Oh my goodness, 2024 already! I was home in December, writing, and over the holidays I had friends to stay in a Covid-cautious bubble that let me have fun and see people in a relatively safe way, though my son and other friends got sick—which meant that the present-opening part o … | Continue reading
Well well well! Here we are in another bright and shiny new year, my Cosmere Chickens! And I sincerely hope that this one treats you better than the one before. (If you had a good year, I hope that this one’s even better. And if it was a bad one, well… same wish.) You may […] | Continue reading
NBC’s La Brea is about to have its third and final season. If you haven’t watched the series yet, here’s the overarching premise: a bunch of folks in Los Angeles fall into a huge sinkhole after an earthquake and find themselves… in another time. And things get more convoluted fro … | Continue reading
The prequel to The Omen is finally making its way to theaters, and we have a trailer to prove it. The Omen, for those who need a refresher, is a franchise that centers around a child named Damien who is purported to be the son of Satan (aka the Antichrist). The first film came ou … | 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 Max Gladstone’s Last Exit with Chapters 21-22. The novel was first published … | Continue reading
There is a mystique that comes with a movie from a bygone era. Though usually fictional, they encapsulate a specific story from a specific place and time brought to life by a cast and crew. By extension, characters are also enveloped within the reels of film—an actor’s performanc … | Continue reading
Happy New Year, and welcome to Tor.com’s yearly round-up of some of our favorite articles from the twelve months! In case you missed it, there’s a separate list for discussions about fiction, reading, writing, and all things book-related; the list below highlights essays about ot … | Continue reading
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 miss … | Continue reading
An alternative to externally-mandated modification is, of course, self-directed modification. Who among us has not mused wistfully on how convenient it would be to replace our current eyes with functional sets, improve hearing, or simply acquire the ability to set people on fire … | Continue reading
The popular video game Minecraft from Microsoft/Mojang is finally getting a movie adaptation after years of development. We’ve known that Jason Momoa was eyeing it as his next franchise, and will star in it accordingly. And today we also found out that none other than Jack Black … | Continue reading
The end of 2023 gave us another update from George R.R. Martin about the Game of Thrones spinoff projects he’s working on with HBO. And while progress still seems slow, it looks like one of the prequels in development has shifted from a live-action endeavor to an animated series. … | Continue reading
Every few months, a post goes around on social media of speculative fiction readers bemoaning that no books in [X] subgenre are being published. Those posts are almost always wrong, especially when it comes to young adult fiction. YA authors have been cranking out incredibly crea … | Continue reading
On December 24, 2023, author Richard Bowes died at age 79. Bowes, whose novels and short stories often took place in alternate, sometimes magically infused versions of New York City, was a fixture of the city’s speculative literary scene, with his works earning eight Nebula nomin … | Continue reading
What’s the most specific, memory-invoking scent you can think of? When I smell a certain vanilla-adjacent aroma—not baking vanilla, a little more mixed-up than that—I remember traveling in Tasmania. It’s instant: One whiff of that scent, which was in my sunscreen, and I see littl … | Continue reading
It’s a new year and a new chapter of the Bestiary, and that chapter is a corker. (I rather hope the year won’t be, except in the most positive sense, but we won’t go into that.) Let’s talk about cryptids. These creatures live on the border between myth and reality. Maybe they’re … | Continue reading
This week in Reading The Wheel of Time, we’re covering chapters five and six of Winter’s Heart, in which Perrin struggles to keep it together and nobody succeeds in giving him useful advice. Also, despite my earlier predictions, Masema shows up. Berelain continues to Berelain and … | Continue reading
Many aspects of modern societies require human specifications within a narrow, predictable range. People possessing unusual cognitive characteristics, who are too vulnerable to UV or not vulnerable enough, whose dimensions and shapes are outside the default range, may be difficul … | Continue reading
It’s Christmas and the Doctor is back. And… singing?! Yes, thank you. Recap A child is left on the doorstep of the church on Ruby Road, and is named for it. Years later, that child is Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who is currently being interviewed for Long Lost Family by Davina … | Continue reading
There are plenty of holiday films that we adore, favorites that we screen every year to great applause (or groans) from family and friends. But don’t we all have a few films or TV shows that we associate with the holidays, despite them having nothing to do with the season? Here a … | Continue reading
From grimdark and sword and sorcery to magical realism and alternate history, we love every flavor of fantasy. But when the days get darker and colder, sometimes we reach for something that’s more… optimistic. That’s when we turn to cozy, compassionate, and deeply human stories, … | Continue reading
In 1891, Jerome K. Jerome wrote, “Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories,” and he was only saying what everyone already knew. From December to January, newspapers and magazines used to overflow … | Continue reading
Lots of shows decide they need a little Christmas come December, but they’re not quite sure how to do it. Do you talk about the big Jesus-shaped elephant in the room? Do you just focus on Santa? Do you, I don’t know, cast Juliana Hatfield as an angel or make miracles happen on Wa … | Continue reading
Melissa Broder’s newest novel Death Valley follows a path tread by her previous books, offering an emotionally prosaic story made mystical by a core magic realist conceit. In Broder’s first novel The Pisces, sex and romance addiction is explored through a hot but morbid merman. I … | Continue reading
I might not be the right person to review All of Us Strangers. Or maybe I’m the best person? I… look. I am not strong. What I knew about this movie was that there was a romance between Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, and that was damn well all I needed to know. I had […] | Continue reading
What does Santa Claus represent? Christmas is a fascinating amalgam of a holiday made up of a great big storm of European traditions, so there is obviously more than one answer to this question. But when the holiday blues set in and it feels like there is nothing more to Christma … | Continue reading
Though I am slightly loath to admit it, I have been rewatching Grimm. It is dark and wet in Portland, as it always is this time of year, and a somewhat ridiculous procedural show about a fairy tale cop feels like just the thing. It’s also weirdly comforting, which is another thin … | Continue reading
Small Beer Press closed to submissions in March 2023, and it looks likely that they won’t open for more submissions, at least in the near future, due to publisher health complications caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. “In 2022 we only managed to publish two books. This year we pub … | Continue reading
First, I should admit that I’m a sucker for a lot of holiday standards, from The Grinch and Peanuts to Rudolph and Frosty the Snowman. I adore both White Christmas and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, but there’s also a lot of schmaltzy, badly-written nonsense floating arou … | Continue reading
Based on entirely anecdotal evidence, it seems like most bookish children go through an Egyptology phase. Author Isabel Ibañez certainly did, and now she has written a gift to those of us who tried to write our names in hieroglyphics in fifth grade. What the River Knows, the firs … | Continue reading
As 2023 draws to a close, now is a great time to look back on all of the great young adult speculative fiction from this past year. By the end of the year, more than 320 science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels for teens will have gone through the traditional publishing machin … | Continue reading
There are many intriguing things about the trailer for The Regime, a limited serious from Succession and The Menu writer Will Tracy, and one of them is that it seems to be set in a made-up country. Kate Winslet plays the all-powerful Chancellor, and she wishes to show “America an … | Continue reading
“…I’m having the chimney expanded”—Pee-wee Herman A while back, I wrote about watching Muppet Family Christmas and the experience of seeing Jim Henson appear just before the credits roll. Without fail, when my friends and I watched that special together during my annual holiday p … | Continue reading
In the canon of animated movies that make a person—even a grown adult—sob helplessly, there are two films that arguably stand head and (giant robot) shoulders above the rest: The Iron Giant, and Lilo & Stitch. So imagine, if you will, a story about a robot, directed by Lilo & Sti … | Continue reading
Artists express our care for the craft in different ways. Some seek out exciting new techniques, picking the brains of their favorite creators and adapting to their idol’s workflow. Others look inward, mining emotional veins and pushing deeper into the complexities of what drives … | Continue reading
So many vampire-killing metaphors to choose from, here: The sun will rise on What We Do In the Shadows? The series has gotten a stake through the heart? However you want to phrase it, the truth remains: Vulture has confirmed that the beloved vampiric mockumentary has one more sea … | Continue reading
Since its release in May, I have played The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom a normal number of hours. Playing Tears of the Kingdom is pretty much the same experience as playing Breath of the Wild, and I mean that in the best possible way. Don’t worry: I still don’t know how … | Continue reading
My first forays into cozy science fiction and fantasy left me thinking I wasn’t a fan of the genre. I was disappointed by this. I wanted an SFF addition to the romance novels and small town mysteries in which life is better than it should be and the ending feels familiar in its r … | Continue reading
2023 is the year we evidently settled on romantasy as the portmanteau of choice, and I cannot say I have fully resigned myself to this decision. But whatever my feelings about the word romantasy, which I guess is fine, ish, in some contexts, and however bleak the personal and glo … | Continue reading
Here at the end of 2023, it’s safe to say this year has been a minefield of joy, horror, shocking twists both fictional and in real life, tragedies cosmic and mundane. But here we are, now, rounding up some of the things that made us happy, because if we don’t sing about our joy … | Continue reading
Well, my friends, it is winter here where I live and Christmas is well on its way. The trees are up (we have two, a tradition that started because my family fought over which one we should cut down), the lights are hung inside and outside the house, and we have a brightly lit rei … | Continue reading
Yesterday, a jury found Jonathan Majors guilty of two misdemeanor counts of harassment and assault. Majors faces possible jail time—his sentencing will take place in February—but one decision has already been made: Marvel Studios swiftly dropped the actor, who played a major role … | Continue reading
It’s been a year and a half since Rhythm of War, the fourth book in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series was published, and we now know when to mark our calendars for when we can finally read the fifth novel in the series. Today, Tor Books announced that Stormlight Archi … | Continue reading
It’s been over a year since we found out that Damsel would be both a Netflix film and a book, but we’ll soon get the movie version starring Millie Bobbie Brown as the titular character who—twist!—saves herself from doom and death. As the trailer for the film suggests, Brown’s cha … | Continue reading
“There is not a thing more positive than bread.” So said Fyodor Dostoevsky, and as someone who needs little more than a decent sourdough loaf and a spread of good Irish butter to be blissfully happy, I wholeheartedly agree. Bread is one of our oldest recipes as humans, and nearly … | Continue reading
The Addams Family series Wednesday, starring Jenna Ortega as the titular character, is Netflix’s most-watched English-language program, ever. It’s not surprising then, that the streaming platform is eager to make more shows in that universe. And it looks like Uncle Fester, played … | Continue reading
The manga The Chainsaw Man has already gotten an anime television series adaptation, and now it looks like the popular series from Tatsuki Fujimoto will be getting a film adaptation centered on the Reze arc from the source material. MAPPA, the studio behind the amine adaptation, … | Continue reading
A phrase I think about sometimes—maybe too often—is three simple words: “Earn a living.” They’re so common, these words. A statement of fact. You have to earn a living. You have to make money that you can exchange for necessities and goods. But why earn? Why “a living”? Did you a … | Continue reading
If you’re intent on getting into the prequel game, handing your story off to Paul King seems like a sure thing. The man has charmed audiences everywhere with his Paddington films, and is poised to litter the world with stories that are sweet, meaningful, and thankfully incredibly … | Continue reading