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.
“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.
The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films have announced the finalists for this year’s Saturn Awards today!
The magic system in Pascale Lacelle’s debut YA novel, Curious Tides, is so perfect, so logical (in a certain kind of magical way), that I’m a little bit shocked I haven’t encountered it before. In Lacelle’s world, people have magical powers that are determined by the phase the moon is in when they’re born. Each phase has a quartet of possible abilities that are shaped by the tides.
The rarest—and wildest—powers of all belong to those born during an eclipse. Many people fear and hate the Eclipse-born, but that’s nothing Emory Ainsleif has to worry about, being a Healer born under the new moon. She’s totally magically unremarkable… apart from the fact that at the end of her freshman year at magic college, she inexplicably survived a secret ritual that killed eight of her classmates.
The Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation and the Watershed Center for Fine Arts Publishing and Research at Pacific Northwest College of Art are partnering up to offer a limited edition map of Earthsea based on drawings from Le Guin herself.
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 continue Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 19-20. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!
Head below for the full list of young adult SFF titles heading your way in December!
I’ve never been bashful about my love of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I’ve used it to talk about the “alien-ness” of various Trek series, looked back at the DS9 young adult novels, and wrote forty-one entries on the DS9 relaunch stories that continued the crew’s adventures well past the series finale. In turn, this led to a discussion of the grand climax of the unified Trek “Litverse” with the Coda trilogy, which featured several key DS9 characters.
While we’ve seen the publication of one DS9 standalone novel—Alex White’s Revenant (2021)—and it’s not impossible that more might surface eventually, the post-Litverse focus has understandably been on supporting recent live-action and animated series, with a number of new novels and audio dramas tying in to Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, and Prodigy. Despite some thoroughly pleasurable outings in these television series, none of them have so far managed to displace DS9 as my personal favorite Trek of all time. 2023 saw the launch of Star Trek: Defiant, a new comic book series issued by IDW featuring DS9 characters, but I wasn’t really expecting new DS9 prose fiction any time soon.
All of which makes The Autobiography of Benjamin Sisko not only somewhat of a surprise but a particular treat. Following the format established in works covering the lives of James T. Kirk, Jean-Luc Picard, Kathryn Janeway, and Mr. Spock, this volume offers Sisko’s reminiscences about pivotal moments in his life—some loud, some quiet—and his general reflections on topics like morality, responsibility, leadership, betrayal, grief, and love.
Since 1998, many people have had questions about various moments in The X-Files. One of those moments happens in the two-part episode “Dreamland,” from the show’s sixth season. A song plays in a bar scene. Seems straightforward enough to find out what song it is, right?
But no one could identify it. Not by using Shazam, not by asking Reddit, not anywhere. Until, 25 years after the episode aired, Twitter solved the mystery in less than a day.
Photo: Jakayla Toney [via Unsplash]
I love stories of people taking a stand and fighting back. Growing up in the era of the climate crisis has often made me feel helpless about my capacity to make a difference in the world, so stories of rebellions are reminders that change is possible—and that it doesn’t always have to be on a massive, global scale. Here are some recent SFF short stories featuring rebellions that have inspired me lately, and which I know I’ll be coming back to in moments of hopelessness…
From August 2017 – January 2020, Keith R.A. DeCandido took a weekly look at every live-action movie based on a superhero comic that had been made to date in the Superhero Movie Rewatch. He’s periodically revisited the feature to look back at new releases, as well as a few he missed the first time through.
Having already broken his trend of never doing sequels, director Peyton Reed was brought back a second time to do a third film starring Paul Rudd as Scott Lang. Like the second film, it was billed as an Ant-Man & The Wasp film, with Evangeline Lilly as Hope van Dyne, fighting alongside Lang’s Ant-Man as the Wasp. But unlike the last two films, this one wouldn’t be a caper film…
Vicious cover art by Victo Ngai (Tor Books, 2013)
By the time I turned 25, I felt thoroughly done with publishing. Not writing—I can’t imagine a life where I don’t scribble down stories for myself—but the business, as far as I was concerned, could go kick rocks. In the four short years since I’d sold my first book, I’d seen that book rapidly go out of print, had a trilogy cancelled two books in, and told I must be the reason my books weren’t selling well enough. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the lack of in-house support, or the fact that publishing is, even on its best days, an educated guess, and on its worst, a gamble where authors’ careers are the currency, rashly bet, and easily forfeit.
Frustrated and demoralized by my seeming inability to guess what publishers and readers wanted (attempting to write to trend will almost always lead to disappointment, since no one knows what will be selling when the book eventually hits shelves), I was ready to quit.
