The cruelty of a thirty-second teaser for a movie that looks this fascinating! Thirty seconds is not enough to get the faintest idea of what’s going on in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, but it doesn’t matter that much anyway: When the director of Dogtooth and The Favourite makes … | Continue reading
The 2007 indie film Teeth is a horror comedy whose title and story is inspired by the folk tale of vagina dentata, whose etymology confirms that its meaning is exactly what you think it is. The movie did well critically, and intrigued a lot of people—including, it seems, A Stran … | Continue reading
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 Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black with Chapter 10. The novel was first published … | Continue reading
Last week, Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski revealed that an animated movie set in the original show’s universe existed and that we’d find out the title and the cast would be revealed next week. Well, it’s one week later, and as promised, both of those things have been re … | Continue reading
Descendants of the Fates are always born in threes: one to weave, one to draw, and one to cut the threads that connect people to the things they love and to life itself. | Continue reading
It is not the monster you must fear, but the monster it makes of men… | Continue reading
“Doctor’s Orders” Written by Chris Black Directed by Roxann Dawson Season 3, Episode 16 Production episode 068 Original air date: February 18, 2004 Date: unknown Captain’s star log. We open to Enterprise moving through what appears to be Yet Another Delphic Expanse Anomaly, its w … | Continue reading
The wretched of the earth are not meant to make art, we are supposed to be too busy surviving. (“Home Became a Thing With Thorns”) The Wright Brothers were not the first to find flight. There are other histories, other sciences not recorded, but in this world when something is no … | Continue reading
As first looks at a series go, this one’s pretty short—but you’ll get the gist. The latest video game adaptation to make it to the screen is Peacock’s Twisted Metal, which stars Anthony Mackie and a murderous clown. They had me at the CD binder, to tell you the truth; the ridicul … | Continue reading
Sometimes there is a tale so epic, so lyrical, so otherworldly that plain old prose can’t do it justice! That is when serious writers break out the verse. We’ve collected eight books across a variety of SFF genres that use verse to pluck their readers away form the workaday world … | Continue reading
Oh, how often I’ve dreamed of befriending a dragon. Of finding a miniature draconic companion to curl up on my lap while I read a book! Of showing off my fire-breathing familiar to awestruck houseguests. I was pondering these yearnings the other day, stirred from my trance only b … | Continue reading
The Hunger Games began many years before Katniss Everdeen was born. In the 2020 novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, author Suzanne Collins went back to the 10th Hunger Games, and to the history of Panem’s eventual president, Coriolanus Snow. The first movie adaptations of C … | Continue reading
Legendary is talking to the hand(s)…of Danny and Michael Philippou, the directing duo behind the buzzy horror film Talk To Me (a movie about an evil disembodied hand wreaking havoc on some teenagers, in case you were wondering why the heck I started out this post with a weird han … | Continue reading
We reported on the animated Transformers movie in the works last week, specifically that it would take place on the planet of Cybertron and would feature young Optimus Prime and Megatron as chums instead of nemeses. Today, we got the movie’s official name—Transformers One—and als … | Continue reading
Queerness often begins with yearning, and in Feed Them Silence, that yearning grows teeth. Many of us come to know our queerness first as a dissonance, between who we are and who we are expected to be, what we are expected to want. It haunts, the version of oneself and one’s life … | Continue reading
We should all make sure we’ve got appropriate rat names by the end of this. Summary Traveling in a mail coach is a human boy named Keith, a cat named Maurice, and a clan of rats. All of them have names and can talk, and they use this to their advantage—they go to towns and […] | Continue reading
Head below for the full list of young adult SFF titles heading your way in April! Keep track of all the new SFF releases here. All title summaries are taken and/or summarized from copy provided by the publisher. Release dates are subject to change. Week One (April 4) Blood Debt … | Continue reading
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 cover a selection of Ann K. Schwader poems. “Lavinia in Autumn (Sentinel Hill)” first … | Continue reading
Mushrooms are having a moment right now. I don’t mean that in a “they’re a tasty addition to a meal” kind of way; rather, mushrooms have long been an insidious presence in horror fiction, and in recent years they’ve slowly crept their way out of the shadows and into the spotlight … | Continue reading
For some of us readers, this is Kelly Link Week. The publication of her new collection, White Cat, Black Dog, is cause for great celebration. That celebration began earlier this month with a profile in Vulture that included endearing details such as the names of Link’s chickens … | Continue reading
At this point, should we call Scott Pilgrim vs. the World a classic? It came out thirteen years ago and is one of the quirkiest, most enjoyable comic book adaptations—due in considerable part to its excellent cast. Now, that cast—yes, including Captains Marvel and America—is reun … | Continue reading
Every so often, Wes Anderson gives us SFF folks a reason to talk about him—and Asteroid City is certainly one of those times. Set in a fictional American town in which a whole host of characters find themselves at a dramatic moment, it’s also a movie with an alien. Maybe? Maybe t … | Continue reading
Fantasy abounds with daring young people who study magic on their own, expanding their grasp with bold experiments into fields they only poorly understand. Fantasy also abounds with sensible young people who, perhaps observing the scorch marks left behind by daring autodidacts, h … | Continue reading
These journeys aren’t ending anytime soon. While Star Trek: Discovery has just one more season to fly, the rest of Paramount’s Starfleet of shows show no signs of slowing: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has been renewed for a third season, and Star Trek: Lower Decks for a fifth. W … | Continue reading
Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America’s own in Chain-Gang All-Stars, the hotly-anticipated debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black. This spring, join author Nana Kwam … | Continue reading
Sometimes you shoot for the moon and miss, but you land amongst the stars. Sometimes you shoot for the top of a mountain and land on the moon. Which is bad, in this case. Summary Harry Dread creates an altar and prays to a god, telling them of Cohen and company’s plan because he’ … | Continue reading
February was a cold, snowy month in Montreal with icy sidewalks and lots of blizzards. I was at home most of the month and didn’t go out much. I was teaching my online history of SF course, and writing, and then at the very end of the month I flew to Florence. I read seventeen [… … | Continue reading
If you’re familiar with the lore of the Five Nights at Freddy’s video game franchise, you’re no doubt intrigued by the idea of a live-action feature horror adaptation. The project has moved in fits and starts for years, but with the film now shooting in New Orleans, it looks like … | Continue reading
When nineteen-year-old Fin volunteers to take her secret love’s place in their village’s Finding, she is terrified. | Continue reading
After nearly four years, and a second season that faced numerous Covid delays, Carnival Row has just wrapped up for a second (and final) season—one that mostly justifies its existence while still suffering from a myriad of problems that leave a slightly sour taste in one’s mouth. … | Continue reading
Tea is a beverage that is infused with history. There are records of people brewing and consuming tea possibly as far back as the 2nd century BC, but the drink was not popularized until the Tang Dynasty of ancient China. It has been used as currency, exported in trade, and the te … | Continue reading
I would love to learn how to time slice. Can anyone help me with that. Summary Susan talks to Madam Frout and messes about with things just enough to get herself a few days off and put the suggestion of a raise into Frout’s head. She takes care of things in her classroom and prep … | Continue reading
SF fans of a certain age may have read Jerry Pournelle’s fascinating 1975 essay “The Big Rain,” which assured readers that Not only can we terraform Venus, but we could probably get the job done in this century, using present-day technology. The whole cost is unlikely to be great … | Continue reading
If you’ve ever picked up an illustrated book written by J.R.R. Tolkien, or spent time clicking around on the internet in fantasy circles, or if you’d seen the posters on my dorm room wall yea… | Continue reading
As an autistic lover of sci-fi, I really relate to robots. When handled well, they can be a fascinating exploration of the way that somebody can be very unlike the traditional standard of “human” b… | Continue reading
And when I say everybody, I mean everybody. Not just most people today don’t understand the original story—though that’s true—but every retelling of the story, from the earliest stage plays to Stev… | Continue reading
There’s a book I love that no one else knows about. It caught my eye in the middle school library, magically shelved right in the spot of the fiction section where I liked to read, curled up safely… | Continue reading
While science fiction worlds are (somewhat) constrained by the laws of physics the same is not necessarily true of fantasy worlds. Despite this, many fantasy worlds are slight variations on Earth a… | Continue reading
Throughout COVID, I’ve written a lot about books. However, I’ve not yet written about something that has equally sustained me: instant ramen. Reading and ramen have been an ongoing part of my life.… | Continue reading
My favorite part of reading a work of science fiction for the first time, like visiting a new country, is that hit of strangeness, of being someplace where I don’t know the rules, where even the fa… | Continue reading
What are we going to do with the cult of originality? The set of pernicious beliefs that say: oh, all romances are the same, there’s always a happy ending, that can’t be real literature? Or, this b… | Continue reading
In the 1970s, Filmation produced an animated Star Trek series that was very much intended not to be a dumbed-down version of the live-action series. The general approach was to treat this like the … | Continue reading
In honor of International Apostrophe Day, August 16, we’re going to talk about apostrophes in science fiction and fantasy names. Why do authors think apostrophes make characters seem exotic? Who st… | Continue reading
As someone who has long loved fairy tales and mythology, I’ve always found it both interesting and kind of magical the way similar characters, themes, and motifs appear in the stories of different … | Continue reading
The NeverEnding Story was a classic children’s fantasy of the 1980s, right up there with The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Legend, and The Last Unicorn in creating a latticework of terrifying puppets, q… | Continue reading
Food is often the thing that brings us together, that unites families, communities, and culture. In Aliette de Bodard’s Fireheart Tiger, food and drink play a unique role. Here, the author sh… | Continue reading
In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engine… | Continue reading
According to the late film critic Roger Ebert, cinema is one of the most effective venues for bringing people from different backgrounds together. “For me, the movies are like a machine that genera… | Continue reading