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. . .
When I realized I was 60 pages from the end of Gregory Maguire’s The Witch of Maracoor, I kind of didn’t know what to do with myself. I put the book down and walked away. I didn’t pick up anything else. I wasn’t trying to replace it. I just… needed a minute.
It took me a few days to figure out why this was—why I kept getting teary at innocuous moments; why I was sometimes in a hurry to get to the end and then, suddenly, dreading the ending. Why was this book, this book at this moment, doing such things to me, emotionally?
That’s when I remembered: I’ve been reading about Elphaba Thropp and her family, off and on, for close to 30 years. Decades! Do you know what it’s like to find yourself spending time with characters you met when you were practically a whole different person?
You probably do. You probably have a series—or more than one—that you’ve been reading that long, too.
I just happened to be looking at the August 1975 issue of Galaxy Magazine when my attention was caught by an essay: Jim Baen’s “The Myth of the Light-Barrier.” Was this yet another example of what we will polite call “relativity skepticism,” perhaps an early look at Petr Beckmann’s Galilean Electrodynamics? In short, no. Instead Baen celebrated the fact that a rocket capable of sustaining a one-gravity acceleration indefinitely can travel astonishing distances in a very short time from the perspective of the traveler. Of course, the stay-at-home will experience a lot more time, but Baen sees this as a plus:
And that’s the point. Given a one-gravity, constant-acceleration space-vehicle plus a complete indifference to point of origin, you can go anywhere and do anything. You can even be free. Because anybody who might have an inclination to tamper with your liberty (unless you were foolish enough to bring him along) will have been dust long before you arrive at your destination. Blue meanies included. Freedom!
In 2017, when I considered pitching a series for Tor.com focused on The Silmarillion, and was wondering whether there would be sufficient interest—given that it lies deep in the shadow of both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit—I chanced upon a podcast that would spur me on to really do it. I mean, if chance you call it. It was The Prancing Pony Podcast, in which two guys chew over the legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien—about his works, his choice of words, all his themes, and his overarching legacy. They weren’t just cherry-picking topics randomly; they were setting out to discuss it all methodically—and yet somehow casually—with the rigor of scholars.
Six years later, their nerdy little podcast isn’t so little. And now, hosts Alan Sisto (a.k.a. the Man of the West) and Shawn E. Marchese (a.k.a. the Lord of the Mark) have recently published their first book: Why We Love Middle-earth: An Enthusiast’s Book about Tolkien, Middle-earth, and the LotR Fandom. It’s terribly good, I’m afraid. Moreover, it’s a fun and useful read. I’ve met Alan Sisto a couple of times now and aim to interview him. But what about Shawn Marchese, word-nerd extraordinaire, who cohosted the first six seasons of the podcast with Alan? Well, I’ve cornered him RIGHT HERE! He’s not going anywhere. Let’s grill interview him!
Photo: Hannah Busing [via Unsplash]
Some of our favorite SFF protagonists tend to form their own circles, building communities with those that love them for who they are. Around the holidays, these stories offer a gentle reminder that there are many ways to define family, and plenty of reasons to spend time bonding with the people who mean the most to you even if you’re not strictly related.
These five stories celebrate found families and the wonderful, unconventional love they share.
The latest installment in Legendary MonsterVerse—the Apple TV+ series, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters—is more about some complicated multi-generational family issues than Titans like Godzilla. That doesn’t mean, however, that some very large and very deadly creatures don’t make an appearance.
One of those creatures is the tentacle-faced Frost Vark, who we first meet at the end of the third episode where it exacts its terror on a too-warm airplane. The Titan isn’t one we’ve seen before, and we owe its existence, in part, to the young son of the show’s co-creator, Matt Fraction.
In February, Disney announced that another movie in the Toy Story franchise was in development—an inevitable happening, clearly, given that Disney loves nothing so much as it loves making more movies in series, or making more versions of movies it has already made. What wasn’t known at the time was whether it would be Toy Story 5 or another spinoff like Lightyear.
But a hint came this week from original Toy Story star Tim Allen, who said on The Tonight Show that he and Tom Hanks have both been contacted about starring in the next film.
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 17-18. The novel was first published in 2022. Spoilers ahead!
I fantasize about the food culture of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine more than any other invented universe. I long to try a sip of spring wine, or experience the spicy tang of hasperat. And my kingdom for a raktajino! The extra-strong Klingon coffee is mentioned briefly in other series, but no one seems to drink it as much as the senior officers on DS9. Double sweet, double strong, your replicator or mine?
Maybe it’s the blending of recognizable Earth food cultures with alien civilizations on the promenade that gives DS9 such bustling, vibrant warmth?
Things are changing in a galaxy far, far away. (Aren’t they always?) A new Vanity Fair article offers a belated look at the making of Ahsoka—while the show was airing, actors and writers couldn’t promote their work on account of the ongoing strikes. Now, though, they’re free to speak, and there’s more than just your usual (very enjoyable) background and character commentary. There’s a big piece of news for Lucasfilm: Dave Filoni has been named the company’s chief creative officer.
The role means he’ll work with Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and head of development Carrie Beck at a much earlier phase in the process for each new project. “When we’re planning the future of what we’re doing now, I’m involved at the inception phase,” Filoni told Vanity Fair.
Photo: Marco Verch [via Flickr, CC BY 2.0]
I’ve officially become An Audiobook Person. It wasn’t a sudden conversion—I’ve been listening to podcasts for years, but there was a time I couldn’t imagine listening to fiction in the same way. Then I started adding non-fiction audiobooks into the mix in my library queue, and I loved it. It was a whole new world; then at some point, I finally tried listening to a few fiction audiobooks, and… it took some getting used to, honestly. I bounced off of a few attempts, and at first I didn’t like surrendering so much control to the narrator, letting their phrasing and their interpretations of the characters’ voices influence my impressions. It felt a bit like getting the story secondhand, filtered through someone else’s mind, like the mental equivalent of reading somebody’s aggressively highlighted copy with notes scribbled in the margins.
But I did like being able to catch up on reading while I was packed into an overcrowded, standing-only subway car, or making dinner, or going for long walks. The more I listened, the more I got used to it—but also, I learned what works for me and some things that don’t (more on that in a bit), and I started to appreciate what a talented narrator can bring to the experience. I think I started really listening to fiction in earnest in 2015 or so, and now I have favorite series and favorite audiobook narrators, people whose names I’m always happy to see when I’m searching for something to read/listen to.
This week marks a milestone for all of humanity—Friday marks the 35th anniversary of the first broadcast of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The first ever episode, “The Green Slime” was shown on a small Minneapolis cable-access channel called KTMA on November 24, 1988.
There are many things to say about MST3K, (and eventually I plan to say all of them) but since this is Thanksgiving week I wanted to thank the show’s writers for helping me with a very specific issue I had as a kid.
The super-news just keeps super-coming. We already learned, this week, that Nicholas Hoult is very like going to step into the evil shoes of Lex Luthor in James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy; now we’ve got another super-pal, and one more antagonist. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Skyler Gisondo will play Daily Planet photographer Jimmy Olsen, and Portuguese model Sara Sampaio will play Eve Teschmacher, who is Lex’s assistant (and sometimes more than that).
She’s got a ramshackle spaceship, a misfit crew, and a big problem with its sexy newest member…
We’re thrilled to share chapters four and five from Constance Fay’s Calamity, a romantic enemies-to-lovers space adventure available now from Bramble. (If you missed the first three chapters, you can find them here!)
Three of the richest people in the world. Three of the most powerful, most influential in both the best and worst of ways; three of the smartest, future-savvy and most driven people in the world who are changing the course of humanity daily. It would take just the three of them to make immense, long lasting changes that slow down the doomsday clock, to tilt the earth away from certain end, but instead they plan to only save themselves.
Now here’s something to be thankful for! Coming back for its thirty-fourth year(!), Mystery Science Theater 3000 is once again hosting a Mega Turkey Day Marathon Telethon. That’s right, for 48 hours starting at 9:00 a.m. ET on Thursday, you can tune in and watch 24 classic episodes of the series, including some from way back in the 1980s!
Welcome back to Dissecting The Dark Descent, where we lovingly delve into the guts of David Hartwell’s seminal 1987 anthology story by story, and in the process, explore the underpinnings of a genre we all love. For an in-depth introduction, here’s the intro post.
For some writers, the idea that love will last beyond the grave is unbelievably romantic. For E. Nesbit, it’s terrifying. “John Charrington’s Wedding” sees the English fantasist and socialist (never one to meet a fairy-tale or romantic trope she couldn’t put her own spin on) examining the horror of this idea and its realistic outcomes, complete with an undead groom, a terrified bride, and wedding guests who are understandably bewildered that the two are even getting married, given how many times Charrington was rebuffed. By examining the basic plotline of a gothic “beyond the grave” romance and skewering it with a certain dark, acerbic aplomb, Nesbit exposes the twisted power dynamics behind privilege and obsession, and in doing so writes a strange ghost story for the ages.
To be honest, I am positively feral over David Tennant and Catherine Tate returning to Doctor Who.
Normally, I’d be a little skeptical of this sort of thing. Logically I know that Doctor Who is a show that thrives on a certain amount of fan service and is indebted to a loyal audience that spans generations, which means that faces from previous seasons are going to pop up every once in a while. But I’ve been burned by these sorts of homecomings before. The 50th anniversary episode, featuring some icons of the “new Who” era (David included, and my main girl Billie Piper), was …fine, I guess, with a lot of loose ends left and a lot of timeline fuckery that I, personally, was disappointed by. We’re also in an era where a lot of reunions and reboots are happening. Everything from Gilmore Girls to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is on our screens again. I mean, they’re rebooting Glee for godssakes. When will it end? It makes me want to throw myself into a black hole.
But that’s not the point of this.
It’s a bountiful time to be a Witcher fan. We may be between seasons on the Netflix adaptation—and anxiously awaiting the arrival of Liam Hemsworth as the show’s new star—but Netflix also just announced yet another animated Witcher movie, The Witcher: Sirens of the Deep, which is reportedly based on the short story “A Little Sacrifice.”
And Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski says you don’t have that long to wait for a new Witcher book.
