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My Sci-Fi/Fantasy OTPs Are All Beta Couples
I’ve written tens of thousands of words of fanfiction for various fandoms, and I’ve always found myself drawn not to the main romantic leads, but to the secondary Beta Couples. While the main pairings...
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Gone to the Dogs: City by Clifford D. Simak
In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers,...
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Speaking Truth Through Time Loops: Russian Doll and “Now Wait for This Week”
A woman in New York City finds herself doomed to perpetually celebrate her early-mid-life birthday, cycling through the same rote interactions with friends and searching for a way to escape the pattern...
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QUILTBAG+ Speculative Classics: Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre
Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre is considered one of the major works of 20th century Haitian literature—when I picked up the new English translation by Kaiama L. Glover, however, I wasn’t...
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I Must Be Writing for Both of Us: Wild Life by Molly Gloss
Set in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the twentieth century, Wild Life takes the narrative frame of a journal, written across a period of weeks, by Charlotte Bridger Drummond—single mother of...
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A Transformed Woman: Madame d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat.”
“Either become a woman, or make me a cat.” The image of a beast hiding deep within an enchanted forest in an enchanted castle, waiting to be transformed through love, is generally associated with,...
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Pull List: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and DIE and the Lure of Nostalgia
Looking back on something you once loved deeply is a double-edged sword. Sometimes you revisit the past and find it not nearly as hospitable and compelling as you thought, and sometimes you find fresh...
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The Monster at the End of This Episode — Star Trek: Discovery’s “Saints of...
One of the themes of the second season of Discovery is fixing what was broken—or at least off-kilter—in the first season. Some of these are carried a bit too far. Honestly, I don’t need Pike not liking...
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Check Out the Good Omens Opening Credits (And Release Date!)
For the perfect Friday treat, look no further than the opening credits sequence for the Good Omens television series! And the release date, of course. Which you’re probably more excited about. The...
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What Manga, Anime, and Japanese History Teaches Us About Loving Robots
After losing to Angelique Kerber in the Australian Open a couple of years ago, tennis star Serena Williams said, “As much as I would like to be a robot, I am not. I try to. But, you know, I do the best...
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Half-Assed in a Half-Shell — Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)
While 1993’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III didn’t do well enough to warrant a fourth film, the heroes in a half-shell continued unabated in various forms throughout the rest of the 1990s and the...
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Setting the Stakes in Storytelling
Everyone turns up for a car chase at the end of the world, and the cars won’t start. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men is a movie of exquisite direction, and I’m madly in love with the action scenes....
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Six Standalone Fantasy Novels that Stand Out
There’s a certain satisfaction in picking up a fantasy novel and knowing it’s a standalone. For one, you won’t have to wait a year, or two, or even five before you find out what happens next. In that...
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Announcing the 2018 BSFA Award Finalists
The British Science Fiction Association has announced the finalists for the BSFA Awards for works published in 2018. The Awards will be presented at the 70th Eastercon, in London, April 19-22....
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Read “A Dead Djinn in Cairo”, A Supernatural Alternate History from P. Djeli...
Egypt, 1912. In an alternate Cairo infused with the otherworldly, the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities investigate disturbances between the mortal and the (possibly) divine....
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There’s a Fine Line Between Theatre and Fantasy
As some readers might be aware, my other job involves the theatre. So believe me when I say that nothing provides unexpected drama quite like live theatre and its lesser cousins, galas and proms. Any...
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Reading Children of Blood and Bone: Chapters 1-8
Welcome to the first installment of our reread of Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone. This week, we’re focusing on chapters 1-8—in which Zélie gets herself into all kinds of trouble, Princess...
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8 Forgotten SFF Classics of the ’70s and ’80s
I’m a nerd from a family of nerds, and I grew up reading a lot of science fiction. Specifically, I grew up reading a lot of my mother’s science fiction collection, which included a lot of brilliant...
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Star Trek Has the Best Credit Sequences in All of SciFi Television
I am an easy mark for a good credits sequence. “Good” doesn’t necessarily mean long, either—Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s exuberant twenty-second sprint tells you everything you need to know, while (in the UK,...
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From Science to Spirit: Equus, Story of the Horse Explores the Animal’s...
The first half of the PBS show Nature’s two-hour documentary on the horse focuses mostly on the science: evolution, biology, psychology, and animal behavior. It prominently features a controversial...
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