You can add Doctor Who audio plays to the list of content creators are releasing for free to tide us over while we do our socially distanced duty. Radio Times reports that Big Finish is making one Doctor Who production per week available for free downloads in April and May!
Photo: Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker marked the end of not just one trilogy, but three. Over the weekend, Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker himself, shared an emotional goodbye letter to the series.
“What an extraordinary journey it’s been,” he begins, typed out on some Star Wars letterhead (is this official? has he had a stock of it since the ’70s??), recalling the story of how “The Adventures of Luke Starkiller” evolved into the Skywalker saga we know today.
Check out the full letter below!
Another Veronica Roth adaptation is coming to the big screen! The Hollywood Reporter reports that the Divergent author has sold the film rights to her upcoming adult novel, Chosen Ones, to Erik Feig’s company Picturestart.
Pretty much the entire entertainment industry is shut down right now, but that doesn’t mean TV creators can’t have some socially distanced fun with their shows. The good folks over at Vulture asked “dozens of showrunners, creators, and writers” how their characters would be faring during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 37 responded with surprisingly in-depth treatments. One of them just so happened to be Star Trek: Picard director, writer, and executive producer Akiva Goldsman, who shared his thoughts on how our beloved Jean-Luc would be spending time in lock-down.
If you’re looking for a way to while away the hours in self-isolation, it might be a good time to definitively find out—once and for all—all the pop culture characters you have jostling for sovereignty inside of you. That was the idea at (the now-virtual) Tor.com HQ at least, where we all took the Open-Source Psychometrics’ Project’s Statistical “Which Character” Personality Quiz.
Go take it, and click through for the Tor.com staff and contributors’ results!
Korrasami stans rejoice: Korra and Asami themselves—that is, voice actors Janet Varney and Seychelle Gabriel—will be performing a live-reading of the first chapter of Turf Wars, the three-part graphic novel spin-off of The Legend of Korra. The event is organized by Dark Horse, who will stream it via their Twitch channel on Monday, April 6, at 2 pm PT.
As a balm for the self-isolation woes of bibliophiles the world over, LeVar Burton announced this week that he’ll be doing Twitter livestreams of his podcast LeVar Burton Reads every other weekday. First on the menu: the works of Neil Gaiman.
Last month, director Yeon Sang-ho revealed that he’s made a sequel to his critically acclaimed 2016 zombie movie, Train to Busan. Entitled Peninsula, it takes place four years after the events of the first film, when the zombie outbreak has completely decimated South Korea, leaving it an infested wasteland. Now, Well Go USA Entertainment has released the first teaser.
Good news for those of you who’ve already reached the end of your self-isolation TBR list: Stephen King‘s new book, If It Bleeds, is coming out a week early. Bloody Disgusting reports that the novella collection will be released on April 28 instead of May 5.
Ken Liu is the Nebula and Hugo award-winning author of The Dandelion Dynasty series. To celebrate his new short story collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, he dropped by r/Books for an AMA, where he dispensed writing advice, gave fans a sneak peek at the future of The Dandelion Dynasty, discussed being on both ends of the author-translator relationship, and much, much more. Here are the highlights!
Edgar Wright’s next project will be a robot love story. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the director has signed on for a feature film adaptation of Set My Heart to Five, an upcoming novel by author Simon Stephenson, who’s set to adapt.
Sarah Gailey’s new novel, When We Were Magic, came out in March, just a month after the release of their novel Upright Women Wanted, but the ongoing coronavirus pandemic means they can’t do any of the promo events authors would otherwise be doing.
Luckily, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has partnered with r/Fantasy for a “virtual con” for authors who’ve had to cancel their book release events, and to kick things off, Gailey dropped by on Monday for an AMA. Here are the highlights!
Obviously for a fantasy world to work, we need our sword-wielding heroes and wise queens, an arrogant princeling or two, dashing superheroes, gruff wizards, maybe the odd monster who’s misunderstood by the humans at the base of the mountain. You probably want a nefarious villain and a handful of henchpeople. But none of those archetypes would get very far in their adventures if not for the shop clerks, cooks, nurses, and janitors who actually keep society chugging along—even in a fantasy realm.
With this in mind, we have assembled an appreciation post dedicated to some of our beloved under-sung working-class characters in SFF. Join us in the proletarian utopia of the comments to add your favorites!
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic may have canceled conventions, book expos, writers festivals, and book tours around the world, which means many authors have switched to virtual events and release parties to promote their works. This week, K. M. Szpara will be discussing his book Docile, published by Tor.com Publishing earlier this month, in conversation with Hugo Award-winning author N. K. Jemisin.
The Great Socially Distant Read of The Goblin Emperor kicked off last Wednesday with fantastic results! We shared a vibrant conversation with readers on Twitter, while maintaining a safe and healthy distance. You can look back at the whole discussion (and join this week’s!) at #TorDotReads, and in the meantime, we’ve rounded up some of the highlights of last week’s conversation.
