The Expanse had a lot of threads to tie together in last night’s season finale, and I’m pleased to say most of them were tied! I’m even happier to say that with a renewal from Syfy, we’re going to get to spend more time with these characters. Join me as I dig into the finale, which will obviously include spoilers.

OK, it takes some great characters (and great actors) to keep an audience engaged while they’re trapped behind a table, but the banter between Avasarala and Cotyar was riveting as always. And now more than ever I want to be Avasarala when I grow up. As Mao’s people fire on the trio, Cotyar returns fire, but it’s Bobbie who yanks one of the tables out of the floor and holds it up as a shield. She’s also the one who thinks to access a map of the ship, and figure out an escape route. Unfortunately Cotyhar’s been shot, so she reluctantly agrees to leave them, get her armor, and attempt a rescue. Things get even more interesting after she leaves—Avasarala presses her hand to Cotyar’s wound, and the two attempt to negotiate, first with their captors, then with each other. At one point Cotyar passes out, so Avasarala digs her hand into his wound until the pain wakes him up, and snaps that he can’t go into shock yet. You kind of understand a few minutes later when he considers selling her out.

Shohreh Aghdashloo’s performance contains wonder. She’s clearly hurt, and terrified, but you can see her compartmentalizing and moving chess pieces even as she accepts her own death. She asks Cotyar to go back and deal with Errinwright after she’s gone, so that at least the Earth might be spared the war he’s pushing. It might be this that stops Cotyar—he decides not to give her up. And then of course she jumps up and surrenders, asking that Cotyar be allowed to leave before he bleeds out. Having thought of a way to protect the earth, she acts, even at the cost of her own life. But since this is The Expanse, Mao’s men immediately renege on the deal and train guns on both of them.

Dammit.

Meanwhile, Bobbie crawls through the ducts, scuffles with a pair of guards who make the mistake of sassing her, and finally comes to the docking bay. But no! There’s an engineer standing between her and the bay, threatening to put the airlock in full lockdown. Sure, she’ll beat him to death, but she won’t make it to the drop ship. She makes a solid point, “You’re about to lay down your life for an unworthy master. That’s not an honorable death.” He considers this and moves out of her way, then thinks better of it and asks her to shove him into a locker so they’ll think she forced her way in.

Can the show keep this guy? He seems neat.

Bobbie gets back to Avasarala and Cotyar just in time, although it seems like rough going for our poor gutshot spy.

Meanwhile, on Venus…well, not much happens here. They try to descend to check out the proto-molecule, which invades and explodes their ship. Again, puny humans, the proto-molecule is not playing.

Most fraught of all is the action on the Roci. Everyone has come back together: Holden apologizes for being a big growly jerk, and gives Alex the credit for rescuing the Weeping Somnambulist. Naomi apologizes for tranquing Amos, who in turn apologizes for trying to hold Naomi back when she wanted him to let her go. But of course this togetherness can’t last. Naomi spots the Caliban in the cargo hold, and they all spring into action. Meng still wants to try to make contact, but Holden and Amos ignore him in favor of blundering in, guns blazing.

This does not work. The Caliban is annoyed by their attack, so it hurls a piece of the Roci at them, pinning Holden to the wall and crushing his leg. The Caliban is attracted to the radiation in the ship’s core, so it starts digging into the floor panels. Holden is trapped against the wall watching it destroy his ship while the rest of the crew try to come up with a rescue plan. The plans all end in Holden dying along with the Caliban, a fact he seems increasingly OK with as the pain in his leg gets worse.

Amos doesn’t want to kill Holden, but he’s pragmatic about it. Naomi is beside herself, literally walking in circles hoping to see a piece of tech that will spark an idea. She and Holden speak through his comm, and for the first time he refers back to the events on the Canterbury. He asks Naomi to take over and get herself and their makeshift family somewhere safe, and not to do what he did by seeking revenge. He doesn’t regret their time together—he regrets spending so much of his energy on anger rather than building a life with her.

Finally, it’s Meng who sees a different way. He notices the way some of the kitchen plants are growing toward their artificial light source, and realizes: if it’s radiation the Caliban wants, can’t they chuck a nuclear torpedo out into space, and then bolt as soon as the creature jumps after it? Luckily he takes his plan to Alex, the only one with the patience to listen.

Also luckily, once Naomi and Meng are out on the hull with the nuke, Meng shakes off his lingering fear that the Caliban is Mei, and throws the bait just in time. The Caliban goes full Gollum and dives after it, and, sadly, continues its Gollum impression by being incinerated in the Roci’s thruster fire.

The family comes back together again, with Alex making sure to give credit to Meng. Things are great! So obviously Naomi has to finally confess to Holden that she never destroyed the proto-molecule they found. In fact, her betrayal has gotten even worse. Given that both Earth and Mars each have proto-molecule now (not to mention Dawes and Cortazar, who are still AWOL) she weighed her otion, her loyalty to the Belt, and her desire for peace, and finally decided to give the proto-molecule to Fred Johnson. Now at least the Belt will have a chance to defend itself.

Miller is spinning in his Venusian grave.

Holden is shocked, but the scene cuts away before he can fully react, because now we have to watch SNAKE IN HUMAN FORM Dr. Strickland load Mei into a cryochamber, and load that cryochamber into a giant Raider of the Lost Ark-style warehouse full of children, who may or may not be teeming with proto-molecule.

Ugh. Thanks for that, show.

Random Thoughts Floating in Space

• THE PROTO-MOLECULE MURDERED ADAM SAVAGE. Jamie is going to be pissed.
• Or maybe it’ll just bond with him? Make a Cali-Savage? Did I just think of the greatest spin-off ever? Cause I think I did.
• I enjoyed all the subtle emotion going on between Cotyar and Avasarala. The two have so much history, and I appreciated that the show allows them to layer anger and resentment into the fact that they genuinely enjoy each others’ humor, and then to puncture all of that with the fact that Cotyar in fact doesn’t owe Avasarala a thing. He’s doing this for his own reasons, and she doesn’t get to manipulate them.
• I love that Avasarala tries to manipulate them anyway.
• Can Bobbie give us a reenactment of Die Hard every week, please?
• What are they doing to Mei? Is it what I think it is?
• …actually, don’t answer me. I don’t want to know.
• Finally, completely serious note: my favorite thing about this show is the way is consistently rewards intelligence, particularly the intelligence of people who are often overlooked. Bobbie is the one who finds a way out of Errinwright’s trap. Meng is the one who saves Holden’ life. They’re both able to think quickly and come at problems from unexpected angles. Most importantly for Meng, he’s able to use his expertise to come up with a creative solution because Holden and Amos aren’t there to bluster at him.

Did Season Two live up to your expectations? Who’s excited for Season Three?

Leah Schnelbach will choose to believe that Adam Savage is frolicking happily on a farm in Upstate Venus. You can come talk to her on Twitter!

I should get this off my chest right away. As a writer, I’m a bit of a frenzied loon when it comes to recommending fiction. Overly zealous? Yup. Opinionated to the point of grating? Sure. Once I stumble upon something that bowls me over (no matter what the genre or format) I’m the world champion at the evangelizing throat-throttle.

The source of this fervor, or fever if you will, probably originates from my appreciation of life’s linear limits, as in, with what little time we have, why read something trite when you can read something astonishing? Luckily the immense world-interpreting power of fiction occurred to me at an early age, and now I recognize this as a blessing. I say luckily because many in my life back then scornfully advised that fiction (sci-fi, horror, and comics especially) were an utter waste of my time. Every now and then I run into these same cynics and I’m not surprised by their vast existential bewilderment. Regrettably, the narrative lens that could’ve helped them understand our crazy and fragile world they eschewed long ago.

Now as an author, I occasionally get asked for my favorite novel. For bibliophiles this is always an exacting question, but for writers it’s a nearly impossible one. But if forced to name the book I push most often on others it is Thomas McGuane’s 1973 novel Ninety-two in the Shade.

Now, befitting my awareness of our limited time, no one would ever call me a big fan of slow boilers or Dickensian doorstops. Does this mean then that I make snap judgments with books? Absolutely, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. Snap judgments often are the only way to make a choice. Consequently, the unspoken imperative for all would-be novelists is to impress the hell out of the reader right now. As with a busker on a train platform or a poet at an open mic night, the opening salvo is no place to be out of tune or to be futzing around. In my opinion, the reader deserves this courtesy.

And McGuane does this in Ninety-two in the Shade like a rock star. For aspiring writers it’s like a mini masters class on satire and a terrific guide on how to open a novel. With its first nine or ten paragraphs, the novel establishes everything. Mood, setting, tone, and the impending trajectory of the protagonist Thomas Skelton all within a minute’s reading.

Today, in our polemically-charged times, the first sentence still packs a wallop.

Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic…

A bit of the prognostic? Maybe. But more accurately I believe this opening line articulates the universal timelessness of the tale.

From there McGuane’s prose doesn’t just introduce his forlorn protagonist. In the wee small hours before a Florida dawn, it heats up with such gifted description that the hook of haunted urgency is set. The reader learns so much about Skelton’s predicament—

his fading intemperance, his whimsical enchantment with nature, his empathetic and crippled mind—it’s spellbinding. With such thrift, I am always amazed at the smallest details. Who knew a tub resting on “frog’s feet” or a traffic light changing to red could symbolize so much?

A favorite section for me entails the two “hitchhiking” paragraphs late in the opening. Framed by the sentences “The trees along the road were full of catbirds…” and “This was the epoch of uneasy alliances…” right there, shattered like a fun house mirror, the protagonist’s madness is laid bare. Simultaneously McGuane defuses the horror of Skelton’s mental crisis with hilarity, all the while underscoring the novel’s theme of carrying on no matter what.

Ultimately, I think this brilliant opening illustrates the virtues all authors should strive for—be it fantasy, horror, science fiction, romance, or any other genre. Some may disagree, but between you and me, deep down we both realize they’re wrong. I know the hell-for-leather immediacy, the waggishness, and the damn the torpedoes attitude are just the things I want in my science fiction. To reiterate an earlier point, time is indeed precious and our fragile world even more so. It’s my responsibility as an author to cut, polish, and hold up that lens so that those reading can maybe make sense of their world. If not, it’s my hope to provide some small measure of escape, at least for a little while.

Please, read these opening pages of Ninety-two in the Shade and perhaps you too will fall in love with this book.

Kieran Shea is the author of Koko Takes a Holiday, Koko the Mighty and the soon to be released Off Rock from Titan Books. His short fiction has appeared in many publications including Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Thuglit, Dogmatika, and Crimefactory. Nominated for the Story South’s Million Writers Award twice, he lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

Last year, Universal Pictures acquired the rights to adapt Scythe, Neal Shusterman’s YA novel envisioning a future in which people called “scythes” keep overpopulation in check by killing others at random—mimicking the death that no longer occurs now that mankind has eradicated all disease. Deadline reports that the studio has landed on its writers: Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken, who penned the screenplay for 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Campbell has also worked on an editor for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Van Helsing, and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Published in 2016 by Simon & Schuster, Scythe was a 2017 Printz Award Honor Book for its “powerful examination of ethics, humanity and the flaws of immortality.” The synopsis:

A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery: humanity has conquered all of those things, and has even conquered death. Now Scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control.

Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art” of taking life, knowing that the consequences of failure could mean losing their own.

Shusterman will serve as executive producer on the film.

Tender is a book-length collection of short fiction from Sofia Samatar, a brilliant Somali-American writer whose work has been nominated for several genre awards over the past few years. Samatar is also the winner of both the John W. Campbell and Crawford Awards—so, suffice to say she is doing consistently fantastic work, and Tender gathers much of that work together in one place for the first time.

Divided into two sections, “Tender Bodies” and “Tender Landscapes,” this collection includes two original stories as well as eighteen reprints. “An Account of the Land of Witches” and “Fallow” are the two fresh publications here, both in the landscapes section of the book. The reprints range from 2012 to now in terms of their initial appearances, and also span a wide range of publications.

I was immediately predisposed to Samatar’s collection, as it begins with “Selkie Stories are for Losers”—which, full disclosure, was one of the pieces published under my tenure as senior editor at Strange Horizons. On re-reading, around four years later, it’s still an emotional, intimate story, and it certainly sets the tone for the rest of the book. The through-lines that arc across this collection are all present in the first piece: a concern with gender, family, folk tales, race, history and the supernatural, as well as a certain frankness that’s hard to pin down but makes Samatar’s short fiction human even when it’s dealing with inhuman characters.

Samatar, though she employs artful and often poetic prose, is paradoxically direct in her approach. Whether she is marrying mythologies to modern scenarios (“How I Met the Ghoul”) or writing about a dystopian near-future (“How to Get Back to the Forest”), she renders her characters with an unvarnished honesty. She also illustrates her settings in broad sweeps of careful detail, giving the reader a solid and coherent sense of the world the tale takes place in without fail.

The only stories in this collection that do not work are the stories where this balance collapses and the direct gives way to the opaque. For example, “A Girl Who Comes Out of a Chamber at Regular Intervals”: this story has evocative moments, but as a whole is difficult to parse or feel through. The two narratives are clearly related, but the connection is insufficient and the imagery overtakes the flesh of the piece. In the end it lacks a sense of movement or form. Given that most of these stories function on a thematic or emotional arc rather than a straightforward plot, it’s especially important to maintain clarity.

However, the stories that do work—particularly the stories that work in conjunction with one another—far outweigh the ones that don’t.

The titular story, “Tender,” is an ideal example of the work this collection does over and over in a series of different ways. The protagonist lives as a tender, someone who looks after the toxic storage of depleted nuclear materials; she is trapped in her glass box, her closest contact coming through decontamination chambers. The narrative is structured through a series of brief observations or scenes; through them, we discover that she cheated on her husband repeatedly and eventually attempted suicide when he kicked her out, and she is now in some sense atoning for her toxicity.

This collage technique appears in several of the pieces collected in Tender, creating stories out of non-narrative content juxtaposed together to create a sense of unity or movement. “Ogres of East Africa,” previously discussed before here, uses the juxtaposed vignettes format to good effect—as do several other pieces, including but not limited to “Cities of Emerald, Deserts of Gold,” “Olimpia’s Ghost” and “The Red Thread.” Those last two fit under a specific subheading of the technique: they’re epistolary. Throughout her short fiction, Samatar pays a great deal of attention to prose and structure, making the way a story is told as important as the story: imitating a sloppy high school essay, like in “Walkdog,” for example.

I was also impressed with both of the pieces original to this collection. “An Account of the Land of Witches” has three threads: one involves the original narrative of the witches’ city told by both an escaped slave and her master, another the scholar who has become trapped due to Visa problems in the Middle East during wartime, and the last a brief foray with a fantastical group of explorers charting out the Dream Science based on those previous accounts. There are stories within stories, here, from beginning to end; the piece asks the reader to work to understand the implications and connections between the three arcs without offering a direct or obvious answer.

“Fallow” is the second original piece, a novella, and is by far the longest in the collection. It’s also the best novella I’ve read in quite some time: a told-tale, set on a colony (of sorts) in distant space occupied by a society of Christians who abandoned Earth when it was breaking down. The three parts of the novella focus, one each, on a person the protagonist has known and their particular story as it relates to the story of the colony and the protagonist herself. The first is a childhood teacher who eventually committed suicide; the second is “Brother Lookout,” who was a leader of a spiritual splinter group that advocated open relations with outsiders;  the third is her own sister, who ran away (or so we hope) with an Earthman whom she rescued from execution-as-isolationist-policy during her time working in the Castle.

The novella is a heady mix of science and grim hard-scrabble religious life in a dystopic and closeknit society. The characters are all immensely human and built of a thousand realistic details; therefore, the slow reveal of the politics and horrors of the colony is devastating. There is such an intensity in this piece, I find it difficult to describe, as it builds so slowly and carefully to its climax. That climax, too, is more a realization than a conflagration: just that the protagonist is surviving as best she can, recording the realities of her life and the lives of others where she must remain. Because, ultimately, there’s no way out—though we know, as she does, that there would be other places to go if she could leave.

Tender is full of intriguing prose experiments and self-conscious stories: stories that think about the meanings of categories like human and animal, history and culture, and do not offer the reader simple answers. Samatar explores the Middle East and Africa with care in this collection, and in doing so employs a wide range of mythologies and traditions while simultaneously respecting and demanding respect for their legitimacy in a predominantly white and Anglo-American genre. This attention to detail and frank, honest representation results in a compelling body of short fiction—though best read in chunks, in this case, so as not to overwhelm with similar notes that differ only fractionally in some cases. I’d strongly recommend giving the literary, clever, and productive art that Samatar has collected here a read. It’s as good as I’d hoped, and just as smart too.

Tender is available now from Small Beer Press.

Brit Mandelo is a writer, critic, and editor whose primary fields of interest are speculative fiction and queer literature, especially when the two coincide. They have two books out, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction and We Wuz Pushed: On Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-telling, and in the past have edited for publications like Strange Horizons Magazine. Other work has been featured in magazines such as Stone Telling, Clarkesworld, Apex, and Ideomancer.

Look who’s back for Game of Thrones season 7! It’s a surprising number of players, considering the series’ penchant for shocking deaths. HBO has released the first batch of official photos, and while they won’t tell you anything you didn’t know by the season 6 finale, it’s still great to see all these faces again as the series heads into the first half of its final thirteen episodes. Especially Tormund.

Daenerys has arrived in Westeros and everyone is sporting spiffy new duds, but beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. Especially after this throne-taking teaser…

(L to R) Nathalie Emmanuel as Missandei, Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, Conleth Hill as Varys, Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen, and Jacob Anderson as Grey Worm – Photo: Macall B. Polay/HBO

Kit Harington as Jon Snow – Photo: Helen Sloan/HBO

Maisie Williams as Arya Stark – Photo: Helen Sloan/HBO

Aidan Gillen as Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish and Sophie Turner as Sansa Stark – Photo: Helen Sloan/HBO

Bella Ramsey as Lyanna Mormont – Photo Helen: Sloan/HBO

Ellie Kendrick as Meera Reed and Isaac Hempstead Wright as Bran Stark – Photo: Helen Sloan/HBO

John Bradley as Samwell Tarly and Hannah Murray as Gilly – Photo: Helen Sloan/HBO

Kristofer Hivju as Tormund Giantsbane and Gwendoline Christie as Brienne of Tarth– Photo: Helen Sloan/HBO

Plenty more where that came from at The Daily Beast!

Game of Thrones season 7 premieres July 16 on HBO.

Six years ago, Fox tried to get a television pilot based on Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s graphic novel series Locke and Key on the air, but the series didn’t pick up. The unaired pilot, written by Josh Friedman (The Sarah Connor Chronicles) and produced by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, was screened at Comic-Con a few years later, and was generally well received. Kurtzman and Orci later tried to make a movie trilogy happen instead, but that also fell through.

Now, Hulu has taken a stab at the project, ordering a new pilot written by Hill himself, with Carlton Cuse (Lost, Bates Motel, The Strain) serving as showrunner. Hill’s series, published by IDW, follows the three Locke siblings (Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode) as they move with their mother Nina across the country to the mysterious Keyhouse, their ancestral home in Maine. But as they adjust to their new lives, the kid discover a series of magical keys that grant them special powers.

Hill shared his excitement about the project on Twitter:

We got a great team on the show. First script all written – everyone seems to like it. I’m expecting @scottderrickson to Rocke & Roll.

— Joe Hill (@joe_hill) April 20, 2017

(Kudos to the Twitter user who suggested “Locke’d and loaded” in response.)

That’s Doctor Strange writer/director Scott Derrickson, who will direct the pilot.

After returning to television for a six-episode series last year, Scully and Mulder will resume their hunt for THE TRUTH. Chris Carter, Gillian Anderson, and David Duchovny will all be back for a ten-episode “event series” sometime in the 2017-2018 season.

The last event series added a new, wistful tone to the detectives’ relationship, along with new recurring character Tad O’Malley, a bloviating conspiracy theorist played by Joel McHale, new mini-agents Miller and Einstein, and a few great scenes of Mitch Pileggi’s A.D. Skinner. It will be interesting to see if they return given the expanded ten-episode format the show has to play with. The last series also delved more into Scully and Mulder’s past together and the fate of their child, William, so it seems inevitable that he’ll figure into the new mini-season.

You can read more about the new series over at EW! What do you want to see when The X-Files returns…again?

Salutations, Tor.com! Welcome back to the Movie Rewatch of Great Nostalgia!

Today’s MRGN will be a little different from our usual fare, O my Peeps! Owing to Easter weekend madness and a truly absurd concatenation of scheduling conflicts, my sisters will not be joining us for this post; your Auntie Leigh will be flying solo on this one. And given that, I decided to do a film appropriate to my solo status: 1984’s Firestarter, adapted from the 1980 Stephen King novel. Yay!

Previous entries can be found here. Please note that as with all films covered on the Nostalgia Rewatch, this post will be rife with spoilers for the film.

And now, the post!

So! Firestarter is the story of young Charlene “Charlie” McGee and her father Andy McGee, who are on the run from what we hope is an entirely fictional secret branch of the U.S. government known as The Shop, who performed illegal experiments on Andy and his to-be wife Vicki, which gave them (faulty) psychic powers, which then got passed on to their daughter in distinctly non-faulty fashion, in a way which meant that the latent pyros on the stunt and special effects teams for this movie probably had the time of their lives.

As I mentioned in my Carrie post, I had really wanted to do Firestarter as the MRGN’s first Stephen King movie, but we switched to Carrie because my sisters had neither seen the Firestarter movie nor read the book it was based on, and were therefore not nostalgically equipped to comment upon it.

This obviously made perfect sense, but I was still a little sad about it. Because as I also mentioned in that post, Firestarter was not only the first Stephen King novel I ever read, but it was very possibly the first novel not aimed at a younger audience I ever read as well. It was certainly a great deal of the source of my childhood fascination with stories about psychic phenomena – a fascination King and I clearly share, given how many of his books center around the idea in one fashion or another. Firestarter, though, was arguably the quintessential Stephen King take on paranormal mental abilities and the probable results of their introduction to the modern world.

Needless to say, I adore the shit out of the novel, and have reread it probably at least a dozen times over the years. By contrast, I’m pretty sure that before this week I had only seen Firestarter the movie once or maybe twice, and that many years ago, but I remembered that I had loved Drew Barrymore in the role of Charlie McGee, and had general warm fuzzy feelings about the movie overall, and so I was moderately excited to see it again and see if it held up.

And, well. It, uh, didn’t.

We’ve all heard or read – or said – some variant on the truism that The Book Is Always Better Than The Movie, but I feel like that takes on an especially pointed truth when applied to movie adaptations of novels about psychic phenomena in general, and adaptations of Stephen King novels about psychic phenomena in particular. That latter may only be because King’s books were the ones that everyone tried the hardest to make into movies (because as I said before, Stephen King in the 80s was money, baby), but it was a distinct and recurring problem that I really should have remembered before getting my hopes up about Firestarter.

And it’s not like I’m not sympathetic to the inherent problem here. Figuring out how to visually depict things that are almost exclusively happening inside characters’ heads is really difficult, you guys. Many a film director has flung him-or-herself against that particularly sharp-edged windmill and come out the worst for it, and perhaps I should therefore cut Firestarter’s director Mark L. Lester a little slack about it.

Maybe I should, but I ain’t gonna, because I spent the whole film irritably making mental notes about the ways in which Charlie’s pyrokinesis and Andy’s “mental dominance” could have been depicted SO much less cheesily. So many directors seem to feel that there has to be some kind of obvious visual or aural component of an otherwise invisible action to make sure the audience knows something is happening, and I personally think this is bullshit. Mostly because it leads to eye-rolling nonsense like mandating that Charlie can’t set things on fire without being in her own personal and inexplicable wind tunnel:

Or that her father can’t mentally “push” people into doing what he wants without clutching his head and popping a forehead vein, which is supposed to convey the strain his gift is putting on him, but mostly just made David Keith look like he was trying (and failing) to take a massive dump.

Sorry, but no. Even Brian De Palma’s “quick zoom and violin screech” method of indicating psychic happenings in Carrie was less annoying than this. I am very much a fan of the “less is more” approach when it comes to conveying this kind of thing from the actors’ end, and just making sure that the results are the spectacular and/or visually communicative aspects of what’s going on. I feel that this is the key method in which to avoid much cheese when it comes to portraying ESP-type things on screen, and I also feel this is an area in which Firestarter very much fell down on.

Ham-handed visual cues were not the only failing of the movie, sadly. King’s novel was really about two things: the wonder and horror of a little girl with such destructive power at her beck and call was the main thing, of course, but it was also just as much about the terribly casual way it’s taken for granted that the U.S. government is doing illegal and awful things to its own citizens, with total impunity and horrific disregard for the principles it and we are supposed to be operating under.

The film adaptation of Firestarter sorrrrt of conveys that, but not with anything like the conviction (or power) of the novel. The best example of this, I think, is the scene with the postman.

In both the novel and the film, Andy McGee attempts to send letters to major newspapers and magazines to expose the fact that the U.S. government is hunting him and his daughter in completely illegal and unsanctioned ways, and in both novel and film, Shop agents intercept those letters before they can be delivered.

The difference is that in the film, the Shop’s resident hitman Rainbird just strangles the postman to death and steals the bag with the letters, whereas in the novel, the mailman lives. More importantly, the scene is from the postman’s POV, as Shop agents pull him over and hold him at gunpoint while they rifle through the mail for the letters, and then leave him behind, crying, because, he pleads, this is the U.S. mail. It’s supposed to be protected, because this is America, and yet, it isn’t.

It’s a scene that struck me vividly, even as a kid, because of how palpable King made the sense of utter betrayal the postman feels. The postman’s ideological anguish at the revelation that America is not the shining bastion of justice and good that we have always been taught it was is a theme that’s endemic to the entire novel, and while the government agents in the movie are obviously just as callous and awful as their novel counterparts, the movie’s failure to make that point as, er, pointedly as the novel did meant it just kind of melted into this nothing of random villainy. I know it’s maybe a bit weird that I’m arguing that it’s worse to make the guy cry than to actually kill him, but I’m talking about thematic and dramatic impact here. This is a story; those things matter.

Speaking of random villainy. There’s no denying that George C. Scott did a good job of portraying the deeply creepy semi-pedophiliac serial killer character of John Rainbird, to the point where I can’t decide whether the blatant whitewashing of what was supposed to be a Native American character might actually have been a good thing, because ain’t nobody going to want that in their ethnic group. And besides, statistically nearly all psychopathic serial killers are white men anyway. (Though of course the actual problem is that the whitewashing erased a chance for a Native American actor to have a significant role in a major Hollywood film, so.)

Also, holy crap is Martin Sheen young in this. Also jarring, because I totally forgot he was in this movie, and by far my most significant association with Sheen is in his decidedly heroic role as President Bartlet on The West Wing. But in fact, his cold and calculating Captain Hollister isn’t even the first “Stephen King evil government figure” Sheen had portrayed at that point, as he also played the apocalypse-bringing potential future President Greg Stillson in the 1983 adaptation of The Dead Zone. Which makes his later West Wing role kind of hilarious by contrast, doesn’t it.

This movie in general had a pretty stellar cast, actually. In particular I have to point out that Drew Barrymore’s performance as Charlie McGee is really way above and beyond what I would expect out of 95% of child actors that age. I know she rather went off the rails once she grew up (though by all accounts she actually pulled herself back on the rails as well), but in my opinion her fame as a child actor was entirely deserved.

Holy crap reaction #2: Hey, that’s Heather Locklear! Not that we got to see her for long, as she played the swiftly fridged wife/mom Vicki, whose character got even shorter shrift in the movie than she did in the book. (This is, probably, my one real beef with the novel.)

So, good cast, but the movie failed to use them very well. There were some good choices made in adapting the exposition from the novel, but the slow pace and weird editing choices killed nearly all the narrative tension that the book sustained so beautifully. The special effects were probably pretty good for the time (and it must have been hell, ha ha, to work with so much fire), but they were not employed to nearly their best effect, in my opinion.

I also have to note that the music for the movie was by Tangerine Dream, whose score for Legend, as you may recall, I considered so iconic and essential to the movie that I threw a temper tantrum at the director’s cut for taking it out. By contrast, well. I would not have stomped a single foot had someone decided to take away Firestarter’s “score”. I use the scare quotes advisedly, as one of the little bits of trivia I found about the film stated that Tangerine Dream never even saw the movie; they just sent a bunch of music to the director and told him to “pick out whatever he wanted”. Let’s just say, you can tell. Ugh.

Basically I would have made many many many different choices in how this movie was made, because as is, it doesn’t remotely do justice to the source material. I’m also pretty sure I would have been bored out of my mind had I watched this movie without knowing the source material.

In fact, I was pretty bored anyway. My sisters should feel pretty good about the bullet they dodged on this one.

So! In conclusion, O My Peeps, if you’re jonesing for some excellent psychic psychodrama avec a healthy side of evil government conspiracy, give the film version of Firestarter a distinct miss, and go read the book instead. You won’t be sorry, I promise.

And at the last, my patent pending Nostalgia Love to Reality Love 1-10 Scale of Awesomeness!

For Firestarter the movie:

Nostalgia: 6-ish

Reality: 3

For Firestarter the book:

Nostalgia: 10

Reality: well, I haven’t reread it all that recently but I’m willing to bet it’s probably at least a 9

And that’s the MRGN for today! Come back and see me reunited with my lovely siblings in two weeks! Later!

Once the new tech stops being shiny…what then are you left with? Cory Doctorow’s new book Walkaway is all about living in that post-shininess era of technology. What do you keep? What do you allow to fade? And what can be used to truly create a better future?

Walkaway narrows down to see what technological advance truly holds everything together, but Doctorow isn’t the only one who understands that our lives, and the stories they create, tend to hang on a single piece of tech. Here are just a few premises that are casually, irrevocably destroyed when you remove a vital piece of helpful, fictional technology.

Sophons (The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu)

The limits of relativity are a big deal in Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem trilogy, but so is cheating them.

Sophon technology is an amalgam word, made of the “Sophia” (meaning “wisdom”) and “proton”; it’s a supercomputer that is located in a proton that is unfolded from eleven dimensions into two dimensions, then programmed and refolded. This technology is created and utilized by the alien Trisolaris civilization, and allows them to interact with Earth in real-time, despite being located 4 light-years away. When Ye Zhetai—a woman who has lived through China’s Cultural Revolution and become deeply disillusioned by the cruelty she sees in humanity—alerts Trisolaris to the presence of life in Earth’s solar system, a decades-long process of confirmation and communication begins, with the Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO) forming to slowly prepare humanity for the arrival of the aliens.

Years later, a nanomaterials expert named Wang Miao infiltrates the ETO and discovers the Trisolaran plan—phase 1 of the invasion has already begun, using sophon technology to secretly hinder Earth’s science research, particularly as it pertains to particle physics.

Without sophons, Trisolaris’ invasion becomes a shadowy unknown threat instead of an ongoing crisis. It’s the one big cheat that the series allows itself, because otherwise Trisolaris has no way to induce fear in humanity, or stunt our development. Without instant communication, The Three-Body Problem becomes a very different story.

Babel Fish (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams)

The #1 question in any story with humans and aliens: How do we communicate? Douglas Adams had a particularly neat solution to this problem in the form of the Babel Fish. (Fine, it’s a living creature. But it’s a creature that is essentially used as a form of technology among travelers—which is an important intersection to consider!) The whole point of the Babel Fish is that it feeds on your brainwave energy, then excretes a telepathic matrix into your brain, which gives you the ability to instantly understand any language. This idea, while gross-sounding, is a pretty great way of dealing with translation issues without a device that is essentially just a giant super-fast dictionary. It’s such a cool idea that it has been cribbed by other sci-fi narratives, too (like Farscape’s translator microbes).

And of course, if Arthur Dent didn’t have access to one, there’s no way he’d be an effective companion to his pal Ford Prefect, right? He needs that bridge between him and that galaxy. On the downside, it does make him capable of understanding Vogon poetry. So it’s not all sunshine and daisies on the road to Communicative Happiness.

von Neumann Machines (vN by Madeline Ashby)

The humans robots of Madeline Ashby’s series are von Neumann machines, which means that they are capable of self-replicating. This means a robot can have or “create” their own family—even if only by making copies of themselves. vN tackles intricate concepts of consciousness and selfhood. What is individuality when your version of procreation leads to many versions of yourself? What would a community of beings like this come to resemble, and how would they relate to one another? Amy Peterson’s journey to learn more about herself, her family, and her world are evolved from concepts of what artificial life might look like if it took this form.

And it’s not that far-fetched either: John von Neumann was a mathematician and physicist who, along with creating his own particular architecture for computers, was the first to carefully study the idea of self-replicating machines. He proposed a kinematic self-reproducing model as a thought experiment, and eventually went on to develop an even more abstract model that was based on cellular structures. So Amy’s existence, fictionally speaking, is a natural progression from a very real scientific concept.

The Epstein Drive (Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey)

The entire plot of the Expanse series revolves around humanity’s ability to travel to the asteroid belt and outer planets, which they then colonize. None of this would be remotely possible without the Epstein Drive, created by Solomon Epstein well over a century before the start of the first book, Leviathan Wakes. It is a modified fusion drive that allows spaceships to maintain thrust throughout their entire voyages, allowing for continual increases in speed over long distances. Sadly, it’s inventor dies during the very first successful voyage, incapable of stopping his space yacht once as it reached speeds he hadn’t anticipated.

Epstein’s last thoughts are sadness that he will never get to experience the consequences of the drive he built—because he knows it is will change humanity’s course forever. It will end the looming threat of war between Earth and Mars, it will allow them to reach the asteroid belt and mine the minerals they need, and humans will be able to explore farther than ever before. And he’s right. His engine drives the course of humanity over James S. A. Corey’s entire ongoing space opera.

Threeps (Lock In by John Scalzi)

Lock In features a world beset by a virus known as Haden’s Syndrome. While most people who contract only the disease only exhibit symptoms on par with the flu, one percent of these victims experience “lock in”; paralyzed completely but fully awake. These few—known as Hadens—are capable of experiencing life via robotic transports called “Threeps,” which can go out into the world and interact on their behalf, controlled by an internet-like interface between the robots and their brains. (Threeps are adorably named for Star Wars’s fussy protocol droid C-3PO.)

The world of John Scalzi’s Lock In is essentially the same as ours–the story is actually a police procedural–but if you omit the mind-to-machine interface that makes Haden-controlled Threeps possible, the story nevertheless becomes irrevocably altered. There’s really only one piece of tech in Lock In, but that tech has enormous implications for the future of mankind.

Welcome to Freaky Fridays, the day of the week we dive down deep into the depths of out-of-print paperbacks and emerge with a rose between our teeth.

The Seventies and Eighties weren’t a good look for any American city. All you have to do for proof is look to the incredible music coming out of New York and LA (hip hop, disco, New Wave, punk, glam metal), the amazing art (Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Karen Finley), and the groundbreaking theater (Robert Wilson, Ridiculous Theater, A Chorus Line)—cities capable of inspiring such an avalanche of talent must be hell on earth. Thanks to stupid urban planning decisions, crack cocaine, Reagan-era policies, and general economic malaise, every city sucked during these two decades. But the one that sucked the longest and hardest was New York City. Have you seen Taxi Driver?

So what did horror paperback writers do to cope with the urban hellscape in which they were living? They did what they’d always done: they wrote novels about monsters eating people’s faces. Come on inside, and let’s take a ride on Thomas Monteleone’s Night Train.

Between 1970 and 1980, around 1.3 million white people moved out of NYC. The city almost went bankrupt in 1975. Cops distributed pamphlets to tourists telling them they would probably be murdered while visiting New York. The brainiacs at the RAND Corporation came up with a plan to make firefighting more efficient by closing firehouses and cutting fire inspections. As a result, by the late Seventies, the Bronx alone was reporting 120,000 fires per year (by some estimates), and there were 14,000 arson investigations annually. In 1968, NYC had less than 1000 homicides each year. For the next 24 years, it was 1200 or above, with records being set in 1989 (1905 murders) and 1990 (2245). Today it hovers around 352 per year. Thanks, crack!

Written in 1984, Night Train is ostensibly about a reporter, Lya Marsden, teaming up with a cop, Michael Corvino, to investigate the 1915 disappearance of Train 93 in the subway tunnels between Astor Place and Bowling Green. But, really that’s just an excuse to get our heroes running around the city, which is the real star of the book.

“They called it the South Bronx, but it looked like a war zone… It was an alien world of gray destruction,” it reads, the urban blight of early Eighties New York providing a backdrop for the high weirdness that begins bubbling up through the cracks. At first, it’s hard to differentiate between the hordes of feral cats living in the subway, the daddy-obsessed Subway Slasher lurking on the trains, and characters like Whitey Thompson (a grizzled, lone wolf city exterminator who wipes out rat nests with a sawed-off shotgun) and the actual monsters that people keep claiming they’re seeing underground. But by the time Ralphie, a strip club bouncer, wanders down the tracks and discovers a giant, grotesque Prometheus chained to a massive boulder inside an abandoned subway station ,we know we’re in for more than your average dose of New Freak City weirdness on a Saturday night.

Train 93 shows up, still stuffed to the gills with its mummified passengers, while other transit workers discover an underground grotto populated by giant albino frogs. There are jelloid, skin-dissolving starfish bubbling up from somewhere, and somehow the legend of the albino Knights of Bernardus who retreated underground in 1624 and are now led by an evil dwarf sorcerer who lets them out to the surface at night to forage, gets everything so mixed up that our hero reporter and cop have to recruit NYU philosophy professor, Dr. Lane Carter, to unravel all the dangling plot threads.

Just like New York City itself, something is always happening in this book, whether it’s an underground pterodactyl attack, yet another transit worker finding yet another bottomless abyss in the subway tunnels, or a 15 year-old kid opening up with a shotgun in crowded Union Square Station, but things start to jell the first time the characters mention Thibaut De Castries. Suddenly, everything falls into place and you know exactly what this book is about.

Invented by author Fritz Leiber in his novella Our Lady of Darkness, De Castries is the greatest practitioner of the occult art of megapolisomancy. According to Leiber (via De Castries) the massive quantities of steel, copper, concrete, and glass in cities and their arrangement attracts certain paramental (occult) forces that can be used to predict the future. Alan Moore’s use of psychogeography in his performance pieces and in From Hell is a riff on megapolisomancy, and when megapolisomancy describes cities as if they were haunted necropolises you can see how it may have influenced Ramsey Campbell as he disorients readers with his inanimate cities written about as if they were sentient, and malign, forms of life. Even Neil Gaiman uses this concept explicitly in Sandman #51, “A Tale of Two Cities”.

Monteleone takes Leiber’s theories and develops them into the backbone of Night Train, writing that the development of New York City has worked a megapolisomantic ritual that caused other dimensions to intrude into our own, with the points of intersection located underground. The focus of the occult invasion is on the Lower East Side, bounded by Broadway on the west, Allen Street on the East, 4th Street to the north, and Canal to the south. So, basically, the Lower East Side and Nolita/the lower East Village. The good news/bad news? While Katz’s Delicatessen escapes these baleful boundaries, not so lucky are the Yonah Schimmel Knish bakery or Uniqlo Soho.

Because Monteleone believes in the “Go Big or Go Home” school of writing, his characters don’t spend a lot of time investigating ancient manuscripts in dusty libraries. Instead, they strap up, enter the bizarre and be-magicked tunnels beneath New York City, find the mystical creatures that live there, and shotgun the shit out of them. Going full SWAT on occult forces seems to work pretty well, actually. They finally encounter the ancient albino monks of the order of the Knights of Bernardus, and the monks conjure up a mighty spell to destroy them. All seems lost until Corvino discovers that evil spell-casting dwarves are allergic to M-16 fire, and he goes full auto on this hideous urban Hogwarts. Have some hot lead, Potter.

Horror paperbacks loved to start with a prologue, these days usually called a “cold open” and they loved to end with an epilogue, the literary equivalent of the question mark that appeared on the screen at the end of old monster movies (“The End…?”). Monteleone delivers his epilogue and you wonder if he used actual megapolisomancy to glimpse the future of New York City. Our heroes have (mostly) survived, even though they’re totally traumatized and more likely to take a taxi than swipe their Metrocard from now on. But the cops have decided that they need to keep an eye on the monthly crime stats on the Lower East Side. As long as crime numbers keep dropping the city fathers know that the Knights of Bernardus and their bizarre, bloodthirsty bestiary aren’t coming back. Gentrification is the spell that seals tight the doors of Hell.

(PS: And check out that sweet cover by the legendary Lisa Falkenstern.)

Grady Hendrix has written for publications ranging from Playboy to World Literature Today; his previous novel was Horrorstör, about a haunted IKEA, and his latest novel, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, is basically Beaches meets The Exorcist.

There’s a weird moment near the end of Shakespeare’s most realist and domestic comedy, The Merry Wives of Windsor, when the plot to expose Falstaff’s failed sexual exploits gets all “Midsummer Nights” dreamy. Suddenly, there’s an enchanted oak tree which is haunted by fairies and a monstrous figure of Herne the Hunter. It’s all a kind of prank at Falstaff’s expense, of course, but it hinges on the fat knight thinking it’s real, and for a few minutes the play feels like its moved into an entirely different genre. The reality of Windsor’s small town doings gives way to the stuff of Puck, Oberon and Titania. It’s as if Shakespeare has gotten frustrated by the mundane, prosaic world of the play and needs to find a little whimsy, even if he will finally pull the rug out from under the fairies and show that it’s all just boys with tapers and costumes.

Until that final act, Merry Wives had been the closest Shakespeare came to writing the kind of drama penned by his friend and colleague Ben Jonson, whose most successful plays were expressly urban, satirical and contemporary. The point at which Merry Wives wanders off into the woods says a lot about the difference between the two writers and how they were esteemed by their culture at the time. Jonson was brilliantly bitter in his humor, particularly in how he exposed social pretension and religious hypocrisy. He was also a classicist, a man deeply committed to the models of art established by the ancients, and he wore his learning on his sleeve.

Indeed, in his dedicatory poem penned for the 1623 folio (the first [almost] complete works of Shakespeare published seven years after the author’s death), Jonson can’t resist backhandedly praising Shakespeare for his genius despite his having “small Latin and less Greek.” The implication—one picked up by other critics for the next couple of centuries—was that Shakespeare was a naturally talented but unstudied writer whose magical forays was a sign of his limited rural roots. For those around him who viewed art in terms of learning and adherence to rules of form and propriety, this was a problem, and when his near-contemporaries were critical of Shakespeare they frequently targeted his fanciful imagination and natural wildness as literary flaws. In 1630, Ben Jonson wrote that Shakespeare “was, indeed, honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped” (my emphasis). Jonson saw Shakespeare’s gift as something which needed controlling, reining in.

Other scholars less persnickety than Jonson praised Shakespeare but felt they had to explain his speculative inclinations and lack of learning. John Dryden observed that Shakespeare “needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he look’d inwards, and found her there,” and Milton spoke of Shakespeare as “Fancy’s child” who would “warble his native wood-notes wild.” That fanciful wildness led Voltaire, in typically neoclassical French mode, to complain that Shakespeare “had a genius full of strength and fertility, natural and without any spark of good taste and any knowledge of the rules. …there are such beautiful scenes, such great and at the same time so terrible pieces widespread in his monstrous farces which go by the name of tragedies.” In other words, Shakespeare was too geeky and yet also insufficiently nerdy.

By “geeky” I mean that Shakespeare was an enthusiastic fantasist who didn’t so much run with what his imagination generated but positively geeked out on the wild, the supernatural and the strange. But he wasn’t a proper “nerd.” Jonson, by contrast, was a nerd to the bone, prone to a kind of seventeenth century man-splaining by way of his extensive classical learning. Theatrically, of course, that could be disastrous, and Jonson came to loathe the tyranny of public opinion which shot down some of the plays of which he was most proud. Still, it’s worth remembering that Shakespeare’s homespun fantasy was not always appreciated in his own time. The diarist Samuel Pepys, for instance, felt comfortable dismissing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1662 as “the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.” Much of the subsequent critical response treated Shakespeare’s fantastical elements as best ignored compared to Shakespeare’s “more serious” matters of character, philosophy and social commentary. But one of the great critics of the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson, who was not above criticizing Shakespeare’s work for what he found shocking in it, still recognized that the wildness and imaginative scale of that work outstripped the more restrained and rational drama of his own period, comparing the two in an appropriately nature-inspired metaphor:

“The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity.”

The literary establishment’s skepticism about the fantastic is a recurring theme through history, of course, as is evidenced by Tolkien’s frustration over academia’s refusal to talk about the monsters in Beowulf as monsters, so one can be forgiven for forgetting just how central the fantastic and outlandish is to Shakespeare. Consider some of the elements that don’t sit well in the kind of “serious” realist fiction which dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and stand amazed at how frequent and central they are to Shakespeare’s plays. To begin with the obvious ones, there’s the spirits and wizardry of The Tempest, the fairies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the prophetic witches of Macbeth, and providential interferences in the late romances Pericles and Cymbeline (the latter of which includes Jupiter descending from the heavens on an eagle). There’s Mercutio’s lengthy digression on the dream fairy, Queen Mab—clearly more a product of Shakespeare’s own rural Warwickshire than the urban Verona which is Romeo and Juliet’s setting. Otherwise realist plays hinge on ghosts, not just Macbeth, but also Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Richard III. Shakespeare also blurs the edges of reality with events that feel supernatural even when there’s a conventional explanation, such as in Merry Wives. The most extreme instance is the statue of the sixteen-year dead Hermione, which comes to life at the end of The Winter’s Tale. The play offers just enough explanation to suggest that it’s possible that she never really died and has been in hiding in the interim, but the moment feels magical, possibly because that aforementioned providential interference has stamped the whole story. This is, after all, the play which features Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction: a character exits “pursued by a bear.” That sense of strangeness—things just about possible but odd and unsettling—is a hallmark of Shakespeare in ways that separate him from his contemporaries.

It is this Shakespeare that lives on in spec fic and visual media. As one of the fonts of Western fantasy, he is the one who insists upon that which is most crucial to the form: that tweaking reality, pushing it so that story floats free of the limitations of realism in no way lessens the writer’s reach in matters of character, theme, political, religious or other “serious” resonance. Fantasy easily coexists with the richest of sentence-level writing, the most penetrating character analysis, and the most provocative thinking. Or at least it can. Shakespeare, I think, serves as a model, something for fantasy writers to aspire to, and his undeniable achievement should make it a little easier for the rest of us to embrace our inner geek in the pursuit of artistic excellence and stand up for fancy.

This post was originally published in June 2016 as part of Tor.com’s series of essays on Shakespeare.

A.J. Hartley is the bestselling author of a dozen novels including Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows (co-authored with Tom DeLonge) and the YA fantasy adventure Steeplejack, available from Tor Teen. As Andrew James Hartley he is also UNC Charlotte’s Robinson Distinguished Professor of Shakespeare, specializing in performance theory and practice, and is the author of various scholarly books and articles from the world’s best academic publishers including Palgrave and Cambridge University Press. He is an honorary fellow of the University of Central Lancashire, UK.

What if your whole life was just The Breakfast Club for a chaotically whimsical god?

The Magicians’ second season finale begins with a voiceover summary, a notion that sounds terrible until you discover that the voiceover is from none other than Ember, god of Fillory, who describes everything that’s happened in relation to how much it entertained him. These characters, with all the trials they’ve been through? Just the wacky hijinks of Quentin Coldwater and pals: the addict, the victim, the bitch, the scowl, and the martyr. Just tropes that have ceased to entertain Ember.

Ember, however, knows how to entertain; his version of the story is just as off-color as the real thing, and he does Margo’s voice for good goofy measure. “The danger of sublimated trauma is a major theme in our story,” he notes. “Character is destiny.”

But he also says the candy witch from the season premiere will pay off, and she doesn’t. At least not yet.

How reliable is narrator-Ember? How written is the story in each character’s book, tucked away in the Library? How many choices were made to bring the story to this point? The first season of The Magicians was about growing up, a coming-of-age tale with major trauma, but the second is about something just as difficult, and just as ongoing: surviving.

Ember is wrong about our characters, just as he’s wrong about his brother, and wrong about so many other things. Power, whatever its source, never made anybody any smarter. Eliot may have been an addict, but he’s grown into a leader. Julia was a victim, but she took her fate into her own hands—even if that didn’t play out the way everyone expected. Margo is a bitch, but she’s still trying to save Fen and Eliot’s daughter. Alice was a martyr, but she became a force solely interested in herself. And Penny—forget being a scowl. It’s Penny who says to Kady, after he’s given a diagnosis of just weeks to live, “Let’s not waste time being mad, ok?”

And what is Quentin, the person around who all these character revolve? A sad little nerd king, according to Umber, who’s not wrong. But also a god-killer.

I don’t think even Quentin saw that one coming.

All this change and growth was not obtained easily, and it’s certainly no guarantee of success. Looking back over season two, it’s a season of mistakes, and painful ones—betrayed trust, vindictive aggression, boundless certainty, selfish love. These mistakes are defining, but they’re not limiting. Or they don’t have to be. And sometimes they’re not mistakes, but they feel like the wrong choice anyway. Julia is whole again, her shade returned to her by Our Lady Underground—and she’s exhausted, traumatized, tangled in panic attacks and memories. There is no kinder moment this hour than Eliot, asking if she’s ok, but making a face as he does it: He knows the answer. She’s not. And so he adjusts his request for her help just a little bit, framing it as a challenge, and a way for her not to be alone.

“Why do you care?”
“I just do?”

Caring can’t always be explained, but it’s never a mistake. Eliot will make—has made—his share of fuckups, but more than anyone, he’s accepted them, and the role he has to play. He’s a king. And being a king has taught him the thing everyone has had to come to terms with this season.

“You know what you learn when you’re a high king? Screwing up is inevitable, and there are some fuckups you can never unfuck.”

You can’t unfuck some things. But you can survive them. You can try, and fail, and try again, harder and better and smarter. The problem is that there are gods around, and they have not yet learned to accept their screwups. They would rather smash their toys and go home, building more perfect worlds in tiny linear boxes.

Ember and Umber are like petulant little children, mad that a toy got dirty. Only a new one will do. But humans don’t have that option. We don’t get to throw away a dirty, imperfect life in favor of a new one. And so we learn to survive our mistakes, even when it costs us. Margo’s mistake with Fen and the fairies costs her an eye, a symbolic loss if ever I saw one. She didn’t see what she’d gotten them into, or how fully Eliot was invested in his kinghood, his wife, his family. They have a perfectly them moment of understanding, but the rift between them can’t be ignored.

“I guess we’ll just have to live with this strain until the future reveals itself. Meantime, that future is going to be a big blank post-apocalyptic nada unless we do what we do best.”
“Act out with a total lack of empathy and impulse control?”
“Party like the world depends on it. Because, Bambi One-Eye? It do.”

The strain can’t be ignored, but it can be lived with and worked around. Maybe not if Margo keeps insisting on dominating the populace, but, well, we’ll see what the fairies have to say about that. I never claimed anyone was done learning from their mistakes. Just that they’re learning to live with them.

The biggest mistake, in the end, might be that they thought they were doing the right thing. “Q? I think you just saved the whole world,” Eliot says, when the brother-gods of Fillory lie dead in the castle. And yes, Quentin (and Julia) saved it from the immediate impending apocalypse, the one petty tyrant Ember was about to bring about. But at what cost?

“With every good thing,” Alice says, “no matter how small it is, it’s always married to something so completely disgusting. You can’t escape it.”

This wasn’t a small good thing. This was, in theory, a huge good thing. A save-the-day good thing, hoorah, rainbows and puppies and maybe shiny medals for everyone good thing. Remember last season Quentin Coldwater? All he wanted was Fillory—and Alice Quinn. Now he’s saved them both. So imagine the cold shower that is the news Alice delivers. “Gods like Ember have parents, you idiot.”

And those parents have employees, including the Mario brother of the gods, a plumber who appears to turn off all the sources of magic. The bastard does it with a little smirk on his face.

This could, in different hands, be too much, especially for Quentin—getting all the things he wants, then being the one to fuck it up for everyone. But this was a group effort, a series of choices that led the magical breakfast club to places good and bad. They’ve survived all their mistakes this season, from Penny getting stuck in a magical bank vault to Margo starting a war to Quentin not telling anyone when niffin Alice was in his back. The season built carefully to this point, so that it feels like the natural culmination of everyone thinking the story should go the way they want it to—only to run up against something more powerful that has other ideas. But as Ember’s voiceover shows, they were always up against something more powerful with its own ideas. They just didn’t always know it.

And now, life no longer involves magical choices, but a lot of theory and adjusting. Was it worth it to save Fillory to destroy magic? Should anyone have had the power to make that choice? How does Fillory even work, or exist? What holds a magical world together, if not magic? What about the Neitherlands? And what about these damn fairies, converging on Castle Whitespire? Did their plane vanish?

Still, not even fairies are as interesting as how this season ends: right back at the beginning, with Quentin and Julia, dreaming of magic, trusting only each other. “I have never met anyone less willing to take no for an answer,” Eliot says to Julia early on, and so of course it’s Julia who is still not accepting the universe’s no. She makes sparks.

What will she do with them?

BEST QUOTES AND LOOSE ENDS

• Where are Penny and Kady? Presumably he’s with the rest of the Librarians, but where? How does Kady get to him? Is she not just repeating old mistakes? Last season she passed info from Brakebills to Marina, and now she’s passing things from the Library to Harriet?
• Jason Ralph’s face this episode jumped several magnitudes of expressiveness. When Alice asks, not for the first time, why he brought her back, he’s instantly lost, a child who cannot, will not understand the question.
• “I don’t pretend to understand what you’ve been through but I can tell you, the way you’re relating to that couch is not unknown to me.”
• “It’s a new chapter and the title is, Shit-tons of Drama and Surprise”
• It must drive obsessive Umber insane that his horns are asymmetrical.
• I have many questions about that sword. How did they make it? Did Julia just spell a sword into being god-killing or did she put the bullet in it or what?
• “We are officially a land of godless heathens, making today the first day of our societal adulthood. I for one am slightly terrified and equally excited, and trying not to break into Hamilton.”
• Is the lamprey the thing from the sandbox? It had a family??!?? And what does it mean when Joseph says “my Alice in there still”?

Molly Templeton is hugely relieved that American Gods is about to start, as otherwise 2018 would feel even further away.

Philadelphia is locked in the grip of an evil magic that transforms its streets into a nightmare landscape the minute the sun sets each night. While most of the city hunkers down and hopes to survive the long winter nights, Becket Walker is roaming the darkened streets having the time of her life.

Once, the guilt of having inadvertently let the night magic into the city—and of having killed her onetime best friend—had threatened to destroy her. But now she’s been Nightstruck, and all her grief and guilt and terror have been swept away—along with her conscience. So what if she’s lost her friends, her family, and her home? And so what if her hot new boyfriend is super-controlling and downright malevolent?

Mesmerized by the power and freedom of not having to care about anyone but herself, Becket is sinking ever deeper into the night magic’s grasp. But those who love her refuse to give up on her—even if she’s given up on them. If they can’t find a way to help Becket break the night magic’s hold, the entire city might soon find itself shrouded in perpetual night. But the last thing Becket wants is to be “rescued” from her brand new life, and she will fight tooth and claw to stay exactly where she is.

Jenna Black’s Night Magic, the follow-up to Nightstruck, is available May 30th from Tor Teen.

Chapter One

I was trapped in a quarantined city that went foaming-at-themouth crazy every night. My house was trashed so badly it was unlivable. My father was dead. I’d shot and killed my best friend.

And I was having the best time of my life.

I walked down the streets of Center City, Philadelphia, on a beautifully brisk winter night hand in hand with the hottest guy I’d ever seen and couldn’t stop smiling.

Aleric grinned at me, his green eyes glittering in the darkness. The power was on—you could tell from the lighted windows all around—but the streetlamps turned into gallows every night, so the city didn’t have the ambient glow I was used to. I loved the air of intimacy the darkness added.

“Are you wondering now why you resisted for so long?” Aleric asked.

“Stop being so smug.” I punched him in the arm with my free hand. He laughed, letting go of my hand and putting his arm around my shoulders. I slipped my own arm around his waist, sidling closer until our hips were touching and we were forced to time our steps to each other. I rested my cheek against the buttery soft leather of his jacket, inhaling its delicious scent.

Just yesterday, I’d been almost suicidally miserable. I’d blamed myself for the darkness that had descended on the city, for all the deaths that darkness had brought, for all the suffering. I’d even blamed myself for the death of my father, though with my new, clearer viewpoint it was hard to remember why. Any idiot could see that it wasn’t my fault. Well, any idiot except the non-Nightstruck me, that is.

I’d slipped away during the night intending to kill Piper, but I never really expected to succeed. I wasn’t depressed enough to take my own life, but I’d been in a bad-enough state that taking a suicidal risk had seemed like a good idea. Piper and Aleric had known that, had counted on it to lure me out into the night.

In the end, it had all been a giant trick, designed to weaken my psyche and make me susceptible to the lure of becoming Nightstruck. Turns out all it takes to become Nightstruck is to be outside during the Transition from night to day. If you’re weak and vulnerable, the lure of the night magic will call to you and you’ll be swept away to . . . well, wherever the Nightstruck disappeared to during the day. Even being Nightstruck myself, I wasn’t sure I understood exactly what happened to us when daylight hit.

I’d desperately tried to avoid becoming Nightstruck, tried to get inside before the dawn Transition occurred, but I hadn’t made it.

Thank God! It was hard to imagine why I’d fought something so wonderful. All that pain and guilt and grief . . . Gone, in the blink of an eye.

I rubbed my cheek against Aleric’s leather jacket again, enjoying the decadent texture. Then I looked down at myself and frowned. I was wearing the same clothes I’d worn yesterday, obviously. I couldn’t go back to my house and get a change of clothes, seeing as Piper and her Nightstruck friends had destroyed everything I owned. It was too cold for me to be terribly rank yet, but I still felt kind of scuzzy. Not to mention that my nice warm puffer coat was hideously ugly, made even more so in contrast to Aleric’s gorgeous black leather jacket.

“I need some new clothes,” I said, then frowned. “But I can’t exactly go shopping, can I?” Aside from the fact that I had no money, all the city’s stores were closed and locked up tight by sunset.

Aleric snorted. “You’ll never have to shop again. Anything you want is yours for the taking.”

“Well yeah, I know, but all the stores are closed, and the ones that didn’t have good security have been stripped bare by now.” When the city had first gone mad, packs of the Nightstruck had roamed around breaking into stores and houses willy-nilly. Those without good enough security measures had long since been picked clean, and the rest were virtual fortresses at night.

Aleric shrugged. “That may be a problem for the more run-ofthe-mill Nightstruck, but you’re different. I’m the king of this city and you are my queen.”

He whistled loudly. A group of Nightstruck who’d been hanging out on someone’s front stoop passing around a bottle of booze snapped to attention at the sound, then hurried to gather around us when Aleric beckoned with his free hand. The Night-struck stared at him attentively, like a pack of devoted dogs, but he didn’t speak. I gave him a quizzical look, but he just winked at me.

We must have stood there for like five minutes, the Night-struck never taking their green eyes off Aleric, never speaking, barely even twitching. He was the center of their universe, and I had the vague sense that the old me would have been completely creeped out by the way they were looking at him.

“What are we waiting for?” I finally couldn’t help asking. The temperature was dropping, and warm though my ugly puffer coat might be, I was starting to shiver.

“Patience, Becket,” Aleric said with another of his smug smiles.

“I’m Nightstruck, idiot,” I told him. “Patience is not one of my virtues.” It felt just a little strange to talk to this virtual stranger, this guy I’d once considered my enemy, as if we were the best of friends. The old me had always been shy and tongue-tied, carefully thinking about every word that left my mouth. All that had changed, and I felt absolutely no discomfort about calling this powerful, dangerous person an idiot.

Aleric seemed more amused by my rudeness than irritated, and a moment later I heard the metallic clang of something approaching. Something four-footed, by the sound of it.

Most of the city’s statues came to life at night, transformed from their daylight selves into nightmare constructs that would happily prey on any non-Nightstruck person who dared set foot outside. I figured that since we were only a few blocks away from Rittenhouse Square, the approaching footsteps came from one of those statues, and it turned out I was right.

I’d had some nasty run-ins with Billy, the bronze goat statue from the square, but what turned the corner now was about ten times more terrifying. I was pretty sure that during the day, it was a snarling lion that was as dangerous-looking as Billy was harmless, but the night had given it a serious makeover. Its mane consisted of a mass of writhing, hissing metal snakes, and its tail had turned into a scorpion-like stinger. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, it also had a set of finger-sized mandibles that looked very much like a spider’s. Being Nightstruck, I was supposedly immune to the terror of the city’s constructs, but this one gave me a serious case of the shivers.

The mutant lion sauntered right up to Aleric, the other Night-struck moving quickly aside to let it by. Guess I wasn’t the only one who thought the creature was scary. Aleric, however, reached out to pet the damn thing’s head, heedless of the snakes and the constantly moving mandibles. I shuddered and slipped out from under Aleric’s arm when the lion made a low thrumming sound that I supposed was a purr and butted its head— very gently—against his chest.

“Leo here would be happy to take us shopping,” Aleric said. “Wouldn’t you, Leo?”

Leo made a whuff of what was probably agreement. Aleric reached for my hand, but I shied away. I’m not one of those girls who runs screaming at the very thought of a snake, but I had no interest in getting closer to that writhing, hissing mass on Leo’s head, and the spider jaws made my stomach turn.

Aleric laughed at me but made a little shooing motion with his hand. “Back off and give us a little room. There’s a good kitty.”

Leo stepped back by maybe about ten inches. He was still way closer than I liked, but I didn’t want Aleric thinking I was a wuss, and I knew that the construct wouldn’t hurt me. I gritted my teeth and stepped forward to take Aleric’s hand. One of the snakes in Leo’s mane lunged at me. I squeaked and tried to jump back, but Aleric held me fast and the snake’s fangs snapped together about six inches from my nose.

“Relax, Becks,” Aleric said. “He’s just playing with you.”

Playing. Right.

I was more relieved than I could say when Aleric gave my hand a little tug and we started walking down the street again. The Nightstruck fell in behind us like an untidy army, and Leo walked beside us, his metal claws clanking against the pavement with each step.

Our little parade made its way over to Walnut Street, one of the more fashionable shopping areas of the city. Many of the windows were boarded up, the stores having been early victims to the marauding Nightstruck before anyone knew they needed extra protection. The rest were covered by metal doors or grilles. At least, I’m sure they were metal doors or grilles during the day. At night, they looked like age-yellowed bones or rocklike scales or swarms of small metal bugs. Unlike most of the changes that took place during the night, these were actually semi-helpful, making the stores even harder to get into than they would be if the window coverings were mere grilles.

The first store Aleric stopped in front of was a small boutique that sold ridiculous fur and leather goods, the kind of place where you could buy a pair of mittens for twenty-five hundred dollars. In other words, a store I had never set foot in and had never really aspired to set foot in. It looked even less inviting now, thanks to what had once been a set of bars but had become frothy tentacles reminiscent of a giant jellyfish.

“How about we start here?” Aleric suggested, gesturing to his little army.

Like obedient and highly stupid zombies, the Nightstruck waded in, grabbing handfuls of tentacles and tugging them aside. Ordinarily, the constructs ignored the Nightstruck as if they didn’t exist, but apparently these tentacles didn’t appreciate being under attack. The Nightstruck screamed as the tentacles wrapped around them and started squeezing. Some seemed to have sharp edges that drew blood, and some seemed to crush bones with the force of their grip.

The tentacles were so busy crushing the life out of the Night-struck that they left an opening through which we could see the store’s front window. Leo squeezed himself into that opening. One of the Nightstruck freed an arm and tried to grab hold of Leo’s mane, screaming for help. Leo casually turned his head and bit the poor guy’s hand off, the spider jaws eagerly shoving that hand down his gullet as blood fountained and the screams reached a new height.

I watched all this happen with a kind of appalled fascination. These people were dying for me, screaming in fear and pain. I thought it was kind of a waste—surely there would have been some other way to get inside without getting people killed—but I didn’t feel particularly bad about it. I certainly didn’t feel any need to try to help them. If they were so blind stupid that they walked into a mass of killer tentacles just because Aleric told them to, then it was their own damn fault they were dying.

It was an interesting feeling, watching those people die and not being overcome with horror and guilt. I wasn’t completely unmoved by their deaths, and I would have saved them if I could. At least, I’m pretty sure I would have. But it was obviously pointless to try, because if all of them weren’t enough to take on the tentacles, what the heck could I do? And realizing I couldn’t help but could only get myself hurt made it surprisingly easy to just stand there and watch.

“You didn’t have to kill anyone to prove your point,” I told Aleric as Leo head-butted the front window and shattered the glass.

“But how else could I prove that I would kill for you?”

I had no answer for that. Aleric gestured for me to go through the hole Leo had created in the window, and I saw no reason not to do so. The hole was big enough that I didn’t even have to worry about being sliced by stray shards. The floor crunched beneath my feet. The Nightstruck weren’t screaming anymore.

I expected Aleric to follow, but he remained standing on the sidewalk, looking in at me through the broken glass.

“Aren’t you coming?” I asked.

He gave me a lopsided smile and raised his eyebrows. It took me a moment to remember that he was more like the constructs than like the Nightstruck. The Nightstruck were human—at least something very like human—but Aleric and the constructs were creatures created by magic, and for whatever reason, they couldn’t seem to enter buildings.

I turned away and groped at the wall until I found a light switch. I flicked it on and found I was standing next to a mannequin that was wearing a black knee-length mink coat. I reached out to stroke the sleeve, and it was possibly the softest thing I’d ever touched. Without meaning to, I sank my fingers into the fur, luxuriating in the feel of it.

Even if I could have afforded it, I would never have chosen to wear a fur coat of any kind before I’d been Nightstruck. I recoiled every time I saw a human being wearing fur, overcome with pity for all the animals who had died to make said human being feel important. I wondered how many cute little weasels had been slaughtered for the sake of this coat, but I realized it didn’t matter. They were already dead, and me refusing to touch a coat made of their pelts wouldn’t bring them back.

“Try it on,” Aleric suggested.

I hesitated. It was one thing to pet and admire the coat, another to actually put it on. “It’s a little much, don’t you think?”

Aleric rolled his eyes. “That’s your old self talking. You can have whatever you want. If you want a mink coat, take a mink coat. If you’d like to wear evening gowns every night, be my guest. You make the rules.”

I bit my lip and shivered. My parents were such sticklers they wouldn’t even buy me a crappy used car because they thought it would spoil me. The thought of just taking what I wanted—no working for it, no begging my parents, no disapproving looks— was so intoxicating I felt almost dizzy with it.

“At least try it on,” Aleric urged. “See how it feels.”

“I guess there’s no harm in that,” I muttered under my breath. I stripped off my puffer coat, dropping it to the floor, then carefully slid the mink off the mannequin’s shoulders and put it on.

“Oh my God,” I moaned as I clutched the lapels closed then tied the belt. The coat was like a mink bathrobe, and aside from being so wonderfully soft, it was about ten times warmer than what I’d been wearing. It also weighed about ten times as much, but that was a price I was more than willing to pay.

Thinking of price, I checked the tag that was attached to the belt—and almost choked on my own tongue.

“This thing costs almost nineteen thousand dollars!” I screeched. My mind could barely encompass the idea of wearing something that cost more than some brand new cars.

Aleric gestured for me to come closer, and I did. He reached out like he wanted to touch the fur, and I leaned forward through the broken window so his hand didn’t have to cross the threshold to touch me. But instead of admiring the coat, he yanked off the price tag and smiled at me. “Tonight, for you, it’s free.”

I laughed with pure delight as I realized he was right, then hurried back into the store to a full-length mirror to get a good look at myself.

I let out an involuntary gasp when I saw a pair of bright green eyes staring out of my face. It shouldn’t have surprised me. All the Nightstruck had unnaturally green eyes. But the face I saw in that mirror was not the one I thought of as mine.

I told myself to pretend I was wearing green contacts and shook off the strangeness. The coat looked absolutely fabulous, like it was made for me. The rest of me, though . . .

I tugged off the knit hat I had pulled down over my ears and searched the store until I found a white chinchilla hat that was so soft it almost made the coat feel scratchy. The white hat looked a bit weird with the black coat, but I loved it too much to resist it. It wasn’t like Aleric or the Nightstruck were going to look down on me for my poor fashion sense.

A little more shopping, and I found the perfect pair of shearling boots to keep my feet warm during the long winter night. I was by now sweltering inside the store—the heater was doing its best to counter the arctic blast coming through the front window—but I wasn’t about to take my wonderful new furs off. I looked at myself in the mirror one more time and frowned at the cheap skinny jeans that peeked out between the hem of the coat and the tops of the boots.

“I need new jeans,” I declared. “Something with a little pizazz. And doesn’t come from someplace like Target.”

“I can make that happen for you,” Aleric said.

I had no doubt he could.

Excerpted from Night Magic, copyright © 2017 by Jenna Black.

Be warned: this post contains sex and blatant deity favoritism. During a press event for the upcoming Starz show American Gods, showrunners Bryan Fuller and Michael Green mused on comic book pantheons, the nature of worship, and the unique challenges of adapting “god sex” from Neil Gaiman’s novel to the screen.

This might seem like an odd juxtaposition, but if you’ve read American Gods you know that the book tackles sexuality in a unique way. Since many of the book’s divine figures come from a time when sex was simply part of worship, there are several scenes of amorous encounters between humans and deities. This led to particular challenges for the showrunners.

First, the blatant favoritism! Asked to pick a favorite god from any pantheon, Michael Green threw down a divine gauntlet with The Beyonder. “He’s kind of omnipotent, basically put Yahweh in the comic! And what’s the first thing he’s going to do? Make them all fight.” Fuller went with a similarly comics-influenced answer: “The first god—or I guess demigod—I was actively fascinated with was Wonder Woman. And that was… as a young gay kid my favorite characters were Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman, and Princess Leia. They were the ones I responded to, because I didn’t identify with the male characters…because I was different than them.” Green nodded, and then pointed out, “We just did a Marvel/DC thing here!”

The two also discussed the philosophy behind the sexuality on the show. They were guided by a need to give attention to a broad spectrum of sexuality. Fuller particularly wanted to highlight same-sex love scenes as a corrective to past film experiences:

There are experiences that I’ve had going to movies and watching a sex scene…where the audience cringes and boos because it’s a same-sex couple. I remember seeing The Color Purple and people gasping and jeering when there was the suggestion of a sex scene between these women, and in Prelude to a Kiss, when Alec Baldwin kissed the elderly man the audience freaked out…we wanted to remove as many prejudices as we could by making it beautiful.

This came to the fore in a scene between a young man from Oman, Salim, and a Djinn who has found work as an American cab driver. Green and Fuller discussed adapting the book:

Salim and the Djinn was a story that we both remembered. And that resonated to us in completely different ways. It was so romantic, and the fact that they were gay and Muslim was secondary to the romance. And telling the story of Salim in the book the sex scene is a blowjob in a hotel. [For the show] we felt like the Djinn in this romantic gesture wanted to give him a more intimate sexual experience. Also we wanted to be incredibly visual and gorgeous, wanted to convey a sense of sexuality cinematically.

The only note from Starz Standards and Practices was that they needed to tone down one moment so that it appeared “pornographic” rather than becoming “pornography”. Green emphasized, “As long as the sexuality was rooted in character, and was something integral as opposed to something cuttable, then it would be something we could stand behind.”

Fuller described trying to write and shoot the scene as a “communion” between the two men: “There’s something to the god-sex on the show that is much more spiritual.”

They approached the infamous Bilquis scene in the same spirit. Fuller mentioned how important the role was to the actor, Yetide Badaki, saying, “It’s fascinating to talk to Yetide, who grew up in Nigeria in a society where women weren’t allowed to have ownership of their sexuality, were not allowed to have sexual pleasure, for her as an actor to come in and play this woman who is so empowered by her sexuality and in control of it.” And Green downplayed the physical difficulties of shooting the scene between Bilquis and worshiper, instead emphasizing the emotional resonance of the scene.

What are you willing to give to your god, and what is god willing to accept from you? What is the largest gift you can give? You body. Your life.

Fuller and Green also discussed their plans to expand the pantheon beyond the scope of the novel’s. They’ve already added extra “Coming to America” sections to this season, including one where Mexican immigrants bring a version of Jesus across the border into Texas. But assuming that the show continues we’ll get to see a variety of deities. Fuller said that one thing he regrets was that “we couldn’t hit all the continents, because there are so many gods. We haven’t gotten to any Asian gods. There are many fascinating ones that we want to incorporate into the narrative. So we’re going to be doing a mix of what’s in the book and also new gods—er, well, new old gods to us. We’re fascinated with their stories and want to see how they manifest. What are the rules of thoughtform? If you believe in it enough you can manifest it in reality. That is the central thesis of this show, but how does that apply to those types of characters who may not be gods but are worshiped as gods?”

After a lively conversation that ranged from Marvel to DC to divine sex, we’re curious, I can’t wait to see how the pantheon expands!

Robert Jordan’s fantasy The Wheel of Time is coming to television! But for those for you who haven’t yet read the epic, getting up to speed with an adaptation of a 14-book series can be a daunting prospect. Luckily, IGN has distilled the central idea of WoT into a 60-second video, which makes for a solid platform for people to dive into the books, or the upcoming television show.

Check it out below!

[via IGN!]

Writing, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of actually putting words on paper, is one of the loneliest professions. But then there are conventions, panels, collaborative serialized storytelling experiments, and (thanks to social media) Twitter hashtag fun and Reddit AMAs, all of which see authors congregating in the same physical or digital space. But what do you call it when these famously reclusive creatures are all collected together? Like a mob of kangaroos or a unkindness of ravens, we thought writers deserved their very own descriptive collective noun. We came up with “a mischief of authors,” but we want to hear yours!

A collective noun could be useful in all sorts of situations, really, including our fanfic about Lord Byron’s ghost story competition (the one that lead to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). Oddly, one never comes up in Mike Carey’s The Unwritten, which features cameos from many authors throughout history and plays heavily with stories and the lives they warp.

If you need inspiration, there’s always Wondermark’s index of Supernatural Collective Nouns to get the gears turning:

Of course, your answer reveals what you really think about scribes, whether it’s “a rumpus of writers,” “an audacity of authors,” “a gossip of columnists”… Or none of the above!

So, we implore you to stretch your own writing muscles and fill in the blank: “a [collective noun] of authors.”

This small Jyn Erso is actually named Harley, and her dad Dino Ignacio makes all sort of fantastic cosplay outfits for his family. This year, in honor of the dearly departed Carrie Fisher, Harley came to the Star Wars Celebration prepared with her Jyn outfit and a stack of Death Star plans–and handed them out to every Leia she saw.

Observe. And then cry with us.

A New Hope Leia!

A Cloud City Leia!

An Endor Leia!

A–hey, wait a minute, that’s skipping over a significant part of the plot!

There are more of these utterly charming photos from the Star Wars Celebration over at Ignacio’s Imgur account. And you’ll find more impressive cosplay in his gallery!

[Via Nerdist]

The first novel by Cory Doctorow I read, some time in the early 2000s, was Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I read it, believe it or not, on a PalmPilot. I’m not bringing this up because that was Singularity-level technology for me at the time (even though it was!) but rather to illustrate just one of the reasons why Doctorow gained a loyal fan base early on in his career: he’s been releasing his books under Creative Commons licenses since the very beginning, meaning you can head to his website right now and download one or more of his novels or collections.

It’s also an illustration of what may be Doctorow’s most defining characteristic as an author: he wears his politics on his sleeve. Fiction or non-fiction, long form or short, Doctorow will work his opinions about copyright law or digital privacy or economic injustice into the text. For better or worse, whether you like it or not, these books come with a message, and Doctorow will make 100% sure that you get that message and then some. (It’s one of the main reasons why some readers don’t click with his fiction; I’ve heard people say they may as well read his Boing Boing columns, which often deal with the exact same issues.)

To each their own: I’ve always enjoyed Doctorow’s novels, because they’re fast-paced, funny, and full of interesting (if occasionally somewhat interchangeable) characters. Even if you happen to disagree with his opinions, at least they’re expressed clearly, intelligently, and out in the open, rather than hidden in the subtext. (They’re about as far removed from hidden in the subtext as possible, actually.)

So, with the release of Doctorow’s new novel Walkaway just a few days away, here are a few recommendations for possible entry points into Doctorow’s sprawling bibliography. I’ve split them up in three groups: “adult” fiction, YA fiction, and nonfiction.

Adult Fiction

Makers

Here, I’m going to make it easy for you. Want to try out some Cory Doctorow? Fine, you don’t even have to leave this site. Doctorow’s novel Makers was serialized right here on Tor.com—click through and start reading!

Makers is a perfect manifestation of some of the author’s recurring themes and subjects, in this case a near-future take on “maker culture”, which the author defines as “people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet.” (With some minor tinkering, you could slap that same tag line on several of his other novels, including the forthcoming Walkaway.)

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

This was the author’s debut, as well as the first novel released under a Creative Commons license. I don’t think Doctorow would object too strongly to me describing him as a huge Disney geek, and this novel was the first indication of this preoccupation in his work. Most of it takes place in Walt Disney World in the 22nd Century, when the amusement park is run by rival “adhocracies” competing for a reputation-based currency called Whuffie. (For more Doctorow-Disney material, albeit somewhat darker than Down and Out, try the novella The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.)

With a Little Help

Doctorow has written some excellent short fiction over the years. If you’d rather jump in with some short stories before committing to an entire novel, check out With a Little Help, a collection the author put together with (as the title suggests) assistance from friends and fans for everything from cover illustrations to copy edits. (If you download the most recent version, you’ll find my name somewhere in the credits for catching a typo.) All that aside, it’s also just a great collection of stories. The story “Scroogled”, featuring immigration officials who use your Google search history to look for incriminating personal details, is practically the Platonic ideal of a Cory Doctorow story.

Young Adult Fiction

Little Brother and Homeland

Little Brother is the novel that put Doctorow on the map, so to speak. The story of Marcus Yallow—a tech-savvy 17-year-old who gets caught up in a DHS sweep after a 9/11-style terrorist attack in San Francisco—became a New York Times bestseller and won multiple awards. Published during the tail end of the George W. Bush administration, it’s a perfect example of Doctorow’s ability to grab the zeitgeist by the scruff of the neck and extract a captivating story from it. That same zeitgeistiness (What? It’s a word and I like it.) is also part of the reason why Doctorow’s work occasionally loses some of its impact as the political landscape shifts and shifts again. (Another consequence of this is that the cutting-edge tech of the time sounds weirdly dated even just a few years later, resulting in things like “I checked the phone—­my home PC had sent it an email.”)

Interestingly, Doctorow actually revisited Marcus Yallow and company for Homeland, a follow-up novel set a handful of years after the conclusion of Little Brother. Quoting my own review, “Where Little Brother was clearly a child of the George W. Bush era, dealing with the domestic fallout of the War on Terror, the Patriot Act, ‘enhanced interrogation’ and so on, Homeland takes the same characters and fast-forwards them to roughly the beginning of this decade: the Great Recession, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and an increasing level of disenchantment with the political process aimed at both sides of the proverbial aisle. Youthful techno-defiance during the first Obama term, basically.”

For the Win and Pirate Cinema

Maybe inspired by the success of Little Brother, Doctorow wrote two more YA novels following the same pattern: teenagers standing up for what’s right, using their facility with current technology to crack open and change unfair systems. In For the Win Doctorow applies this formula to inhumane working conditions for MMORPG gold farmers, whereas in Pirate Cinema he tackles draconian copyright laws. Viewed together along with Little Brother and Homeland, these novels may come across as somewhat formulaic, but individually they’re all fun, relevant YA novels I’d recommend to teenagers and adults alike.

Non-fiction

And then there’s the non-fiction, which ranges from essays to newspaper columns to blog posts and more. Depending on which bio you check, Cory Doctorow describes himself as a “science fiction author and activist” or an “activist and science fiction author.” The order doesn’t matter all that much because, as mentioned before, the author’s values and opinions on a wide range of topics permeate his novels and stories. At times Cory Doctorow reads somewhat like a more political Neal Stephenson, in terms of his willingness to take detours and side-bars in order to squeeze non-fictional material into his fiction. (To be fair, many of those infodumps don’t deal with politics at all: Homeland starts off with a guided tour of Burning Man that’s so detailed you’ll be able to draw a map of the event by the time you’re done, and there are a few times when Marcus gets going on the proper way to brew coffee that’ll have the caffeine-addicts among us salivating and taking notes.)

However, if you want to read Doctorow’s thoughts free of pesky distractions like characters and plot, Content and Context are two good collections of the author’s essays and columns. Fair warning: because Doctorow often writes about the intersection of information technology and politics, many of these essays from just a few years ago are already quite dated.

For more up-to-date material, check out Boing Boing, where Doctorow still blogs multiple times daily, and of course his own site. (Side note: I’ve become pretty good at blindly guessing which Boing Boing articles in my RSS feed were authored by Doctorow, just based on their titles.)

A while back I somehow found myself thinking up one of those check-the-right-box magazine quizzes to help decide if you’d enjoy Cory Doctorow’s writings. If you read Boing Boing or Slashdot regularly, add 10 points. If you’re annoyed by infodumps, subtract 10 points. If you’re politically liberal-leaning, add 5 points. If you read xkcd, add 10 points. (Doctorow is a recurring character!) Add 10 points each if you know how to jailbreak a mobile device, can list a minimum of two 3D printer models without checking Google, or subscribe to MAKE. And so on.

However, I often recommend his books to people who wouldn’t score very high on the Doctorow Compatibility Test (patent pending), simply because most of them are fun, fast, and thought-provoking reads — and that includes his forthcoming novel Walkaway, which I didn’t include here simply because I’m only about halfway through my advance copy.

Stefan Raets reads and reviews science fiction and fantasy whenever he isn’t distracted by less important things like eating and sleeping. You can find him on Twitter, and his website is Far Beyond Reality.

If you’ve been itching to get your hands on a hardcover edition of N.K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award-winning novel The Fifth Season, here’s your chance: This September, Subterranean Press will release fewer than 500 limited-edition hardcover copies of the book, with gorgeous new cover art by Miranda Meeks.

Readers interested in owning this special edition have two options: Subterranean will produce just 400 signed, numbered copies of the clothbound hardcover edition priced at $80. There will also be 52 signed, traycased leatherbound hardcovers—a lettered edition—priced at $250. Both editions are printed on archival quality paper with embossed and colored endsheets.

Subterranean Press describes the first novel in Jemisin’s Broken Earth series:

The Fifth Season follows three women in three times—youthful Damaya, skillful Syenite, and the older Essun—as each face the challenges of the end times of their world. Their stories are inextricable, yet unique, limned in voices and tones specific and necessary to each character. The world of The Fifth Season is the Broken Earth, a world clearly extrapolated from our own, but just as clearly and marvelously Jemisin’s invention. The geographies and politics alike are contoured from the stuff of both life and imagination, combining into the rare fantastic setting that is as fascinating as the characters who inhabit it and the stories they find themselves in.

Here’s the full cover:

Art by Miranda Meeks

Meeks also illustrated the cover for Brandon Sanderson’s Dangerous Women novella “Shadows of Silence in the Forests of Hell.”

“We are thrilled to be producing this special edition of what has fast been recognized as a new classic in the science fiction and fantasy field,” Subterranean Press COO Yanni Kuznia said in a press release. “Jemisin’s novel is one we are especially excited to produce in a limited edition meant to have a treasured place on its owner’s shelf.”

When we first meet Offred in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, she is thisclose to giving up. She’s losing track of time and, worse, hope; she vacillates between the equal temptations of escaping through suicide and just putting her head down and giving in to the system. She had a name, but it’s forbidden now, so she won’t even tell it to us.

By contrast, in Volker Schlöndorff’s 1990 film adaptation, our introduction to Kate—the name she’s given in Harold Pinter’s heavily streamlined screenplay—is watching her husband gunned down right in front of her at the Gilead/Canadian border before she’s dragged away with the rest of the fertile women. The entirety of the film is condensed into just a few months, as we watch Kate become a Handmaid, instead of the years in which life as a Handmaid is already her reality.

Book Offred’s trauma is lived-in. Movie Offred is still in shock. In short, there are absolutely no stakes.

In a parallel universe, there is a movie version of The Handmaid’s Tale starring Sigourney Weaver, fresh off Alien and Ghostbusters, her curly hair obscured by her red veil as she intones “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum” and plots the demise of her masters through a running interior monologue. But Weaver dropped out of the project because (irony of ironies!) she was pregnant, and Natasha Richardson stepped in to an adaptation where the screenwriter “had something specific against voice-overs” (as the actress later bemoaned) and the director thought this was an erotic thriller.

No, really. As The Atlantic tells it, Schlöndorff, coming from the New German Cinema movement, interpreted Atwood’s dystopian tale as “a thriller—a sexually charged and vivid drama without the nuance or emotional depth of the source material.” And so, bafflingly, the posters featured Natasha Richardson clutching her red Handmaid garb to her bare breasts, looking haunted, while Dunaway and Duvall loom over her. “This looks like a movie about a threesome gone wrong!” I said to my partner, laughing, to which he immediately replied, “Isn’t it?”

Unfortunately, Richardson’s onscreen persona reflects the passive woman in the print materials, and her delivery is all off. Due in part to what the New York Times described as the British actress’ “flat, toneless American accent but [enlivened] with her throaty purr,” Richardson’s Offred mostly seems bemused at her circumstances, never actually anguished.

But she’s also working with what she’s given, which in truth isn’t much. In adapting the novel, Pinter stripped away the many layers, side plots, and relationships that made Atwood’s story so rich. Luke is dead, his fate sealed rather than left as an uncertainty to haunt Offred later. Moira is not her friend from the pre-Gilead era, but simply another woman she encounters at the Red Center; their history is constrained to just a short time, and the intensity of their bond makes little sense. The Commander’s household, instead of her last chance, is her first posting. Offred has barely accepted what it means to be a Handmaid before all hell breaks loose with Mayday; the rest of the film’s events would mean little to her, let alone to audiences who likely had not read the book.

To add insult to injury, Pinter ditched any sort of internal monologue for Offred, not even a brief narration during the opening and closing credits to bookend the story. What you see is what you get—and considering that the Handmaids are punished for speaking out of turn and can’t even communicate with one another outside of coded pleasantries, losing the insight into Offred’s true thoughts makes it seem as if she doesn’t have much to contribute to her own story.

As a result, Offred’s character is defined by her actions, which are so over-the-top as to seem performative, disingenuous. After suffering through her first Ceremony as a Handmaid, Offred runs to her room, rips off her red gown, and throws open the window, baring her breasts to the outside as she sobs brokenheartedly. It’s such an incongruously eroticized shot, seeing as it takes place (a) in a dystopian thriller and (b) after a violent, agency-robbing rape. Then the moment, if that’s what it is, is broken: Nick (a smoldering Aidan Quinn) spots her from across the courtyard and seems less shocked by her nakedness than worried she’ll get caught; he half-scolds/half-warns her to cover up before she gets herself shot.

If Pinter and Schlöndorff were trying to make it clear how unsexy the life of a Handmaid is, they certainly succeeded. But Atwood already did that just in her description of the Ceremony. We didn’t need the additional histrionics, but I suspect that they were “required” to hammer home the extent of her anguish. All nonverbally, of course.

Similarly, the narrative structure foregoes any sort of layering in favor of the simplest and most straightforward timeline. The film proceeds in a completely linear fashion, no flashbacks or time jumps: Kate is captured at the border; Kate is conditioned at the Red Center; Kate is brought to the Commander’s household and renamed Offred. Events that are revealed later in the book, like the flashback to Moira’s escape, happen at approximately the same point in the movie but as part of the linear narrative. Therefore, the plot must contrive to take Kate out of the Commander’s household for a sleepover at the Red Center after her doctor’s appointment—despite it being a frequent, noninvasive procedure—so that she can be reunited with Moira and be the cattle prod-wielding assistant in her jailbreak. (And in that case, why not throw her Handmaid dress back on and slip out with her?)

For a story rich with symbolism, there are few motifs; the rare recurring visual—of her lost daughter Jill wandering through the snow calling out “Mommy?”—serves no real purpose to the story. The dystopian trappings are there in their technicolor brightness, and some visual choices—like having the Handmaids pull the rope to physically string up one of their own at the Women’s Salvaging, and Moira’s “sexy Handmaid” outfit at Jezebel’s—are excellent interpretations. Yet without any deeper insights, it’s all we have to go on.

One of the biggest casualties in this streamlining is losing the moment in the past where everything changed: the malfunctioning debit cards, the mass layoffs, women downgraded to second-class citizens with the punch of a button. Offred’s imprisonment has barely begun, yet simultaneously she’s apparently been doing this forever. She makes a mention at Jezebel’s how she hasn’t had a drink in years, yet she’s been an official Handmaid for less than six months. So, did she spend at least a year training at the Red Center? Seems unlikely, as the Gileadeans were desperate to get Handmaids into households. Did Gilead extend its control slowly, outlawing vices like alcohol for years before they worked up to shooting potential escapees at the border? We have absolutely no idea because there is no story before or after these 109 minutes.

This is the problem with forcing a story to go from point A to B when the source material jumps around the whole damn alphabet (but does it damn well). Rather than resort to large infodumps, Atwood deliberately reveals only as many details as you need to know in any particular moment. So even though we learn this out of order, we can track the history of Gilead: first women lost their jobs and debit cards, then the Constitution got suspended, and so on and so forth—every terrifying micro and macro event leading up to Offred and Luke’s terrifying run to the border. Even as the story unfolds nonlinearly, Atwood still manages to keep the timeline, and worldbuilding, coherent.

Oddly enough, we trade Offred’s interiority for more time with Serena Joy (Faye Dunaway) and the Commander (Robert Duvall). While in the novel they are only together when Offred is present, during the Ceremony, in the film we get at least two short scenes of them alone as a couple. While Offred is off walking with Ofglen, Fred pauses by the flower beds to comment on Serena’s commitment to her projects but really to ask about how she thinks Offred is fitting in to the household. Yet he claims that it’s all for her sake: “I want you to be happy, Serena.”

“Yes,” she retorts, not pausing in her planting, “life is so much easier for you when I am.” It’s a shocking dissent, as the Wives, for all their privilege, are still expected to be subservient to their husbands, but it’s also undercut with the sort of wry affection that comes from decades of marriage.

Later, when Serena and Offred are engaging in some “girl talk” about how soon they can both fulfill their duties by getting Offred knocked up, Serena’s comment “because a baby would make my life whole” carries a mocking edge. Faye Dunaway is far and away the best part of this film, as a Wife struggling to retain her dignity not only against the intrusion of a Handmaid but also in mourning for the life that had to be sacrificed to create Gilead’s social structures. For all that Richardson plays Offred’s horror at being raped during the Ceremony, there is a comparable expression of violation on Serena’s face, also veiled (in blue, of course). And months later, when the Commander unconsciously reaches for Offred’s face in the middle of things, Serena snatches his hand and holds it tightly. The look on her face is heartbreaking; she knows about their secret trysts.

Yet I don’t know if I would call the Handmaid and the Wife sexual rivals, exactly. While book and movie Serena Joy both tell Offred that “he is my husband, til death do us part—we fought for that,” it’s not as if we see the Commander and Serena cozying up on non-Ceremony nights; there seems to be a barrier between them that can’t be attributed just to their issues with infertility. Though even if their sexual dynamics are nonexistent, there is a clear intimacy, as seen in the aforementioned exchanges that were added to the film. Don’t let the photo below fool you; Offred’s every private encounter with the Commander is characterized by forced pleasantness, whereas Serena has an easy rapport with her husband.

If anything, Serena and Offred become sexual comrades, or confidantes; Serena plays a madame of sorts when she arranges for Nick to impregnate Offred (which, as previously established, helps all the women of the household while keeping the man’s ego intact). But while Offred and Nick are having forbidden sex in his apartment, Serena does not return to her bedroom to distract the Commander from calling upon his Handmaid for late-night Scrabble. Instead, she stays up and watches old footage of herself singing “Amazing Grace” in her former life, conducting her younger self with her cigarette, her face rapt with nostalgia for past freedoms.

The sympathy for Serena Joy is less puzzling, as the Aunts instruct the Handmaids to “think of the Wives” and how hard all of this is for them, to accept an interloper and quasi-rival into the homes they’ve made. But the Commander seems to earn the same measured consideration, despite his part in the galling proceedings that created Gilead. After Offred murders him, we are treated to a final tribute to his military prowess in patriotic warfront footage; it’s broadcast by the Eyes, pure propaganda.

And there is the biggest shocker of the film, the radically different ending. Someone affiliated with Ofglen and the Mayday resistance smuggles in a switchblade and a note—which is shocking for its content but not the fact that it’s the first written word Offred has seen in years—that something will happen at 10 p.m. tomorrow. Offred seems to disregard the note, but keeps the knife, as the next day is when Serena Joy catches her redhanded (or black-boa’ed?) sneaking out to Jezebel’s.

Instead of retreating to her room like a punished child, Offred visits the Commander’s office one last time, to beg him to intercede on her behalf. It’s a bizarre scene: She stumbles in on him holding a loaded gun, his nerves frayed despite the footage we’ve just seen of him calling the war “a comparably stable situation” and promising “a breakthrough for our forces.” To her desperate plea, he simply shrugs helplessly, every part the henpecked husband: “What could I do? She gave me hell, she gave me all kinds of grief.” Wives, amirite? he asks of his concubine, even now looking for sympathy.

You can hardly blame Offred for ramming the knife in his neck. The way that the Commander grabs at her, so that they go down together, drenched in his blood, is eerily reminiscent of his violent kiss, the one he expected as a reward for Scrabble and Cosmo, earlier in the film.

And so, when the Eyes come for her despite Serena Joy not calling them, it’s under the pretense of arresting her for murder. But instead of Offred stepping into a black van and emerging centuries later as a voice on a cassette tape at a Symposium, we stay with her—in linear time, yet again—except now she’s Kate, and she’s pregnant with Nick’s baby, hiding out in an old trailer in the wilderness. She waits for news, but she has hope that she will be reunited with her daughter Jill and that she and Nick will bring their unborn child into a new world.

Of course she has hope. She’s only been a Handmaid for a few months! The whole experience—and the same could be said for the movie—passes as if it were a bad dream.

Back in the 1980s, Atwood decided against adapting her own novel for the screen due to timing conflicts, and though she consulted on specific details, she was emphatic that the screenplay was in no way hers. The result, though sanctioned, was clearly The Handmaid’s Tale as seen through the eyes of two men: equal parts violent and erotic sex performed upon a Handmaid who tells us no more than whatever neutral remarks she utters aloud.

For the upcoming TV adaptation, Atwood is not just a consultant, but a consulting producer, this time with a creative team that seems to be almost equally male and female. While executive producers Bruce Miller and Warren Littlefield have earned acclaim for their work on (respectively) The 100 and Fargo, star Elisabeth Moss also serves as producer, and executive producer Reed Morano (who also directed the pilot) has been more vocal than anyone in promoting the series on Twitter and Instagram. The Republic of Gilead may have been created by men, but The Handmaid’s Tale requires female voices.

But no voice is as vital as Offred’s. Rather than shy away from the device, the TV series’ writers have turned Offred’s internal monologue almost into its own character, distinctive from her demure Handmaid persona. She’s Joe establishing the boundaries of his futuristic world in Looper, the Narrator enumerating his vendettas in Fight Club, Leonard constantly filling in his empty memories in Memento, Joel’s voice detailing the relationship that lived and died but deserves a second chance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And even though I already know how it ends, I can’t wait to hear the rest of her story.

Natalie Zutter burst out laughing in the first five minutes of The Handmaid’s Tale movie, and the rest of it was downhill from there. Follow her on Twitter and Tumblr.