled away into hiding by one of the few men immune to the “femicidal” wave sweeping humanity, Anne cuts her hair, dirties her face, and disguises herself as a boy. She only ventures into society when she absolutely must, often gambling on whether she passes well enough to slink by the detection of a store clerk when she purchases supplies. The threat of discovery hangs heavy—Anne’s safety, her life, balancing on the gendered expectations of a man she doesn’t know.
As a trans woman, I know this threat. It’s a feeling I’ve felt in gas stations in rural Oregon on the mornings when I forgot to shave. It’s a feeling I’ve felt whenever I enter the women’s room in a rest stop off I-94. It’s a feeling I’ve felt when my girlfriend reminds me to let her do the talking when we check into a hotel in Wyoming.
Martha Wells’ Three Worlds are a bravura achievement. They’re a single planet populated by literally hundreds of different species, many of them sentient, and most more or less able to coexist—with a few notable exceptions. The “worlds” themselves are the three realms which people and animals inhabit: sea, land, air. Various species move back and forth by various means, but it’s generally clear which of the realms they primarily belong to.
The central species, the one around which Wells’ novels and stories revolve, is the Raksura. Originally they were two species, a winged predator and an arboreal omnivore; by magic and genetic engineering, they combined into one. By the time of the books, they’re thoroughly amalgamated into colonies or courts, ruled by queens.
I recently happened across a Twitter conversation in which an author asserted, with the unwavering confidence of a person about to denounce the heliocentric model of the Solar System, that mystery/detective/police or legal procedurals are antithetical to horror/fantasy. This is a claim for which I am grateful. My quest for inspiration is endless and nothing serves me quite as well as a bar so low it requires a trench.
The assertion is unsurprisingly related to a debate back in the 1950s about whether science fiction mysteries were possible, given that detectives could easily solve the mystery with futuristic technology in a manner the reader could not duplicate. As one might expect from writers, a number of them took this as a challenge. Thus, a small flurry of science fiction mysteries appeared in the 1950s. Perhaps most remarkable was Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, which chose as its setting one in which getting away with murder should be impossible, before depicting how one might go about doing just that in a society filled with telepaths.
In this case, the easiest disproof seems to be to provide at least one example of the eight combinations of mystery, detective, police, and legal procedurals with fantasy and horror.
It’s barely October, and yet it’s already that time of year. You know the one: the holiday season.
By which I mean the season of the violent holiday movie, obviously.
The latest in this storied line of cinematic masterpieces is Violent Night, which stars Stranger Things’ David Harbour as a Santa who brings a different sort of festivity to the home of a family being held captive by mercenaries.
The space sheep are called dray, by the way. And that’s only half the fun of this week’s episode…
From his myriad standalone novels and novellas, to the City of Stairs trilogy and the Foundryside series, author Robert Jackson Bennett continues to craft larger and more expansive stakes, more high octane action set pieces, and pushes genre into new and fresh spaces, all while grappling with deep and complex questions of character, morality, community, and more. And here in Locklands, Bennett once again sticks the landing as he brings the Foundryside story to a beautiful, bittersweet, and heart-soaring close.
Although human life spans (with child mortality factored in) used to be a mere quarter century, modern Americans can expect considerably longer lives. However, even were we to posit an unlikely social revolution in which life extension treatment was generally available to all, it seems that factors inherent in human biology limit maximum lifespans to about 120 years. Which, granted, is a lot better than twenty-five years. If still not as long as the lifetime of a sequoia or a bristlecone pine.
Imagine what we could accomplish, had we only a thousand years or so to procrastinate hone our skills? What grand projects could we embrace, knowing that we could see century-long efforts to their end? How wonderful it would be to live long enough to get that catchy Pharrell Williams earworm out of your head! Unsurprisingly, SFF authors have found the concept of greatly enhanced lifespans tremendously inspirational, as these five works show.
September was an excellent month, beginning with Chicon 8, Worldcon in Chicago, and then flying to Florence immediately afterwards, where we stayed for a couple of weeks before taking the train up through the Alps (so beautiful!) to Riom in the centre of France for the excellent festival Aventuriales, where I was guest of honour and had a really great time. Then we went back through the Alps on the train to Turin, where Ada was a guest at Italian Tech Week. With all this dashing about and being with friends, I only had time to read eight books, mostly on trains and at bedtime, and here they are.
Further to my confessions from last time, I have to be transparent that due to time constraints, I did not go back and read the entire Psy-Changeling series before writing this column. On the advice of counsel, I started with Silver Silence, which begins a new chapter in Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling world. This sequel series, called the Psy-Changeling Trinity series, consists of six books so far, which made it much easier and more accessible for a newbie Singh reader. (It would have been god-tier to read all 21 novels across both series, though, wouldn’t it? Some real “all shall love me and despair” shit. If we weren’t facing two plagues and a global rise in fascism, I’d totally have done it.)
The Dune: The Sisterhood series is moving forward at HBO Max! The show that centers around the origin of the Bene Gesserit already had writer and co-showrunner Diane Ademu-John attached (with Alison Schapker as the other showrunner), and now also has two actors lined up for leading roles.
Five years ago, Nora Wilder disappeared.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Wilderwomen by Ruth Emmie Lang, out from St. Martin’s Press on November 15th.
If you’ve seen Matt Reeves’ The Batman (pictured above), you know that Barry Keoghan makes an appearance as an inmate in Arkham who will clearly become the Joker. Keoghan, however, originally wanted to play another character in Reeves’ Batverse, and sent the director an unsolicited audition tape reflecting that.
It’s a classic romantic trope: a marriage is arranged for political reasons, and despite initial feelings or inclinations, the two strangers begin a slow spiral into each other’s hearts. In A Strange and Stubborn Endurance, author Foz Meadows imbues this familiar story with enough twists and turns and thoughtful examinations to render it almost entirely new—a queer romance for the ages. A secondary world fantasy of intricate politics, hierarchies of power and culture and magic, plus two exquisite leads that brim with life, this slow-burn novel may have the flame low, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t burn hot.
For the first time ever, the 2002 feature Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla will grace theater screens in the United States for one day.
Everyone currently freaking out about the new Interview With the Vampire TV show, have I got a novel for you. While Alexis Henderson’s latest dark fantasy novel House of Hunger is only vampire adjacent, it’s sexy and queer and monstrous and very bloody.
In the final paragraphs of the 1977 short story “The Screwfly Solution” by Raccoona Sheldon (aka James Tiptree Jr, aka Alice Bradley Sheldon), the world has succumbed to an apparent plague of violent misogyny, leaving the story’s protagonist, Anne, the last woman alive. Scuttled away into hiding by one of the few men immune to the “femicidal” wave sweeping humanity, Anne cuts her hair, dirties her face, and disguises herself as a boy. She only ventures into society when she absolutely must, often gambling on whether she passes well enough to slink by the detection of a store clerk when she purchases supplies. The threat of discovery hangs heavy—Anne’s safety, her life, balancing on the gendered expectations of a man she doesn’t know.
As a trans woman, I know this threat. It’s a feeling I’ve felt in gas stations in rural Oregon on the mornings when I forgot to shave. It’s a feeling I’ve felt whenever I enter the women’s room in a rest stop off I-94. It’s a feeling I’ve felt when my girlfriend reminds me to let her do the talking when we check into a hotel in Wyoming.
Marvel just keeps bringing Michael Waldron back. The writer came into the MCU with Loki, stuck around for the turgid Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and now will continue his turn in the multiverse with Avengers: Secret Wars, which will close out Marvel’s Phase Six.
Yes, sure, it’s very tidy that the man who brought Kang (Jonathan Majors, above) into the Marvel world will presumably see him out again. But this is not, shall we say, an inspired choice.
Welcome back to Reading The Wheel of Time and the last week of Lord of Chaos! It’s just the epilogue this week, which is remarkably short by Robert Jordan standards. Still, we get some tasty little teasers of what’s to come in the next book. I must confess, I did not expect Moghedien’s escape!
