Judge Dee returns to solve a new case involving a Parisian party gone wrong. But this time? Everyone in attendance is a suspect, including the judge himself.
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Judge Dee and the Poisoner of Montmartre
17 Iconic Fashion Moments in SFF History
Do you think they have a MET Gala in Middle-earth? If they don’t, they should. As a fantasy writer, I believe no fantasy world is fully realized without fashion. Fashion, though often considered to be nothing more than frivolity, is as integral to a world’s rendering as its resources, its struggles, its power structures, and its art. In fact, fashion is the instrument by which all of these are often expressed. It can be frivolity, yes, but often it’s everything else as well.
This is why I’ve compiled my list of the seventeen most iconic fashion moments across science fiction and fantasy. Let’s get into it, shall we?
Watch the First Trailer for Season 2 of Netflix’s Another Life
If you’ve been looking for a pulpy space opera series to binge recently, the next season of Netflix’s series Another Life is about to drop its second season. The streaming service just released a first trailer for the season, which is set to debut on October 14th.
What Makes a Monster? The Complexities of No Gods, No Monsters by Cadwell Turnbull
Let’s get this out of the way upfront: Cadwell Turnbull’s second novel No Gods, No Monsters is absolutely worth your time. If you’re at all a fan of science fiction and fantasy, if you’re at all interested in deep characterization and interiority playing out against the fantastical, if you’re into the interplay of how genre can operate in conversation with the real world, if any of that is your bread and butter, then you’re good; you can stop reading this review and go pick up the book. You’re welcome. If you’re still here, let’s do this thing.
5 SF Stories in Which Kindness Prevails
Photo by Aung Soe Min [via Unsplash]
There are many people in the world who seem to agree that the correct reaction to impediments, setbacks, and personal affronts is a firm, unambiguous response. After all, how are people to understand that “its” and “it’s” are two different words if their homeworld is not immediately reduced to a lifeless cinder? But there are enough of us who prefer kinder, gentler responses that we form an audience for writers who give us protagonists who are kind… and still manage to prosper. Could the power of niceness possibly prevail in the real world? Perhaps not, but niceness makes for comforting reading.
Time Travel Makes Everything Worse in the Teaser for Needle in a Timestack
Has the combination of time-travel and romance ever made things easier? It doesn’t seem like that’ll be the case in Needle in a Timestack, writer-director John Ridley’s adaptation of Robert Silverberg’s 1983 short story. Cynthia Erivo and Leslie Odom Jr. star as Janine and Nick, a happy couple whose marriage is threatened by Orlando Bloom, who—well, it’s complicated.
Watch the First Trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley
Guillermo del Toro’s films are always worth watching: the acclaimed director is renowned for his intricate and beautiful worlds, and while he’s probably best known for his genre stories like Pacific Rim, Pan’s Labyrinth, and The Shape of Water, his next film looks as though it’s going to take place in a slightly more realistic world.
That doesn’t mean that the world through his eyes is any less beautiful. Fox Searchlight has just released a first teaser for del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, and it looks like it’ll be a tense, creepy ride.
Terry Pratchett Book Club: Witches Abroad, Part IV
A ball, a slipper, and Baron Samedi makes his appearance… It’s time to finish Witches Abroad!
Series: Terry Pratchett Book Club
Preview Cytonic, Book 3 in Brandon Sanderson’s Skyward Series
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Brandon Sanderson’s Cytonic, the third book in an epic series about a girl who will travel beyond the stars to save the world she loves from destruction—publishing November 23rd with Delacorte Press.
Sword Stone Table and the Metaverse of Camelot
Sword Stone Table is a new anthology of original fiction inspired by Arthurian myth. Edited by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington, it expands and explores one of the most familiar mythic cycles in Western fantasy, with a particular focus on gathering new perspectives.
Sword Stone Table is an anthology with a lot to say. It is an ambitious, thematically-sound anthology, with a robust central thesis. The Round Table, it posits, is universal. The traditional stories are simply one version of an infinity of retellings: the archetypes, tropes, and narratives at the heart of Arthurian legend are universal. The anthology sets out not to ‘enlarge’ the Table, but to show a multiplicity of Tables: Round Tables that include the voices and experiences of marginalised groups, throughout space, time, and realities.
Empire Director Sanaa Hamri Joins Wheel of Time Season 2
Image: Amazon Prime Video
Amazon’s fantasy series Wheel of Time might be gearing up to release its first season in November, but work is progressing behind the scenes on the show’s second season. According to Deadline, the studio has hired Empire director Sanaa Hamri to helm half of the show’s second season, and she’ll also serve as one of the season’s executive producers.
Read an Excerpt From Vespertine, a New YA Fantasy From Margaret Rogerson
The dead of Loraille do not rest…
From Margaret Rogerson, author of Sorcery of Thorns and An Enchantment of Ravens, comes a YA fantasy about a teen girl with mythic abilities who must defend her world against restless spirits of the dead. We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Vespertine, publishing October 5th with Margaret K. McElderry Books.
Star Trek: Voyager Rewatch: “The Void”
Screenshot: CBS
“The Void”
Written by Raf Green & Kenneth Biller & James Kahn
Directed by Mike Vejar
Season 7, Episode 15
Production episode 261
Original air date: February 14, 2001
Stardate: 54553.4
Captain’s log. Seven is cooking a meal for Janeway, Chakotay, Paris, and Torres, but it’s interrupted by Voyager being sucked into an anomaly. Unable to break out of it, Voyager finds itself in a starless void—and is immediately fired on by a ship of unfamiliar design, albeit with Vaadwaur weapons.
Series: Star Trek: Voyager Rewatch
Philosophers and Plough-dwarves, Each Must Know His Part in The Nature of Middle-earth
The long-awaited book The Nature of Middle-earth, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has newly awakened into the world like Quendi by the shores of Lake Cuiviénen! Fans hungry for more Middle-earth are scooping up their copies and… making Aragorn beard-memes? Just what is this new posthumous Tolkien book exactly, how “canon” is it, and what things do we learn about J.R.R.’s legendarium that we didn’t know before? Here is everything you need to know…
Fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings who aren’t much into Tolkien’s other Middle-earth stories may only find a few curiosities here. Answers to burning questions like: Were there any ursine entertainers on Númenor? Could Legolas talk to horses? Who in the Fellowship actually had facial hair? Come 5 o’clock, did a shadow gather about Aragorn’s cheeks and chin? Did Gollum actually go about buck naked? Was Galadriel a natural blonde? CELEBORN TELLS ALL!
The Maybe-Impossible Ideal Window of Reading Opportunity
"Reading by the Brook" by Winslow Homer, 1879
Is there a perfect time to read a given book? A moment not too early or too late, where you’re not too young or too grown—not to mention not too tired, worn out, beaten down by the world, or too excitable and distracted and enthused about other things? What about a perfect place?
The experience of reading a book at what feels like precisely the right time and in just the right place can probably be had deliberately, but as often as not is a matter of chance. I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia on a train, on deadline for a review, before trains had wifi. In my memory it was a gloomy day, so there was nothing, not even scenery, to distract me. The rhythm of the train propelled my reading, but also connected with it, so that I always think of that book with movement and focus.
That was an unexpected blessing of place. But when I think of the ideal window of reading opportunity, I mostly think of time, which is another way of saying context: How much have you lived? What are you bringing to the book, and what is it bringing fresh to you? Where are you meeting each other, in the stages of your relative existence?
For some books and readers, this window never closes. But for others, it sure feels like it does.
Red Shirts and Big Helmets — Star Trek: Lower Decks: “The Spy Humongous”
Image: CBS
One of the more amusing changes that Star Trek: The Next Generation made to the Trek mythos was to mess with the color scheme. In the original series, command wore gold, operations wore red, and science wore blue. Among other things, this meant that security guards wore red, and their constantly dying on landing parties led to “redshirt” coming to be synonymous with “dead meat.”
So TNG switched it up so that the people in red were now in command, which did precisely nothing to slow down the redshirt meme.
This week on Lower Decks, they make a pretty funny joke out of it.
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