News Sublimation

Isabel J. Kim’s Debut Novel Sublimation Has Rights Picked Up for TV Adaptation

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 12, 2024

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Isabel J. Kim’s debut novel, Sublimation, has been picked up by Universal International Studios for a potential television adaptation. The book has yet to be released, though Tor Publishing Group has acquired the novel as part of a three-book deal with Kim.

Kim is a Shirley Jackson Award-winner who has written several acclaimed stories, including “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole,” which ran in the February 2024 issue of Clarkesworld.

Sublimation is her first novel, and here is the official synopsis for it:

In a statement, Kim described her book as “a story about identity in a world where it takes fifteen hours to fly across the world and a whole lifetime to live a culture. It’s about being able to see exactly what would have happened if you had stayed. It’s heavily influenced by how I grew up split between Korea and the USA, how there’s a lot of stories about immigration as a clean break and not a lot of stories about the messy return. It’s about how at some point during my adolescence, it started being cool to be Korean.”

“From the very first page, you feel drawn to these characters and this world that explores such rich themes through this paradoxical existence that Isabel has captured so sublimely,” Kelsey Balance, SVP, Global Scripted Series, Universal International Studios told Deadline. “It’s staggering that this is her first novel as it’s so compelling but also so fresh and creative. We can’t wait to bring her vision to audiences around the globe.”

The project is still in its early days, so no news on if/when the adaptation will make its way to the small screen. [end-mark]

The post Isabel J. Kim’s Debut Novel <i>Sublimation</i> Has Rights Picked Up for TV Adaptation appeared first on Reactor.

News Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Will Return With More Monsters, More Legacy—and Spinoffs

You can never have too many Titans

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 12, 2024

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One of last year’s best new SFF series is not over yet. Apple TV+ has renewed Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for a second season—and what’s more, it’s adding an unspecified number of spinoff series to the Monsterverse’s small-screen lineup.

That’s very vague, right? But the press release literally says “multiple spinoffs,” with no further details. Vagueness aside, the return of Monarch is very good news. Even if you have not been keeping up with the various Godzilla-related films of the last decade (I certainly have not), the series is a fascinating, character-driven drama with an appealing cast of both established actors and new faces.

The Russells elder and younger—Kurt and Wyatt—play the same character, Lee Shaw, in two time periods. In the 1950s, Shaw is part of a team that discovers titans. (Said team includes Mari Yamamoto as brilliant scientist Keiko Miura and Anders Holm as Bill Randa). Decades later, in the wake of the Titans’ battle in San Francisco, an older Shaw joins up with a younger generation of characters who have their own reasons to be invested in the secrets of the Titans and Monarch, the mysterious agency that has a connection to the giant creatures.

Monarch was co-created by Chris Black (Severance) and comics writer Matt Fraction, who also serve as co-showrunners. It is—and I cannot stress this enough—very good. It also stars Anna Sawai, Kiersey Clemons, Ren Watabe, Joe Tippett, and Takehiro Hira, all of whom I hope to keep watching for many seasons to come.

No production schedule has been announced for season two of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters or any of its mysterious spinoffs, but in the meantime, you can catch up on the first season on Apple TV+. [end-mark]

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Book Recommendations Terry Pratchett Book Club

Terry Pratchett Book Club: Unseen Academicals, Part II

May your sherry whisper wonderful things to you, too

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on April 12, 2024

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Who’s up for practice? Who wants Rincewind on their team? (Me, I do.)

Summary

Glenda and Juliet head back to the university to give themselves an alibi for not being at the match. Ottimony comes in to tell them all about it after leading the wizards there, and he swears that Juliet looks like the girl at the match. Glenda is summoned to the Stollops because Juliet’s dad got a letter from Vetinari, asking him to attend a dinner with the wizards to talk about the future of football. Trev finds Nutt asleep at the university, having eaten a large quotient of Glenda’s pies. He tells Glenda and Juliet what happened, and when Nutt comes to, he start up his work again. But he says a few things about how Trev really feels about his late father that sends Trev catatonic. Glenda asks Nutt how he knows all these things, how he managed not to die, and where he comes from. Nutt isn’t entirely sure; he only knows how he came to be in Ladyship’s castle and that there’s a door in his mind that he can’t access. Nutt thinks about writing love poetry for Trev to give Juliet, and Juliet bothers Glenda the next day about going to a fashion show, which has an ad in the paper next to an article about the origins of football going back a millennia. Glenda agrees to the show, but only after she gets a chance to listen in on the University Council meeting.

The wizards are putting together thoughts for what they need as a team, including the pies, the uniforms, and the fans. Glenda is bemused by the whole conversation and accidentally interjects herself, letting them know that they’ve got it largely wrong—they won’t be able to change much about how football functions, and they won’t be able to dictate how people enjoy it. She also tells them not to make their uniforms sport a UU across the front, or it’ll make the team look like they have bosoms. Ridcully asks what she does, and they all learn that she runs the Night Kitchen and makes the incredible pies they’re all so fond of. After she leaves, Ponder notes that Glenda’s talk of football invoked memories in the group, whether or not they had them; it was a kind of religious experience. Glenda goes with Juliet to a dwarf chainmail fashion show run by Madame Sharon, who has her assistant Pepe measure Juliet and asks them to help her because her model dropped a pickaxe on her foot. Glenda negotiates a hefty sum for Juliet to model the new cloth-like micromail. The wizards begin their first practice round of football, which they don’t rightly understand.

Glenda sees Juliet through her first fashion show. She’s very drunk and stumbles into the next room after it’s over, having a talking with Pepe, who turns out to have converted to being a dwarf with Madame Sharon’s help. They want Juliet to keep working for them, planning to pay her lots of money travel her around the Disc. They know Glenda is the key to her cooperation, so they ask her to consider it, and Glenda decides they’re going home for the night first. Despite the fact that Ridcully promised never to use it for these sorts of purposes, he demands that Ponder let them in to the Cabinet of Curiosity so that it can make them a proper football—because they don’t have one. They can only keep the ball outside the cabinet for about fourteen hours before causing trouble, so Ridcully stops Trev and Nutt in the hall and asks them if they know where to have the ball replicated. He gives them money for the job and they set off. Glenda tells Juliet that they’ll open up a bank account for her so that her father can’t get at her money. Trev and Nutt run into Andy again, and when he threatens Trev, Nutt threatens to break his hand. They make it to a dwarf shop, and ask him to replicate the ball in exchange for money and a university license to make more of them.

Juliet decides she agrees with Glenda about staying in her job at the university, which makes Glenda feel wretched; the next day her picture is in the paper. Trev goes to pee out back while Nutt and the dwarf artisan are working and sees two vampire women outside, which Butt later tells him are protection for Ladyship. Nutt delivers the love poem he wrote for Trev to Glenda, so she can give it to Juliet. Glenda reads the letter for Juliet and knows that Trev didn’t write it, but doesn’t tell her. Pepe wakes to Times reporters in their store and everyone asking about Juliet. King Rhys has the paper sent via clacks, and the grags are in a tizzy about Juliet’s appearance, deeming it undwarfish. Ponder returns the Cabinet’s ball to the Cabinet and they begin creating teams again. (Rincewind tries to get out of this to no avail.) The (former) Dean has arrived at the university, but the game is interrupted by Nutt, who means to tell Ridcully that they’re playing the game all wrong, and more strategy is needed and, indeed, more theater. Trev comes to Nutt’s defense to make sure no one gets upset with him for speaking out of turn, but Ridcully is amenable to the idea. Glenda sells a lot more for Stronginthearm and gives him ideas for whole new troll fashion lines.

Commentary

There are several overlays going on with the Juliet and Trev story, one of them obviously being the Romeo and Juliet angle that you get from her name and the “two houses” being their two football teams. This is mostly funny to me because I saw some Tumblr post just a few days ago that was pointing out that the Montagues and Capulets being “both alike in dignity” as houses did not preclude any level of poshness—they just needed to be the same. Hence, footballer families.

But the more intriguing slice here is the Cyrano parody, at least to me. Nutt is effectively playing the Cyrano part, writing letters on Trev’s behalf, who’s in the Christian role. But the intention isn’t to make a direct parallel, of course, because Nutt clearly isn’t interested in Juliet—he likes Glenda. And I appreciate the lack of conflict, but moreso, I find myself appreciating the fact that someone who’s as bright as Nutt isn’t really interested in someone who’s pretty if they’re not particularly thoughtful? Juliet’s not his type, so no issue there.

And conversely, Juliet’s route to becoming a fashion model for micromail is endearing too, namely due to Glenda learning some things for herself about snuffing out the desire to dream a little bigger. Do I like that it’s helped along by too much sherry? Yes, I do. I wish sherry talked to me like that. Tequila does, though, so I can’t complain too much.

We’re getting more clues on Nutt’s true identity as we go, but I do appreciate that the mystery is drawn out and viewed from multiple character perspectives, making it that much harder to guess point blank.

The bits where the wizards are practicing football are favorites for me because it reads like it’s written by someone who feels exactly the same way about sports that I do. There’s no sense, no real interest in the game itself, nor any inclination toward athleticism (aside from Ridcully’s own personal interest and physical prowess). The only time things make sense is when everyone is thinking about how exciting the game should be, how to generate narrative around it, how to make it a spectacle. I get that part. The rest is just window dressing.

Asides and little thoughts

• Of Vetinari being the wrong sort for Juliet despite being the only available “prince” around, Glenda thinks: Besides, no one was sure which side of the bed he got out of, or even if he went to bed at all. Meaning: We’re honestly not sure if the man is gay, straight, or ace.
• “By his own admission, he would rather run ten miles, leap a five-bar gate and climb a big hill than engage in any athletic activity.” Me too, Ponder.
• Ridcully’s entire response to the concept of possible gayness—that could really just be some wizard having an affair with a married woman and he’s not getting it—being that there’s not enough love in the world and also “Well done, that man!” (which is, itself, actually in response to people playing football and grabbing his attention) is pretty perfect, all things considered.

Pratchettisms

Next week we’ll read up to:

[end-mark]

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News Transformers

G.I. Joe and Transformers Living Together (Maybe) in New Crossover Movie

A vital, nay, NECESSARY film, we’re sure.

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 11, 2024

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If you saw the end-credit scene from Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, you knew that a Transformers and G.I. Joe crossover movie was likely in the works. At CinemaCon today, Paramount Pictures made it official (via Deadline): We’re getting a blockbuster at some point in the future that will include aliens who can turn into cars and/or mecha beasts AND G.I. Joe soldiers doing… whatever G.I. Joe soldiers do.

While the film is now official, Paramount didn’t share any news about who would be directing this, though the idea apparently came from Rise of the Beasts director Steven Caple Jr and it will be executive produced by none other than Steven Spielberg. The story for the film is also reportedly based on the 1980s run of comics based on the two Hasbro brands.

The first time G.I. Joe and Transformers shared a page was in 1987’s aptly named G.I. Joe and the Transformers. The four-issue mini-series saw the Autobots and the G.I. Joes (a.k.a. the good guys) face off against the Decepticons and Cobra (a.k.a. the bad guys). There also appears to be some friendly fire where Bumblebee gets destroyed(!) and reanimated/rebuilt under a different name, and the changing of sides by one key group, making it three against one in a battle to save Earth from sure destruction.

How closely the movie ties to this plot remains to be seen. But the comic run sounds like something that could make for a blockbuster film. They just better not fuck with Bumblebee too much (see the wonderful Transformer pictured above), as they are the best character in the franchise.

No news yet on when the movie will go into production or make its way to the big screen. [end-mark]

The post G.I. Joe and Transformers Living Together (Maybe) in New Crossover Movie appeared first on Reactor.

News The Running Man

Glen Powell to Star in Edgar Wright’s Adaptation of Richard Bachman’s The Running Man

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 11, 2024

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It’s been over three years since we found out that Edgar Wright was directing another adaptation of Richard Bachman/Stephen King’s The Running Man. Today at the Paramount Pictures panel at CinemaCon (via The Hollywood Reporter), however, we found out not only that the movie is still happening, but that Glen Powell has signed on to star in the lead role, the part that Arnold Schwarzenegger took on in the 1987 adaptation.

The Running Man, which King wrote in 1985 under his Bachman pen name, takes place in a future dystopia (which, by the way, was the year 2025), where the U.S. government runs a gladiatorial game show where a group of killers try to hunt down and kill a contestant. The longer one lives, the more money one makes. One man, the titular running man, enters the game to try to raise money for his sick daughter and manages to rip the game apart from the inside.

Powell will play that man. The actor is currently set to star in the upcoming tornado sequel Twisters (pictured above) and also had roles in Top Gun: Maverick, Hidden Figures and a recurring part in Scream Queens.

No news yet on when this version of The Running Man will make its way to theaters. [end-mark]

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News Star Trek

Star Trek Origin Film Is Finally Happening! Gets 2025 Release Window

So many possibilities!

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 11, 2024

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Star Trek is finally going to boldly head back to the big screen! During the Paramount Pictures panel today at CinemaCon (via /Film), news broke that a new Trek movie, which has been framed as an origin story, will be helmed by Toby Haynes. Haynes’ previous credits include directing episodes of Andor as well as the Black Mirror episode “USS Callister,” a brutal riff on the Star Trek franchise that explores the toxic side of the fandom. The writer for the film is Seth Grahame-Smith, whose previous credits include the underrated Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and The LEGO Batman Movie.

Even more exciting is the news that this origin film is officially happening in the near future (or a least is a much surer thing than the fourth movie starring Chris Pine as Kirk seems to be). Production on the film is set to start later this year and will premiere in theaters sometime in 2025.  

This prequel can’t help but raise questions about how it will affect the canonical Star Trek timeline(s). Will this story tie into the Star Trek: Enterprise series? As such, will Scott Bakula’s Jonathan Archer (pictured above) make an appearance, perhaps as one of the first presidents of the Federation? Or will this film completely rewrite the timeline/create a new one just like J.J. Abrams did with his films starring Pine as Kirk?

Time will tell! And it looks like we’ll get our answers sometime next year. [end-mark]

The post Star Trek Origin Film Is Finally Happening! Gets 2025 Release Window appeared first on Reactor.

News Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

We’re Getting an R-Rated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie Because What Is Reality Anymore?

It’s time to order a pizza…of vengeance.

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 11, 2024

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During their CinemaCon panel today, Paramount Pictures burdened us with the news that an R-rated live-action film based on the comic run Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin is in the works. The movie will be solidly in the adults-only camp, which means it will be chock full of violence, gore, and death! I feel bad for the parents, however, who miss the memo that these turtles ain’t for kiddos and take their eight-year-old to see it.

Granted, the original TMNT comics were darker, grittier affairs than the animated and live-action adaptions we’ve gotten on screen. But the average moviegoer doesn’t know that. The Last Ronin is also a more recent comic series—it ran from 2020 to 2022 and was penned by TMNT creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. According to Variety, Eastman and Tom Waltz (writer of two TMNT video games: 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and 2016’s TMNT: Mutants in Manhattan) penned the script adaptation.

Here’s the synopsis, per Variety:

Uh oh, everyone’s dead! And to my uninitiated eye this premise reads like fanfic of the more family-friendly fare most people know, which I admit makes me more intrigued.

No news yet on who will play the surviving Turtle or when the film will go into production, much less make its way to a theater near you. [end-mark]

The post We’re Getting an R-Rated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie Because What Is Reality Anymore? appeared first on Reactor.

News Dark Matter

Would You Like an Alternate Reality? The Dark Matter Trailer Has Plenty to Go Around

Where in the worlds is Jason Dessen’s real life?

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 11, 2024

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First, clarification: This is not Syfy’s Dark Matter. This is Apple TV’s Dark Matter, which is not about a spaceship’s amnesiac crew, but about a guy who kidnaps himself from another reality. If you did not watch the other Dark Matter, this won’t be confusing at all. The rest of us will just suffer, mildly.

The new Dark Matter is based on the novel by Blake Crouch. It stars Joel Edgerton as Jason Dessen, who has a nice life with his wife (Jennifer Connelly) and son (Oakes Fegley). He does mysterious science work and seems happy enough, until one night he is abducted and wakes up in a world that’s very, very different.

The summary spells it all out:

The series also stars Westworld’s Jimmi Simpson and A Murder at the End of the World’s Alice Braga. Crouch himself is the series’ writer and showrunner—his third time working on an adaptation of his own work (he co-created Good Behavior with Chad Hodge, and was a writer for Hodge’s adaptation of Wayward Pines).

Get into the alternate-reality box on May 8th on Apple TV+. [end-mark]

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Book Recommendations Nordic Visions

Nordic Visions Provides a Unique Overview of Contemporary Nordic SF, Fantasy, and Horror

A recent anthology celebrates a broad range of short stories, from ghost stories to fairy tales to alien planets…

By Rowdy Geirsson

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Published on April 11, 2024

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Nordic Visions is an anthology of speculative fiction stories written by Nordic authors and edited by Margrét Helgadóttir. Released by Solaris Books in the fall of 2023, the book’s sixteen short stories are drawn from all of the Nordic nations and the Faroe Islands, an autonomous territory of Denmark. Taken as a whole, the anthology presents a compelling cross-section of original sci-fi, fantasy, and horror originating in a part of the world best known internationally for crime fiction and children’s books.

Helgadóttir’s introduction provides an informative overview of Nordic speculative fiction as a whole and positions the genre within the broader context of the Nordic literary tradition, while also delineating some of the cultural and historical differences found in each of the countries comprising the region. The short stories themselves are organized by country and they cover a wide range of themes—readers will encounter ghosts, far-flung planets, dystopian societies, mythological characters, fairy tale enchantments, and more. While covering a broad range, the selection of stories leans a bit heavier towards science fiction than fantasy, and some entries are, naturally, stronger than others (as is generally the case with any collection or anthology).

Buy the Book

Nordic Visions

edited by Margrét Helgadóttir

The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction

Buy Book

Nordic Visions

edited by Margrét Helgadóttir

The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction

The Best of Nordic Speculative Fiction

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Nonetheless, Nordic Visions provides an excellent introduction to writers of speculative fiction from a region that tends to be overlooked in the genre. Most of the authors featured have also written full-length novels, many of which have been translated into English. A short bio of each author is provided at the end of the book, which serves as a useful guide for anyone who might wish to check out more of the selected authors’ other works. And if you’re interested in seeking out longer works of Nordic speculative fiction, be sure to also check out my earlier piece on “Exploring Nordic Speculative Fiction in Five Novels.”

Without further ado, here’s an overview of some of the many highlights found in Nordic Visions…

“She” by John Ajvide Lindqvist

A very clever little story that opens the anthology after Helgadóttir’s introduction. Written by the only author in the collection to have made a bit of a splash in English language literature (Lindqvist is the author of Let the Right One In), “She” is essentially a ghost story centered around the haunting of a new house built by a married couple in Sweden. As tends to be Lindqvist’s habit, he subverts the usual tropes of his chosen genre, in this instance by connecting the narrative to the horrors of World War II and shining some light on the darker side of modern Swedish history in the process.

“Sing” by Karin Tidbeck

“Sing” is a futuristic story set on the former mining planet of Kiruna (anyone familiar with Sweden should appreciate the name) that’s dominated by a parasitic ecosystem. The story follows the companionship of Aino, an outcast tailor, and Petr, a temporary visitor to Aino’s tiny village. Petr can’t communicate in the planet’s native “singing” language and as he digs deeper into how he might learn it, the disturbing nature of the planet’s ecosystem is revealed. “Sing” originally appeared on Reactor (then Tor.com) in 2013 and can be read here.

“The Cormorant” by Tone Almhjell

“The Cormorant” is Nordic Visions’ ode to the fairy tale, and is in fact based on one from the early 20th century by Regine Normann, who was something of a Norwegian Hans Christian Andersen (thus the tale is a modern age original story rather than a Grimm Brothers- or Asbjørnsen/Moe-style record of a much older one). “The Cormorant” follows a mother and daughter who live apart in isolation from the rest of their coastal village until an innocent but pivotal act triggers a chain reaction that upends their lives. A thickening sense of mystery propels the story forward towards a very effective, magical, and somewhat unsettling conclusion.

“A Bird Does Not Sing Because It Has an Answer” by Johanna Sinisalo

Johanna Sinisalo, the author of Troll: A Love Story and the original story behind the film Iron Sky, is a highly original sci-fi writer and “A Bird Does Not Sing Because It Has an Answer” is no exception. This story is set in a future with very few wilderness areas remaining and focuses on a single character who is responsible for using advanced electronics to study the behavior of birds… but of course, things don’t go quite as they should. This one is very compelling and ends on a wonderfully twisted note of cynicism.

“The Wings That Slice the Sky” by Emmi Itäranta

“The Wings That Slice the Sky” is a splendid little retelling of The Kalevala, the Finnish national epic and primary source of Finnish mythology. It starts with a description of the painting The Defense of the Sampo by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, which visually depicts Louhi, the story’s first-person narrator, as she is typically portrayed: a wicked, winged monster. The following pages then proceed to tell Louhi’s side of the story. “The Wings That Slice the Sky” is basically Finland’s answer to Genevieve Gornichec’s retelling of Norse mythology in The Witch’s Heart, only provided in short story form rather than a full-length novel.

[end-mark]

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News Heroes: Eclipsed

Heroes May Be Reborn Again

We don’t need another Heroes

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 11, 2024

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Surely they can find another cheerleader to save. Deadline reports that—years and years after the fact—Heroes may get a third chance at life. The original Heroes, created by Tim Kring, ran from 2006-2010, and is infamous in my house for its very awkward product placement (“Nissan Versa!”). A limited sequel series, Heroes Reborn, was set years after the original, and ran for a single season.

The original run of Heroes was charming, for a time, but went off the rails fairly quickly. An entry into the “ordinary people get superpowers” category, it tried not to be the X-Men, but did not always distinguish itself. It did have a generally quite appealing cast, including Hayden Panettiere (as the superpowered cheerleader), Milo Ventimiglia, Masi Oka, Zachary Quinto, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Ali Larter, Adrian Pasdar, Jack Coleman, and Greg Grunberg. Some of these people went on to greater fame (hello, Spock!) and some did not. The show’s writing staff also includes a few familiar names: Bryan Fuller (Hannibal), Jesse Alexander (also Hannibal), Aron Eli Coleite (The Spiderwick Chronicles), comics writer Jeph Loeb, Michael Green (Blue Eye Samurai), and Misha Green (Lovecraft Country).

The new series will be called Heroes: Eclipsed, and Deadline says it “is set years after the events of the original series as new evos are being awakened and discovering powers that will change their lives. Featuring familiar villains and new enemies who once again will be attempting to suppress this next step in human evolution, it will be up to this new group of heroes to save the world.”

No casting has been announced. Kring is writing the series, and executive producing it. Deadline says that it has been pitched to NBC, the original show’s network, as well as streamers—but no one has bitten. Yet. [end-mark]

The post <i>Heroes</i> May Be Reborn Again appeared first on Reactor.

News Speak No Evil

James McAvoy Is a Very Bad Host in the Trailer for Speak No Evil

Beware doctors offering vacation homes

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 11, 2024

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It’s all fun and games, kids, until you make James McAvoy mad. In Speak No Evil, James Watkins’s remake of the 2022 Danish film, McAvoy plays Paddy, a doctor (maybe?) who, along with his much younger wife (Aisling Franciosi), invites another family to his sprawling country home for a weekend getaway. Louise (Mackenzie Davis), Ben (Scoot McNairy), and their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) are delighted to accept. (ed note: hello, unexpected partial Halt and Catch Fire reunion?)

And then everything goes wrong, starting with an unsatisfactory dance performance by the children. Also, what’s with Paddy’s son, who doesn’t talk? This is explained as the boy having trouble communicating, but that trouble might have come from, uh, outside. (The trailer is really not subtle at suggesting what might have been done to this poor child.) The horror takes a while to fully appear, in this trailer, but it appears in McAvoy’s eyes: He is alarmingly good at going dead-eyed and murdery at the bat of an eyelash. He’s so charming! Just kidding, he wants to kill you. Or do something very bad to you, at least.

Speak No Evil is written by director Watkins (The Woman in Black), based on the original screenplay by Christian Tafdrup and Mads Tafdrup. It’s in theaters September 13th. Which, yes, is a Friday. [end-mark]

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Book Recommendations Short Fiction Spotlight

Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: March 2024

Death, betrayal, and the unexpectedly weird in this month’s short fiction spotlight.

By Alex Brown

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Published on April 12, 2024

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We’re doing death, betrayal, and the unexpectedly weird in this short speculative fiction spotlight. I read these ten stories last month and they were so good I had to go back and read them all again.

“Everything in the Garden is Lovely” by Hannah Yang

Every now and again, a short fiction author hits me with an opening line so striking I can’t stop thinking about it. Hannah Yang gave me one of those with “Now that I’ve failed as a woman, my punishment is to become a garden.” Her story is exactly what the sentence describes. A woman fails to meet the rigid, patriarchal rules of her society—in other words, she cannot have children—and is condemned to be turned into a garden. She’ll give life one way or the other. (Apex Magazine, March 2024; issue 143)

“Flight Pattern” by Azure Arther

Gotta say, I had no idea Azure Arther’s story would end the way it did, given that it opens with a guy casually munching on the last dragonfly on earth while hiding out in a bunker with his android wife. Strong Ex Machina vibes with this one, but with a feminist twist that was thoroughly enjoyable. (Uncharted Magazine)

“Lanterns” by Manu Zolezzi

Winnet, a widow in her sixties, is forced to confront a malevolent abuser in this empowering entry. In Winnet’s town, she sits on the council helping to keep order. When the town council vote to let in the Caravan of Light, Winnet isn’t happy about it. The traveling show breaks the borders between the living and the dead and allows spirits to walk the earth for one night. A creative way to explore abuse, trauma, and community support. (IZ Digital)

“Leprechaun Gold Accepted” by Vivian Chou

I loved this little quirky piece. It’s written in the style of a GoFundMe appeal for covering healthcare costs for a fairy attacked by three children, and the comments various donors have left in support. Vivian Chou’s insightful satire pokes at the ways allies often fall into performance territory, either with performative outrage or offering meaningless sympathy. She touches on the way the system oppresses and how when individuals collectivize under resistance, the system finds another way to get at you. (Flashpoint SF, March 8, 2024)

“Let the Star Explode” by Shingai Njeri Kagunda

In a not too distant future, beings in human shape but decidedly “not human” arrive on Earth. They bring with them technology for star jumping, but now only the wealthy can afford to use it frequently. Karu has the chance to star jump, and the things she experiences during her trip change her in ways she has only begun to understand. It should be no surprise that Shingai Njeri Kagunda has written a beautiful, thought-provoking Afrofuturist tale, but if this is your first introduction to her, get ready for a journey as surreal as Karu’s. (Lightspeed, March 2024; issue 166)

“Marshman” by Sara Omer

A cryptozoologist heads out to a strange swamp near a pit on the outskirts of farmland. The pit is a strange place, made stranger by the mysterious creatures lurking around the rim. The cryptozoologist descends into the pit to explore and gets more than they bargained for. Another win for The Dark in creeping me the hell out! A great story full of looming dread. (The Dark, March 2024; issue 106)

“Naglfar” by Elin Olausson

Elin Olausson’s piece feels the way a storm does, one of those rains where you’re cooped up and miserable inside but it’s too dark and cold to go outside. Hella lives alone in her apartment after her daughter abandoned her to travel the world. She took with her a magic coat and all Hella’s hopes and dreams. The title references a ship from Norse mythology that is made of the finger and toenails of the dead, and it gets even more unsettling from there. (Gamut, March 2024; issue 4)

“Saguaro Wedding” by Jordan Kurella

This was the first story I read in the first issue of Small Wonders I’ve ever read and it was just too perfect to pass up. Jordan Kurella’s flash fiction is about the person officiating a wedding between a crow and saguaro cactus. It’s weird, queer, a little bit Western, and a whole lot random in the best way. (Small Wonders, March 2024; issue 9)

“Summitting the Moon” by Pragathi Bala

A moon landing where the moon does the landing? Pragathi Bala puts a spin on the moon landing by pushing its orbit down until it scrapes the surface of the Earth. Ghis longs to “be in space gazing down at the Earth. She imagined her problems shrinking away—her life turned into a blip when compared to the vastness of space beings.” And in a few days, she’ll get her wish, even if her wife is less than enthused. The premise is just so interesting I couldn’t help but dig this piece. (Escape Pod, March 21, 2024; #933)

“The Witch Who Lives Next Door” by Zoe Kaplan

“Father says the Witch who lives next door is frightening, and a little bit beautiful. Mother says the Witch who lives next door is beautiful, and a little bit frightening.” A child lives next door to a witch in a town where witches are both feared and relied on. As the child and the witch grow their friendship into an apprenticeship, the child learns that being feared and needed aren’t necessarily bad things. A charming story about being your true self. (Kaleidotrope, Spring 2024)

[end-mark]

The post Must Read Short Speculative Fiction: March 2024 appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Discovery

The Game Is Afoot — Star Trek: Discovery’s “Jinaal”

This week, the Discovery crew is off on a game-style quest.

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on April 11, 2024

Credit: CBS / Paramount+

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Credit: CBS / Paramount+

If there was any doubt whatsoever that the fifth season of Discovery is a role-playing-game-style quest narrative, “Jinaal” beats those doubts to a pulp. We’ve definitely got ourselves a goal that will be found by our heroes being clever, by getting through traps, by figuring out riddles, and so on.

And it’s fun. Trek hasn’t really done this sort of straight-up game-style narrative before, certainly not on this scale, and while you can practically hear the dice rolling with each scene, it’s fun, dangit.

It helps that the episode does something that the Secret Hideout shows have been much better about than the previous wave of Trek TV shows, and that’s embracing the history on the microcosmic level as well as the macrocosmic. I love that they do things like last week’s use of the Promellians. The first wave of Trek spinoffs would have just made up an alien species rather than re-use one, but there’s no reason not to use one that’s already established. Especially since “Booby Trap” made it sound like the Promellians were a well-known extinct species, yet were only mentioned in that one TNG episode.

While this tendency can sometimes go overboard into the fan-wanky territory (cf. the third season of Picard), Discovery has generally made it work. This episode in particular makes very good use of Trek’s history, particularly the Trill both as developed on DS9 and also as seen on this show, particularly in “Forget Me Not.” And we also get some background on why the Progenitors’ technology was classified.

The clue on Trill is held by a joined Trill named Jinaal, whose current host is still alive on the world. It’s been eight centuries, and both host and symbiont are near the end of their lives—indeed, they’re clinging to life in part because nobody has approached them for their clue yet.

Discovery’s arrival is met with a riddle to prove that they figured out the clue on the Promellian necropolis last time—in particular that it initially appeared to lead to Betazed. Once Burnham provides that right answer, Jinaal’s current host is willing to talk to them, but the host who actually was there eight hundred years ago wants to talk directly to the Discovery crew. So they perform a zhiantara, first seen in DS9’s “Facets,” where prior hosts’ personalities can be temporarily downloaded into another person. The Guardians (including Gray, still apprenticing as a Guardian) perform the ceremony on Jinaal, transferring the older host into Culber.

As with “Facets”—and indeed every other science fiction story that involves characters getting a temporary new personality, a well Trek has dug into any number of times, from the original series’ “Return to Tomorrow” and “Turnabout Intruder” to TNG’s “The Schizoid Man” and “Masks” to DS9’s “Dramatis Personae” and “Our Man Bashir” to Voyager’s “Infinite Regress” and “Body and Soul” to Enterprise’s “The Crossing” and “Observer Effect”—this is at least partly an acting exercise for Wilson Cruz. And, to his credit, Cruz nails it, creating a fully realized character in Jinaal, who is crotchety, enigmatic, and more than a little manipulative.

He was a scientist who worked with the Romulan whose scout ship was found last week, along with a bunch of other scientists, after the Romulan found the Progenitors’ technology. This all happened at the height of the Dominion War, which—as we know from DS9—was a time of significant paranoia in the Alpha Quadrant. Because of that, and because of how dangerous the technology had the potential to be, the scientists all agreed to hide it and only have it be findable by someone who can figure out the clues and who could be counted on to use it for good.

Having this all happen during the Dominion War was very clever, as that was a time when worry about things like Changeling infiltration was at its height. And it’s remained a big secret since then simply because nobody knows where it is without the Romulan journal.

Besides his initial riddle and his general questioning of Burnham and Book about the state of the galaxy in the thirty-second century, there’s one final test. Jinaal claims to have hidden the next physical puzzle piece in a canyon occupied by a nasty predator animal that can cloak itself. Eventually, Burnham and Book realize that it isn’t just a big nasty creature attacking them, it’s a mother protecting its eggs. Once they realize that, they back off, which is what Jinaal was waiting for.

Having passed the compassion test, he gives them the final doodad. Culber then gets his body back and Jinaal can rest.

There are also three character-based subplots, two of which work nicely. Back at Federation HQ, Saru and T’Rina are about to announce their engagement, but Saru’s new career as an ambassador complicates matters for T’Rina’s chief aide, who advises Saru to convince his boss that they should postpone the engagement announcement. Saru goes along with this, thinking he’s protecting his fiancée, but T’Rina wastes no time in whupping him upside the head on that score. The Ni’Var President understands her staff’s need to be politically acute, but she refuses to let political concerns interfere with her personal life—a very logical decision, though logic and politics so rarely mix. It’s a nice little subplot, elevated, as usual, by brilliant performances by Doug Jones and Tara Rosling and their picture-perfect chemistry, as well as the script by Kyle Jarrow & Lauren Wilkinson, which illustrates the conflict potential when Saru’s compassion clashes with T’Rina’s logic.

On Discovery, Burnham charges her new first officer with getting to know the crew. Rayner resists this—he’s read their service records—but Burnham thinks there’s no substitute for talking to people. Rayner’s solution to this is to give each crewmember twenty words to tell him something about themselves that isn’t in their service record. It takes Tilly whupping him upside the head to remind him that his command style on the Antares isn’t going to work on Discovery. Mary Wiseman is particularly good here, showing us how far Tilly has come. (She’d better damn well be one of the stars of the upcoming Starfleet Academy series…)

The third character bit doesn’t quite work, mostly because it feels like some scenes are missing. Adira and Gray are reunited, and they apparently haven’t hardly talked since Gray went to Trill. Given the ease of holographic communication over absurd distances in the thirty-second century, this is surprising, but there it is. Gray and Adira are still obviously in love with each other and still are thrilled to see each other—but then they have a conversation that ends with them deciding to break up because the distance thing isn’t working. They’re both incredibly happy where they are. And yet, in the very last scene, they’re still hanging out on Trill, the mission itself long over. So are they broken up or not? It feels like there’s a scene or two missing there…

In that last scene, we find out that Mol, contrary to Discovery’s report that she and L’ak are on another world, is on Trill, having infiltrated the Guardians. That doesn’t bode well…[end-mark]

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Book Recommendations Science Fiction

Five SF Novels Inspired by Disproven Scientific Theories

Plenty of exciting hypotheses eventually fall out of scientific favor — but not before they’ve found their way into science fiction!

By James Davis Nicoll

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Published on April 11, 2024

Credit: NASA

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Credit: NASA

The history of science is filled with beautiful hypotheses slain by ugly facts. The tendency of the universe to disregard the professional needs of hard-working scientists is something about which little can be done¹. In fact, disproof is a vital and necessary element for scientific progress, no matter how vexing it must have been to Thomas Gold². However, in that interval between hypothesis and disproof, a sufficiently enticing model can inspire intriguing science fiction stories.

Don’t believe me? Here are five science fiction works based on since-discredited science.

Polywater

Russian scientists suggested that under certain conditions, water could be polymerized. Subsequent experimentation revealed that under certain conditions, water could be contaminated, and the results wildly misinterpreted by Russian scientists.

In the context of the Cold War, the possibility that Russia had access to a novel form of water was sufficient to spark fears about a “polywater gap.” This may have helped inspire Wilson Tucker’s decision to incorporate polywater as a key component to the time machine that plays a central role in Tucker’s The Year of the Quiet Sun(1970), in which a politically, militarily, and racially torn America attempts to secure its destiny by dispatching time travelers to map out the near future. Can America be saved with foreknowledge of its unalterable timeline? The answer not only won a Campbell Memorial Award, but the book also won the award in a year other than that in which The Year of the Quiet Sun was published. Time travel!

Memory RNA

James V. McConnell and others believed they had evidence suggesting that memories could be transferred via RNA from one planarian to another. Attempts to reproduce McConnell’s results failed and the model fell out of favor, as models without support do.

Chemically-transferred memory is a wonderful plot enabler. Thus, it was no surprise to see memory RNA appear over and over. Take for example, Larry Niven’s A World Out of Time (1976), in which the memories of a dead 20^th-century American, Jerome Branch Corbell, are transferred into the body of a condemned man. The state that rules the Earth of tomorrow requires a specific mindset for its interstellar starships, which the late Corbell appeared to possess. The state’s assessment is incorrect, as the state realizes once Corbell hijacks his spacecraft for a tour of the distant future.

In fact, A World Out of Time features a number of intriguing but wrong ideas, one of which is…

Bussard Ramjets

Physicist Robert W. Bussard’s 1960 proposal transformed major challenge to relativistic star flight into an asset. He theorized that the thin interstellar medium of hydrogen through which starships would plow could be used as fuel. One could use magnetic fields to divert the hydrogen into a fusion rocket and thus obtain endless fuel and reaction mass. Star farers would not have to worry about being bombarded with relativistic particles and at one gravity forever, the whole galaxy was within reach³!

Too bad that the math does not work and Bussard ramjets, if built, could work far better as brakes than as propulsion systems.

Bussard ramjets were wonderful plot enablers for relativity-curious SF authors, so it was no surprise that ramjets showed up in numerous SF works. Take for example, Lee Killough’s SF procedural The Doppelgänger Gambit (1979), whose plot is kicked off when conniving Jorge Hazlett bilks would-be space colonists by selling them a subpar Bussard Ramjet, with lethal results. Rather than face justice for negligent homicide, Hazlett decides to kill his way to safety with premeditated murder. Of course, it is so hard to stop with just one murder, even in a panopticon state.

Quicksand Moon Dust

Prior to space probes landing on the Moon, the precise nature of the lunar surface was unknown. Among the contending models was Thomas Gold’s⁴ proposal that the lunar surface could be covered in a layer of fine dust. Depending on the properties and the depth, the layer might act like quicksand⁵. As it happens, the lunar surface is dusty, but visitors do not have to worry about sinking into it. That is the only good news. Lunar dust is actually much nastier than Gold envisioned. Abrasive lunar dust is a hazard to machines and humans alike.

Arthur C. Clark’s A Fall of Moondust (1961) embraced the most extreme case of Gold’s model. Deep dry dust seas are traversed by lunar boats conveying tourists. A mishap strands a boat deep beneath the lunar surface. Will rescuers locate and retrieve the tourists in time, or will they smother or be boiled in their own body heat⁶?

The Destruction of Planet V

The region between Mars and Jupiter is filled with a myriad of small bodies. That is not controversial. The Belt’s origin, however, has been the subject of various competing theories over the years. In 1972, M. W. Ovenden proposed that the Belt is the remnant of a large planet that exploded about sixteen million years ago. Subsequent evidence… did not support this model* (imagine an emoticon of extreme disappointment inserted here).

[*Note to the editors at Reactor: please use a “this is an extreme understatement” font for “did not support this model.”]

This is not a huge surprise, given that it would take a phenomenal amount of energy to disrupt a 90-Earth-mass planet⁷, not to mention the total lack of evidence found on Earth for such massive disruption of a nearby world⁸.

Despite what was even at the time overwhelming reason to be skeptical about Ovenden’s model, there was at least one Disco-era SF novel that incorporated the model in a plot-significant way. In fact, Ovenden’s hypothesis may be the least bonkers thing about Charles Sheffield’s Sight of Proteus (1978), in which advanced biofeedback enables form change, which amounts to shape-shifting. Exposure to fragments of the exploded world prove to have unexpected effects on form change. What these effects are will surprise and delight readers.

Just because a hypothesis may be eventually disproven does not mean it cannot be inspirational before that comes to pass. Indeed, some ideas linger in SF long after they have been discarded by the scientific community. The above is only a small sample of a large field. I may have missed some of your favorite examples. In fact, I hope I have. Please entertain us all with other suggestions in comments below.

1. Trust me, you don’t want to go down the “what Lysenko says is science and true” path. ︎
2. Trust me, this is very funny, for reasons that will become apparent… ︎
3. In the reference frame of the traveler. ︎
4. Yes, the same Thomas Gold as in footnote 2. Gold had a talent for being brilliantly wrong in a wide variety of fields. Sometimes he was brilliantly right. Gold correctly identified the source of Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s mysterious repeating signal as a pulsar. His success rate was high enough that even his outré suggestions could not be dismissed out of hand. The fact that there’s never been a Thomas Gold Inspirationally Incorrect Hard Science Fiction anthology is one of SF’s great injustices. ︎
5. It is impossible to fully sink in quicksand. I do not recommend quicksand for your body disposal needs. ︎
6. The struggle to save the tourists is reminiscent of the efforts to save the Apollo 13 crew, although, since the novel preceded the Apollo mishap, it cannot have been inspired by it. ︎
7. Even with perfect efficiency, it would take a full week’s worth of the sun’s output to disrupt the Earth. ︎
8. One tends to think of planets as effectively isolated from each other, aside from gravitational perturbation. This is not always the case. The formation of Mercury’s Caloris Planitia about four billion years ago may have deposited up to sixteen million billion tons of debris on Earth. ︎

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Column Mark as Read

Can a Book Really Be For Everyone?

What makes a book for everyone? Is it the presence of universal themes? Approachable prose?

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 11, 2024

“Children Reading” by Pekka Halonen (1916)

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“Children Reading” by Pekka Halonen (1916)

Last week, I went to see Gabrielle Zevin speak in a very, very large and very, very fancy theater. It was the first time in decades that I went to a book event that was in the kind of room that plays host to symphonies and dance troupes and Bianca Del Rio. I kind of gaped, to tell you the truth. Most book events that I’ve been to have been in cramped bookstore basements, sweaty bars, or, on occasion, a spacious store with chairs for everyone. This was the kind of place where you want to take pictures of all the lighting. It was a reminder, and a much needed one, of how much bigger a book can make the world—something you read alone, weeping gently on the sofa, transformed into something hundreds, maybe thousands of your neighbors have also experienced.

Zevin was speaking because Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow was Portland’s “Everybody Reads” pick, and this was the culminating event. It was my first such event, and everything, including the cheering high school students, was new. Zevin was a delight (how could I not immediately warm to someone who admits they had been mispronouncing Oregon Trail for two years straight?) and gave a talk that seemed half polished and half off the cuff in the best possible way.

And she spoke in a way that was clearly meant for everyone. She talked about video games, as is inevitable with that book, but she talked about grief and disability and time and failure and love and the importance of stories where love between friends is powerful. She talked about her life and she talked, tartly and rightly, about elder statesmen of literature who turn up their noses at contemporary writing. Her book was an inspired pick for a community read; there are so many ways into that story, and so much to take out of it. Most of all it is a book about two people who communicate most clearly in the unexpected medium of video games. “Only connect,” Zevin said, quoting E.M. Forster.

Lately, I have been reading a lot of books that are probably not for everyone. Generation ship novels in verse, novels about pacifism and war, novels about novels that change their stories every time someone new picks them up. None of these things are inherently not for everyone; I think any book can be for any reader under the right circumstances. But we so rarely know, really, if we’re finding a book under the best or worst circumstances. They turn up, we read the back, and we keep reading or move on. I might not have finished Oliver K. Landmead’s Calypso on a different day, but I started reading it in a dim hotel room on a chilly evening, and it transported me. I wanted to keep being transported. Sometimes I put off reading a book for years. I’m always in search of that right moment.

Listening to Zevin, I thought about what makes a book for everyone. I don’t mean everyone in a bestseller list way—who knows how many of those celebrity-book-club, nonfiction-trend, famous-person memoir books ever get read? I mean the kind of book that can draw packs of teens, writers, parents, readers, and everyone else in a community into a theater on one rainy Thursday afternoon. Is it the presence of universal themes? Approachable prose? Intergenerational narratives? A certain sense of transparency, like you can see what the author is doing even as you appreciate it? 

Portland’s Everybody Reads picks are all over the map: fiction, nonfiction, young adult novels. A Tale for the Time Being; Evicted; There, There; The Book of Delights; Good Talk. It’s a really wonderful list. And if I were being forced—or forcing myself—to figure out what connects them, I might say that they are, generally, wise books that offer so much to talk about. 

But it’s more than that, isn’t it? Helen Oyeyemi, for example, writes wise books with so much to talk about, but they are tricky and open to interpretation (her latest is, essentially, about that very subjectivity). Some readers (me) can’t get enough, while others bounce off, hard. I like—I love—a lot of books that I would never try to convince any group of everybodies to read, sometimes for plot or theme reasons, and sometimes precisely because I don’t want to talk about the book with a stranger. There are books that feel like they’re meant to be shared, and books that you hold close to your heart. Sometimes the reading experience is meant to be shared, to be shouted about. Sometimes it’s just for you. 

Most good books probably fit the bill of being wise and discussable. But the everyone books—there’s something else, something ineffable, something I genuinely don’t know if I ever want to put my finger on.

I suspect, though, that a lot of SFF readers have thought about this, or about a topic in this general vicinity. Who hasn’t found themselves trying to explain—with a mild to severe level of exhaustion and/or frustration—that not all SFF is like the one disagreeable book a friend read and did not like, causing them to back away from the genre forever? Who hasn’t heard a genre skeptic say, “I don’t usually like fantasy, but I liked this book?” Haven’t we all tried to find just the right book, the one that would demonstrate to a doubter exactly why the genres we love are so big, so brilliant, so compelling? And what a task that is. Do they want happy stories or stories that spring from a deep well of trauma? Ensemble casts or chosen ones? Secondary worlds or magic at home? Hot villains or trustworthy paladins? Should we make a survey, try to figure out what the best book to convert someone to SFF is? Is there one true SFF novel for everyone? (I kid. Mostly.)

I have already spent a lot of time thinking about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a book that feels like it has one foot in the SFF section even though it’s entirely about real life. (Perhaps it’s the games that Sadie and Sam create, which are sometimes magical.) Is that part of its broad appeal? That it doesn’t transcend so much as bring in genres, drawing them into one big, wise embrace? It’s not for us, but it’s also for us. It’s for so many kinds of “us” that there were all those people in that big, fancy theater, all one big “us,” an everybody I never expected. I read that book like it was for me, personally, and then I experienced it like it was for everyone else, too. What a dream for a book. What a dream for a reader.[end-mark]

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News project hail mary

Project Hail Mary: Ryan Gosling to Star in Film Adaptation

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 10, 2024

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Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary is getting adapted into a movie, with Ryan Gosling (Barbie, pictured above) on board to star and produce, Christopher Miller and Phil Lord (the Spider-Verse films) directing, and Drew Goddard (The Martian, Netflix’s Daredevil series) penning the script. In addition to Gosling, directors Lord and Miller as well as Amy Pascal, Aditya Sood, Rachel O’Connor, and Weir are also on board to produce, with Pascal pulling the whole project together.

The movie comes from Amazon MGM Studios, which announced during CinemaCon today (per Deadline) that the film would premiere in theaters (rather than Prime Video) sometime in 2026. Gosling is undoubtedly playing the story’s protagonist, Ryland Grace.

Here’s the blurb for Weir’s book, to give you a sense of the story:

No news yet on who else might be in the film in a key role (if you know, you know), and no news on when exactly in 2026 we’ll see Project Hail Mary land at a theater near you. [end-mark]

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News The Blair Witch Project

Found Footage Is Back, Baby! A New Blair Witch Movie Is in the Works

But how will people appreciate your snot-coated sobbing if you apply face filters?

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 10, 2024

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This won’t be your mama’s Blair Witch! That’s what Lionsgate and Blumhouse execs Adam Fogelson and Jason Blum promised at CinemaCon today, where the studios announced a multi-film partnership that includes remaking (or making a sequel of?) the 1999 found footage phenom, The Blair Witch Project.

“I have been incredibly fortunate to work with Jason many times over the years. We forged a strong relationship on The Purge when I was at Universal, and we launched STX with his film The Gift. There is no one better at this genre than the team at Blumhouse,” said Fogelson (via The Hollywood Reporter). “We are thrilled to kick this partnership off with a new vision for Blair Witch that will reintroduce this horror classic for a new generation.” 

Blum also acknowledged that returning to Blair Witch was “a truly special opportunity” and he was “excited to see where it leads.”

I am also interested to see where this leads. Would the kids lost in the woods capture everything on their cell phones (and possibly uploaded to TikTok) instead of a camcorder? Other than that, will anything about it be markedly different than the original, which was captured via “found footage” from a cracked video camera that revealed some teens get stalked and murdered by a malevolent supernatural force? Time will tell! [end-mark]

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News Monopoly

From Barbie to B&O Railroad: Margot Robbie to Produce Monopoly Movie

Will there be people playing top hats? Will someone go directly to jail? Will everyone build a hotel on Broadway?

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 10, 2024

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Margot Robbie, who recently starred in and produced the blockbuster Barbie (pictured above), is setting her sights on another toy-related property. During CinemaCon today, Lionsgate, which owns the rights to the Monopoly IP, announced that Robbie’s company LuckyChap will be taking on a live-action film based on the board game. Hasbro Entertainment is also producing.

“I could not imagine a better production team for this beloved and iconic brand than LuckyChap,” Lionsgate chair, Adam Fogelson, said (per Variety). “They are exceptional producers who choose their projects with great thought and care, and join Monopoly with a clear point of view. We are tremendously excited to be working with the entire LuckyChap team on what we all believe can be their next blockbuster.”

Details on the plot remain murky beyond Fogelson’s comment above about Robbie’s studio having a point of view on what to do with the capitalistic game. What that means exactly remains to be seen. Will Robbie play a major role, like the shoe game piece? Or perhaps the iron? Will someone go to jail, directly to jail? Will anyone get $200? Will Baltic Ave. finally get its due?

We’ll have to wait and see, though LuckyChap is chuffed to take it on. “Monopoly is a top property—pun fully intended,” said a LuckyChap representative. “Like all of the best IP, this game has resonated worldwide for generations, and we are so excited to bring this game to life alongside the wonderful teams involved at Lionsgate and Hasbro.”

No news yet on when it will go into production or build a hotel on a theater near you. [end-mark]

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Book Recommendations Reading the Weird

Poetry Month 2024: Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”

Is it a fable?—or a mere fairy story—or an allegory against the pleasures of sinful love—or what is it?

By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth

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Published on April 10, 2024

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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” first published in 1862 in Rossetti’s own Goblin Market and Other Poems. Spoilers ahead!

Summary

Lizzie and Laura are sisters on the brink of womanhood, who often frequent the rushy brookside near their home. Often, too, they see goblin men tramping down the glen with baskets and dishes overloaded with every succulent fruit that field and forest can provide. Both sisters know better than to deal with or even look at such folk. One evening, when prudent Lizzie has run home, curious Laura stays behind. The goblins offer her their fruit, and accept one of her golden curls as payment. Laura sucks down the irresistible juices of the “globes fair or red” until her lips are sore, then wanders dazedly home.

Lizzie upbraids Laura for staying behind in the twilight, a dangerous hour for maidens. She recounts the story of Jeanie, who had commerce with the goblins only to waste away and die when she could no longer find them and their wares. Laura rejects her sister’s warnings. She’ll seek the goblins again and bring Lizzie back some of their fruit. The two go to their shared bed and sleep peacefully, “cheek to cheek and breast to breast.”

The next day the sisters go about their usual chores and innocent amusements, but Laura drifts “in an absent dream…sick in part.” By the brook in the evening, Lizzie hears the goblins’ customary cry of “Come buy” while Laura hears nothing. That night she lies awake “in a passionate longing”, filled with “baulked desire.” Nor do her daily and nightly watches bring the goblin men back to her. Her one memento of that delirious evening is a kernel-stone from a goblin peach. She tries planting it, but it never sprouts.

Laura sinks into decline, neglecting her chores, eating little. Lizzie, who still hears the goblins, longs to buy their fruit for Laura but fears the exchange will cost her too dear. At last, however, with Laura dwindling toward death, Lizzie waits by the brook in the twilight. When the goblins come, she offers them a silver penny for an apronful of fruit. The goblins insist she must feast on her purchase alongside them. When Lizzie refuses to stay, they attack her and try to force fruit into her mouth. Heroically virginal, she resists their efforts. At last the goblins angrily depart, leaving Lizzie to run home with her face and neck dripping with crushed fruit, “goblin pulp and goblin dew.” “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices,” she beseeches Laura—for Laura’s sake, she has “had to do with goblin merchant men.”

Laura’s appalled that Lizzie will now share her fate, but she can’t resist kissing and kissing her “with a hungry mouth.” Once so luscious, the goblin fruit now scorches her lips and tastes like wormwood. In a burning frenzy, she “gorges on bitterness” until she swoons. Will she die or live? Lizzie watches over her sister until morning, when Laura wakes with her vitality restored.

Years later, when both sisters are wives and mothers, Laura tells her children about her encounter with the goblins and how Lizzie won for her “the fiery antidote” to their poisonous fruit. There is no friend like a sister, is the lesson, and so she bids them to “cling together” as she and Lizzie have done.

What’s Cyclopean: There are pellucid grapes with sugar-sweet sap. The goblins themselves have all manner of animal features, but the most fascinating and out-landish may the wombat-goblin, “obtuse and furry”.

Weirdbuilding: Fairy markets are a common trope—places where all manner of fascinating and dangerous goods may be found for fascinating and dangerous prices. A couple such markets show up in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series: In An Absent Dream draws its title from this week’s poem.

Anne’s Commentary

Welcome to April and Poetry Month! My own first encounter with “Goblin Market” was in an undergraduate course on Victorian literature. I don’t think anyone in the class failed to pick up on the poem’s sexual overtones, but only a couple of students ventured to bring it up. Our instructor was quintessentially a PROFESSOR, tweed-clad and gray-haired and given to bow ties, no less. We didn’t want to come off like a bunch of horny sophomores or to offend someone of his staid demeanor. Midway through the session, we learned a lesson with ramifications far beyond nineteenth-century poetry: Don’t judge a person by their sartorial choices and typically dry address.

This professor had a subscription to Playboy. Or at least he had a copy of the 1973 issue that featured “Goblin Market” in its Ribald Classics column. Playboy credits Jonathan Cott, editor of the 1973 anthology Beyond the Looking Glass, for at last recognizing “the lurid sexual fantasies that raged in Miss Rossetti’s unconscious.” Cott described “Goblin Market” as “the most extreme depiction of repressed eroticism in children’s literature.” Apparently thinking its readership needed less high-flown language, Playboy translated Cott’s statement to “[Goblin Market is] the all-time hard-core pornographic classic for tiny tots.” The poem has had many illustrators over the years, including Christina’s brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Arthur Rackham, and Lawrence Housman. None of their illustrations were up to Playboy standards, so the magazine printed several by Kinuko Y. Craft. Our professor kindly let us have a look at Craft’s gorgeous but very much not-safe-for-work interpretations of “Goblin Market.” All kinds of trigger warnings could apply, including attempted rape, consensual but weird sex with semi-anthropomorphic beasties, and sibling incest. Oh, and fruits that look like human genitalia; in addition to their traveling market, the goblins could set up a Grow-Your-Own sex toys business.

Christina Rossetti would write many children’s poems, and it seems that she did publicly claim that “Goblin Market” was one of them. However, she also wrote to her publisher Alexander Macmillan that the poem was not intended for children; this suggests she was aware of the many “adult” interpretations her early masterpiece invited. That paragon of Victorian critics John Ruskin received a (prepublication) copy of “Goblin Market” from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who hoped he’d recommend it to William Makepeace Thackeray for publication in Cornhill magazine. Instead Ruskin wrote back that while his sister’s work had “beauty and power,” it was also too riddled with “quaintnesses and offenses” for the marketplace. Maybe Ruskin was only referring to Christina’s atrocious disregard for classical meter and rhyming schemes, but maybe he also had other “quaintnesses and offenses” in mind.

Ruskin (gasp) was wrong: Macmillan published Rossetti’s first commercial volume, Goblin Market and Other Poems, in 1862, to considerable acclaim from other critics. Not that the other critics were blind to certain “quaint” readings the title piece invited. I think Caroline Norton, who reviewed the book for Macmillan’s Magazine in 1863, nicely sums up the conundrum “Goblin Market” posed then, and may pose still:

“Is it a fable?—or a mere fairy story—or an allegory against the pleasures of sinful love—or what is it? Let us not too rigorously inquire, but accept it in all its quaint and pleasant mystery.”

Norton does add that, in addition to working as a children’s ballad, “Goblin Market” is a piece that “riper minds may ponder over.” Lots of “riper minds” have, pondering up many allegorical interpretations: sexual/earthly love versus spiritual love, the homoerotic versus the heteronormative, a paean to female solidarity, humanity versus Faery as a parallel to upright Victorian society against foreign/otherly corruption. All that’s fine, but as a lover of the weird, I like Norton’s suggestion that we revel in the poem’s “quaint and pleasant mystery.”

Imagine the scope of the food forest these goblins have cultivated somewhere-elsewhere! Is there a lusher catalog of fruit anywhere else in poetry, or in prose for that matter? Or a “quainter” enumeration of the anthropo-zoological guises that goblins can assume? What’s in it for the goblins, this vending of fruit to maidens and maidens alone? Do they have a complicated fetish involving virgins and proxy oral sex via the virgins’ enthusiastic sucking of their ripe…almost bursting…juicy…fruit…

Because only virgin fructivores can satisfy the goblins’ quirk, they miss out on repeat customers. This is where their likeness to human dealers of addictive drugs falters. But maybe these roaming vendors are on the more malicious end of the goblin spectrum and derive wicked sustenance from the vitality that drains bit by bit from their victims. That the poison in the fruit is also its antidote is an interesting twist. I expect that since a victim can’t find the goblin market a second time, it’s always another maiden who must brave the little monsters in order to obtain fruit, with the second magical requirement being that this other maiden must truly love the first, perhaps in more than the common sisterly way.

The totally conventional ending strikes me as belonging to another and much less interesting poem. Was it meant to appease those of Rossetti’s readers who might have found the preceding stanzas unsettling ? Was it there because Rossetti herself was unsettled? She also dedicated “Goblin Market” to her sister, Maria Francesca. I guess it could have been embarrassing for Maria if the ultimate depiction of sisterhood wasn’t soothingly Victorian normal.

Nothing kinky to see here, folks. Get your nasty minds out of that gutter. And put down that Playboy, I don’t care if it was a professor who brought it to your attention. Oh, the moral perils of modern higher education!

Ruthanna’s Commentary

My longstanding association with “Goblin Fruit” isn’t particularly weird or even ominous. Instead, it’s a quote sent by the first woman I connected with through an online dating site in college. This was the late 90s, so you should be imagining less modern app or even OKcupid, and more the Personals section of the Valley Advocate translated into green-on-black text. And you should imagine my baby-bi self finally admitting that I was less interested in the gender of my dates and more interested in whether they adored mountain thunderstorms, exchanging missives with a marginally-more-experienced potential date, drinking in the promise of “bloom-down-cheek’d peaches, swart-headed mulberries, wild free-born cranberries…”—I definitely got the metaphor, but the pull-quote had no intimations of goblin men, nor of their tendency to disappear after one’s first taste of ruinous fruit.

The date itself was not so exciting as the quote, but I retained the positive—and sapphic—associations. Long-time readers will recall that I was generally inclined to find this kind of appeal where I could get it. For me the goblin market is in downtown Northampton, around the corner from the little store where I exchanged my freshman-year “straight but not narrow” button for “I’m bisexual and I’m not attracted to you,” perhaps in some shadowed corner of Thorne’s Marketplace.

Past the list of luscious produce, however, “Goblin Market” is pretty het in its centralization of female relationships. The core sisterly bond between Lizzie and Laura heralds Frozens to come. Lovers appear only metaphorically in the form of the wickedly tempting goblin men, and chastely off-screen in the form of the husbands presumably necessary for sisters to become “wives with children of their own.” The unnamed husbands are no source of fresh fruit. And a sister might be “kiss’d and kiss’d and kiss’d” as the best of possible friends, but that familial passion serves to “cheer one on the tedious way.” Husband and children, by implication, being the correct but tediously un-zaftig choice.

One doesn’t come away from this poem without yearning for fig season. Or at least this one doesn’t.

Where is the boundary between fairy story and the weird? I’m not one for sharp sub-genre divisions, but I also feel like the distinction is real. “The Hide” falls on the weird side of the blurry line, and “Goblin Market” …falls on the side of making lines less blurry. These fae exist to mark the dangers of straying from the well-lit path. Victorian anxieties haven’t quite the nuance of Lovecraftian attraction-repulsion; they offer instead attraction whose repulsiveness is only revealed through Lizzie’s carefully taste-less rescue.

Compare “Whisperer in Darkness,” where alien fae draw travelers underhill and into the cosmos. Both glory and horror are a long way from sweet-talking boys who bed and then abandon. The Mi-Go may offer the ultimate in non-physical chastity, but they also offer alternatively unimaginable pleasures. And they’re faithful if cosmopolitan companions!

Perhaps I’m being unfair to the poem, simply because the opening has lived so long in my head without the rest of the story. If only goblin men hawk remarkable fruits, and only human men offer a safe-but-tedious alternative, that reflects something of Rosetti’s realities that I shouldn’t blame her for depicting. Yet even in fairy stories, I want the lands beyond safe firelight to offer something complicated. Laura’s life ought to be richer for tasting the goblins’ hazards and hazarding their tastes. Quoth Tolkien: “In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveler who would report them.” 

I’ve been fortunate enough to spend the past couple of days with my not-at-all-tedious wife and sister, chasing down a wild cosmic experience by way of a certain amount of extremely practical logistics (i.e., eclipse road trip). The best real relationships, I think, include a measure of both elevating the mundane and grounding the transcendent. A sharp line between those two aspects seems false, as does any claim that only one belongs in a good life.

I’d have Laura take more than fables from her ill-advised fruit purchase. I’d have her relationship with Lizzie gain something beyond gratitude for her rescue. I’d have her children inherit something beyond warnings. But all of these require another tale. Perhaps we could tell it over a plate of greengages.

Next week, we wrap up the last two chapters of Max Gladstone’s Last Exit! What lies beyond the Crossroads, and how many alt-riders, not to mention semi-innocent bystanders in the rest of the universe, are going to survive it?[end-mark]

The post Poetry Month 2024: Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Star Trek: Discovery

Why Star Trek: Discovery Is My Favorite 21st-Century Star Trek

After a rocky start, Discovery has become a sterling example of Trek’s ability to ask big, challenging questions while still being a whole lot of fun..

By Charlie Jane Anders

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Published on April 10, 2024

Credit: CBS / Paramount+

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Credit: CBS / Paramount+

Back in 2022, I wrote a newsletter saying that you can love Star Trek: Strange New Worlds without putting down its sister show, Discovery. Which is true! I love both shows a whole lot. I also am obsessed with Lower Decks, which I rewatch pretty obsessively. I have a lot of love for Star Trek: Picard as well. And I’ve grown to appreciate Star Trek: Prodigy greatly since it moved to Netflix. We are truly blessed to have so much amazing Star Trek right now, and there’s no need to pick one show over the others.

And yet, I still feel the need to come out and say it: Star Trek: Discovery is my favorite Trek of the 21st century so far. 

The final season of Discovery launched last week, and I’ve been remembering why I adore this show so much. These characters have a special place in my heart, and I’ve been loving the exploration of Starfleet in the 32nd century, centuries after the other Trek shows. Discovery has become a thoughtful, expansive show that asks big, challenging questions, while also being a whole lot of fun. 

Minor spoilers for the most recent episodes of Discovery below… 

Discovery got off to a rocky start, to say the least. Annalee Newitz and I discussed the first season in the very first episode of our podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, and there was a lot to talk about. Season one leaned into being a war story, something that Deep Space Nine had already done brilliantly, and then veered into the Mirror Universe, which is one of those settings that gets less interesting the more you see of it. The first season featured a lot of upheaval behind the scenes, with co-creator Bryan Fuller leaving early on and the replacement showrunners being let go. Season two served as a backdoor pilot for Strange New Worlds, while also unspooling a somewhat tangled storyline about black ops and A.I. from the future.

Much like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Discovery really hit its stride in its third season. That’s when the crew of the Discovery traveled forward into a far more distant future than Star Trek had ever explored before. The show gained a new lease on life and the Federation felt wide open once again, with so many new places and ideas to explore. 

Season three of Discovery tells a nuanced, brutal story about rebuilding the Federation after a huge setback—and questions how far our heroes are willing to go restore what has been lost. Season four is a rich story of first contact, in which aliens from outside the galaxy have unknowingly unleashed an anomaly that threatens civilized worlds, and we have to learn to communicate with them before it’s too late. Season five, without going into too much detail, is following up one of the most tantalizing stories from TNG, about the Progenitors, those ancient humanoids who seeded the galaxy with humanoid life long ago. 

(Side note: this trope of ancient humanoids who spread their DNA around the galaxy is sorta adjacent to all those “Ancient Aliens” memes. It seems to emerge from Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken, and it inspired the movie Prometheus as well. A huge part of my young-adult novel Victories Greater than Death is my attempt to deconstruct and subvert this trope, by having my ancient superscientists turn out to be basically eugenicists who wanted to breed humanoids to be part of a bizarre weapon. I originally wanted to have everyone refer to my ancient beings as the First Humanoids, but the She-Ra cartoon introduced some ancient creatures called the First Ones. So I decided to change them to the Shapers, which was honestly a little bit less catchy.)

Anyway, at this point, I should probably lay out some criteria. What makes for a good Star Trek show, in my view? 

There are a few elements that seem really important. I love Star Trek when it explores humanism, using huge cosmic stories to show the resilience and ingenuity of human beings, and to explore what it means to be human. Exploration feels like a key part of Star Trek‘s DNA as well: not just traveling to places where no human has gone, but also finding vastly different forms of life and learning to understand creatures who are nearly incomprehensible at first glance. Finally, I like Star Trek when it explores the relationships among the crew, and lets us see how they help each other to grow and reach their full potential, something that Gene L. Coon was keen to explore on the original series and which became a key element in TNG. 

Resilience and ingenuity have been at the core of Discovery, especially since the third season. The crew are forced to grapple with a radically different future, one in which the Federation has suffered some huge setbacks, and they use their wits and pure inventiveness to help the Federation rebuild and regain its ability to travel at warp speeds. The fight against the oppressive Emerald Chain, which enslaves people and exploits whole worlds, includes many temptations to compromise the Federation’s values, and it’s gripping to watch our heroes struggle to stay true to their beliefs.As mentioned above, Discovery’s storylines have also involved the struggle to understand creatures whose way of thinking and communicating is vastly different from our own, which forms the climax of season four. 

At this point, Discovery has a robust cast of science geeks. Engineering is actually getting a bit crowded, what with Stamets, Adira, and sometimes the wonderfully deadpan Jet Reno all standing around being geniuses—and that’s before you add Tilly, who is capable of being an absolute science mastermind in her own right. If you missed all those scenes in TNG where Data, Geordi and the other crew debate scientific problems and technical solutions, then Discovery has been serving up huge chunks of catnip for quite some time now. 

A lot has been written about just how gay Discovery really is, from Stamets and Culber’s marriage to the T4T relationship of Gray and Adira to Tilly’s lesbian fungus fling. Plus, again, there’s Jet Reno. But the thing I really love about Discovery, going into its final season, is just how much beautiful romance there is across the board in this show—even besides the stuff I just mentioned. Saru has been having a whirlwind courtship with T’Rina, the president of Ni’Var, which is the reunified Vulcan and Romulan homeworld. And Captain Michael Burnham has a stormy on-again-off-again love affair going with Book, a smuggler she met when she first arrived in the 32nd century—I’m really rooting for those two to work out their problems, because they have ridiculous chemistry. I’m not used to seeing Star Trek put romance front and center for so many of its major characters, and I love it.

Finally, the thing I love about Discovery is how its characters have been allowed to change and grow, something the first two episodes of season five take great pains to remind us of. Out of the characters who’ve been there since the first season, none of them is the same person they used to be, and we’ve gotten to see them evolve over time. In particular, there’s a huge emphasis on redemption arcs, which is a subject close to my heart. Michael Burnham starts Discovery as a disgraced mutineer, and is now a highly respected captain with a twinkle in her eye. But a lot of these characters have been allowed to make terrible mistakes and learn from them, becoming better people as a result.

When people call Star Trek an optimistic show, I don’t think they’re just talking about fancy technology. I believe Star Trek’s true power is its optimism about people: our ability to keep being better than we were, and to choose kindness and understanding over brute force. More than any other Star Trek show right now, Discovery exemplifies this belief in our potential as a species, which is something that I personally really need right now.[end-mark]

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

The post Why <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i> Is My Favorite 21st-Century Star Trek appeared first on Reactor.

News Joker: Folie à Deux

Love Is in the Air, Maybe, in the First Trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux

Nobody sings, though

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 10, 2024

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Welcome to Arkham Asylum, folks. Here you will find Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) living a drab, incarcerated life—until he sees a girl who appears to be singing in the prison choir. When they meet, everything changes. Freedom! Performances! Dancing on the rooftops! So much love is in the air!

But how much of this is real? The first trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux is full of flashes of color (those umbrellas!) and razzle-dazzle, but there is a distinct suggestion that little of their fancy lives is actually happening—at least not exactly the way we’re seeing it. Probably Arthur and Harley (Lady Gaga) do break out of prison, but all the shiny-outfit glowing-lights parts seem… well, these two aren’t generally known for being the best-adjusted of folks, you know?

Joker: Folie à Deux is, of course, Todd Phillips’s sequel to 2019’s Joker, which was a massive hit: a billion bucks at the box office and 11 Oscar nominations. It was supposed to be a one-off. Surprise! The sequel has been described as a jukebox musical, though Variety points out that director Phillips has said that’s not entirely accurate: “I like to say it’s a movie where music is an essential element,” Phillips said at CinemaCon, where footage debuted. “It doesn’t veer too far from the first film. Arthur has music in him. He has a grace to him.”

The Joker and Harley dance into theaters on October 4th. [end-mark]

The post Love Is in the Air, Maybe, in the First Trailer for <i>Joker: Folie à Deux</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Young Adult

Read an Excerpt From Ana Ellickson’s The Vanishing Station

A YA contemporary fantasy about an underground magic system in San Francisco—and the lengths one girl is willing to go to protect the ones she loves.

By Ana Ellickson

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Published on April 10, 2024

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Vanishing Station by Ana Ellickson, a young adult contemporary fantasy novel out from Amulet Books on April 30^th.

Balboa always sings a kundiman while he’s shaving, crooning to his own reflection in the mirror as he swipes a sharp blade across his chin—and I’m not talking Gillette razors, I’m talking a blade sharpened to perfection. A blade he keeps tucked away in his boot for emergencies. A similar blade lies hidden in my backpack, because there’s no way my father would let me wander San Francisco alone at night without a chaperone—even if that chaperone is a blade I’ve named Miss Marybeth.

I only know a miniscule fraction of Tagalog (yes, shame shame), but my dad has sung that kundiman love song enough times for me to know the lyrics backward and forward. It’s called “Dahil Sa Iyo,” and back in 1961, Nat King Cole came to Manila and sang it in Tagalog instead of English. It blew my dad away, hearing a Filipino ballad sung by the Nat King Cole. Like something in his own language was worth sharing with the whole wide world.

I wish he’d tell me more about his homeland.

Hell, I wish he’d tell me why we’re sinking further and further into debt.

With the secrets he spilled last night, I need more answers.

As the sun begins to peek through our slatted garage windows, I pretend to sleep. My dad sings to himself in the mirror, the usual kundiman. With all his rambling about deals with the devil and Six mentioning a debt, I refuse to blindly wait for him to tell me what’s wrong. What if he’s been gambling? He obviously already has trouble with addiction—what if he’s taken it one step further? What if I can stop him from making an even bigger mess? I need to know why we’re falling behind on my mom’s medical payments when he says that he’s working a full-time job. The rent payments are taking care of the property tax, house repairs, and funeral expenses. I’m taking on as many house-painting gigs as I can get, so I’m able to cover my own expenses and save a bit for when Stella breaks down. But somehow, we’re losing money. I’ve seen the overdue statements. It’s just not adding up.

The moment Balboa closes the garage door, I leap out of bed. I wrangle my arms into my backpack straps—all the extra clothes I’ll need for Chen’s Painting Service on this fine Saturday.

It’s not hard to follow him. I keep a block between us, ducking below trash bins when it seems like he’ll turn around. But he doesn’t turn back; he’s only ever trudging forward. At the station, my boots clamber down the stone steps until I’m deep below the earth, sucking in stale air and listening to the whirl of ticket turnstiles.

I pull a shimmering blue-and-white ticket from the machine. Dampened sunlight streams in at the far end of the platform where the concrete opens into air. Behind me, people speak in Spanish, Chinese, English, Hindi, and all sorts of languages mushed together. Balboa hovers a few yards away, far enough to not notice me with an inevitable hangover pulsing inside his head. My heart thuds when the sign flashes san francisco airport train: one minute. I stop listening to the cacophony of voices and the rustling of wings.

Instead, I’m listening for the train. I’m trying to feel its rumble in my bones.

When I was eight—before my dad came to live with my mom and me—I played this game where I tried to see how close I could get to the train as it ripped through the station. The conductors hated it. My mom freaked out on multiple occasions. But every time I was down here, I always ached to get as close as possible to that roaring wind.

Now, I feel that same urge thrilling through my veins. My eyes electric, my lungs savoring the intoxicating smell of metal burning bright. Wait—wait until the train comes howling into the station; wait, pressed up to that yellow warning line, until I’m only steps away from the roaring hot metal. I feel as if it’s a wild horse that I can snatch hold of and swing myself atop of in one daring leap. The train’s wake shoves me back, and I hold my ground against the wind, hold my eyes open to the silver rushing blur, hold on to the heartbeat hammering in my chest. I don’t even flinch.

And then, the doors open.

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The Vanishing Station

Ana Ellickson

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The Vanishing Station

Ana Ellickson

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Hot air blows out with a flurry of passengers going about their boring lives at Balboa Park station. Their hurried footsteps add more layers of grime and scuffs to the tile floors. I swallow down the pulse pounding in my throat. Every day these trains race below our city, nothing more than metal and electricity.

I hover on the platform and watch as soon-to-be travelers board the airport-bound train. They wedge themselves into the narrow blue vinyl seats, balancing suitcases and backpacks on their laps, cursing the fact that they brought too many pairs of shoes and books they’ll never actually read on their beachside adventure. A pang of envy rumbles deep inside my gut. What would it be like to have the freedom to go where I want, to follow my dreams?

A kid stares up at me when I stagger back from the yellow line. He saw, of course. In vain, I try to tamp down my wind-whipped hair. He tugs on my paint-splattered backpack, and his mother doesn’t notice.

“What did that feel like?” he says, little kid mouth agape.

“Like I was flying.”

He smiles.

“But don’t try it. It’s dangerous.” I wink. I really shouldn’t have winked. The last thing I need to do is encourage a seven-year-old to do harebrained stunts. But I can’t stop the adrenaline flooding into my chest. And I lied. It feels less like flying and more like I’ve jumped off a cliff into the roaring wind and I’m trusting that I’ll have wings.

It is dangerous. One wrong step and I’d be clobbered by 110 tons of metal.

Trust me, no one who knows me would ever call me a daredevil. I’m actually known as the Responsible One. The one who took care of her mother all through sophomore year of high school while she was battling breast cancer. The one who didn’t go away to college or travel abroad because too many people needed her here. I promise I’ll always keep those two steps between me and death. I swear it.

It’s just—I don’t know what makes me want to leap into that blur of blue and silver. It feels like I could leave this all behind and wake up somewhere else entirely. Somewhere brighter, bolder. It’s almost like there’s a wild heartbeat under the iron and steel, and all I need to do is reach out and grab the reins.

A horn blares.

I jump aboard before the doors slide shut, and the train shoots forward through the maze of tunnels twisting under San Francisco. I hide behind a thankfully large man and scan around his shoulder to see where my dad is sitting. Correction, standing. Leaning hard on his cane, but not wobbling an inch on this bumpy train. He stands beside the exit door on the opposite end of the car. The minutes tick by. Am I more nervous about him catching me on a BART train—or about finally finding out the truth? As we wait for the next station, my eyes roam across my fellow passengers. It calms my hammering heartbeat to imagine how I’d sketch their faces. Reality flips on full blast: the kid snoring beside me with a face like melting candle wax, the old man stuffing French fries in his mouth, making my stomach growl from no breakfast.

And a voice.

“Dahil sa iyo!” The Filipino words come swaggering down the aisle, an aisle so thick with passengers, I can barely see who’s singing.

But I don’t need to see.

I know his voice.

It’s the Sap Master himself.

My dad sings a wicked kundiman.

But why is he serenading an entire train car? I inch closer, still out of his range of sight among the crush of passengers. My legs wobble as the train curves underground, and I cling to a metal pole to keep from falling. Dried paint sticks under my nails. It’s been so long since I’ve walked on a train that my knees tremble with the effort.

Still, the song lures me across.

Dahil sa iyo…

Because of you…

His words come softly now, sweetly melancholy. His rich honey voice fades into the sound of brakes squealing against metal rails—dahil sa iyo, nais kong mabuhay. “Because of you, I want to live.” Something isn’t right— this isn’t the way he sings when he shaves in the mirror. His voice sounds mournful, broken at the edges.

A chill drips down my spine as I push faster through the crowd, the lonely words echoing in my ears. Is this really my father? It’s his voice, that much I know; but I’ve never heard this pain crackling down his throat. I shoulder through the crush of passengers blocking my way.

A flash of movement up ahead. His eagle cane, his shiny Elvis hair slipping away from the crowd toward the dark shadows. The train car’s connecting doors creak open. A blast of roaring wind pierces my ears. Am I the only one to hear it? None of the passengers flinch.

“Dad,” I say. “Dad, wait!”

The glass doors separating the two train cars begin to slide shut. I still can’t see with the last two passengers blocking my way. Through the crevice between their elbows, I catch my dad’s eagle cane as it disappears behind the doors. Fog swirls on the glass, and a spark of cobalt flashes across steel, rippling out like dewy spiderwebs.

“Hey, how about an ‘excuse me’?” a bald man grumbles as I shove past his shoulder.

I yank open the doors.

The heavy plexiglass slides open and leads into a space that reminds me of an old phone booth. An icy blast slaps my skin, as if the conductor has cranked the AC to max capacity. But that’s never the case on a BART train. It’s always too hot. Always too many people breathing in your ear, elbows out and sweat stains under armpits.

My breath leaves a mist on the glass, and I touch my fingers to the water droplets to make sure they’re real. A whiff of my dad’s coconut aftershave, his cracked leather jacket. He was here a moment ago. The two accordion walls crunch together as the train lurches to a full stop. It wouldn’t be able to turn inside the dark tunnels without these flimsy rubber walls bending with the curve. I don’t stay long. There’s nothing like imagining the train splitting into pieces while I’m standing on the bridge connecting the cars.

My eyes frantically scan the passengers’ faces before the doors open at Daly City station. Not-my-father, not-my-father. No! No slicked-back hair, no eagle cane, no leather jacket. Not on this train. It wouldn’t have been possible for him to push his way through all these passengers to the exit.

The conductor gives one final call.

Doors closing.

A warning beep blares into the tunnel.

“Dad?” I holler into the train.

Heads snap in my direction as if I’m a lost toddler. My cheeks redden at the sudden attention. I’m too old to be a little girl calling for her father. But I’m not worried about myself—I’m worried about him.

Before the doors slide shut, I gaze up at the ratty pigeons clinging to the ledges of the train station even though they’ve added spikes to scare them away. The train starts to speed down the tunnel in a blur of blue and silver. It scatters newspapers and feathers into the air.

In all the magic tricks, a dove always disappears and reappears.

We all know what really happens to the dove.

That will not be my father.

Adapted excerpt from the upcoming book The Vanishing Station by Ana Ellickson, published by Amulet Books, an imprint of Abrams; © 2024.

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News Control

Julianne Moore and James McAvoy to Star in Mind-Affecting Thriller, Control

The “clock-ticking thriller” is all about having a voice in your head telling you what to do…

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 9, 2024

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The film adaptation of the podcast Shipworm from Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie is fleshing out its cast. The thriller, which currently has the title Control, has had James McAvoy (pictured above in X-Men: Days of Future Past; other credits include Split, Glass, and His Dark Materials) on board to star for about a year, and today Deadline broke the news that Julianne Moore (May December, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Parts 1 and 2) will be joining him on screen.

Control is a “clock-ticking thriller” where a troubled doctor (McAvoy) wakes up one morning with a mysterious voice inside his head. The voice, perhaps from an untraceable device of some sort, mandates that McAvoy’s character do certain things or something very, very bad will happen (or maybe multiple bad things will happen… it’s unclear). We don’t know much about Moore’s character, though Deadline reports that she “plays a pivotal character with which the doctor must contend.”

The film enters production in Berlin this month and is spearheaded by StudioCanal and The Picture Company. Robert Schwentke, whose previous credits include The Time Traveler’s Wife, R.I.P.D., and the adaptations of Insurgent and Divergent, will direct. Read into that what you will.

No news yet on when the film will make its way to a screen near you. Perhaps we’ll all wake up one day with a voice in our head telling us the details. [end-mark]

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News The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings Musical Sets Its U.S. Premiere

The musical will begins its US run at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater this summer

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 9, 2024

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A musical based on The Lord of the Rings has been running in the UK since last year, and the production will now journey across the Atlantic to make its U.S. premiere in Chicago this summer.

The Lord of the Rings: A Musical Tale will have its American debut on July 19 at The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. It will run there until September 1, 2024 and will then go on an international tour at locations to be announced in June.

The musical adaptation of the iconic books by J.R.R. Tolkien was originally co-created by Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical director Matthew Warchus and Shaun McKenna in 2006, with music by A.R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire), Finnish folk group Värttinä, and Christopher Nightingale (Matilda the Musical). This recent version ran at The Watermill Theatre in the open air and is directed by Paul Hart.

“I can’t wait for this next step in the epic journey of The Lord of the Rings as we craft this new staging for the U.S. premiere production with Chicago Shakespeare Theater for Chicago audiences,” Hart said in a statement. “We loved creating this version which was retold from the perspective of the Hobbits at The Watermill and will now be expanded far beyond those horizons. It will be thrilling to share with new audiences internationally as part of this next stage.”

This means that the musical has a different vantage point than Peter Jackson’s film trilogy (pictured above), and will offer audiences a fresh take on the beloved books.

Here’s the official synopsis for the play:

You can learn more about the musical, including buying tickets, by clicking the link here.

If you can’t make it to Chicago or don’t want to wait until this summer, you can check out a trailer for the production that Watermill Theatre put out below. [end-mark]

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News Game of Thrones

Say It Ain’t So: There Won’t Be More Jon Snow

The spinoff with Kit Harington’s sad-eyed Stark is no longer in the works

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 9, 2024

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There have been a slew of Game of Thrones spinoffs in the works since the original series had its finale in 2019. And while House of the Dragon is about to come out with a second season and The Hedge Knight just cast its Dunk and Egg, there have been other projects that have fallen to the wayside.

The most notable one was the Naomi Watts-starring series that took place ten thousand years before the original show, which shot an entire pilot before getting axed in 2019. And today, Jon Snow actor Kit Harington confirmed that the potential series centered around his character is no longer in development.

In an interview with Screen Rant, Harington had this to say about the project:

Say it ain’t so! That doesn’t mean, however, that we won’t see more Game of Thrones-related shows coming to a television near you. In addition to The Hedge Knight and House of the Dragon, a series centered on King Aegon is still in the works as is an animated show about the Sea Snake. [end-mark]

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News Under Paris

It’s the French’s Turn to Face a Large Shark in Under Paris

Ne va pas dans l’eau

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 9, 2024

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Perhaps we have been hoarding the large shark movies. Is it fair to other countries, really? The French have decided it is their time for a large shark film, and have created Under Paris, in which the arrival of a “giant” (she’s no MEG) shark in the Seine coincides with a very important triathlon.

Yes, you read that right. The poorly punctuated and extremely brief summary offered on YouTube says only, “Sophia, a brilliant scientist comes to know that a large shark is swimming deep in the river.” But there’s a triathlon! Many people in the water! It will be a massacre! (A word the subtitles helpfully translate to “carnage,” in case its meaning was unclear.)

“Comes to know” is sort of hilarious here, given that the trailer makes it clear Sophia (Bérénice Bejo) is tracking the movements of said shark. But this is definitely a movie for which it’s better to not ask many questions.

Under Paris is directed and co-written by Xavier Gens, who has directed episodes of Gangs of London and Lupin. It stars Nassim Lyes (Julia) alongside the aforementioned Bérénice Bejo, who was an Oscar nominee for The Artist. (There are actually a surprising number of Oscar-nominated and winning actors in shark movies, especially if you count Shark Tale, which maybe you shouldn’t.)

Under Paris swims onto Netflix on June 5th. [end-mark]

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Excerpts Fantasy

Read an Excerpt From Mai Corland’s Five Broken Blades

It’s the season for treason in this fantasy debut…

By Mai Corland

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Published on April 9, 2024

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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Mai Corland’s Five Broken Blades, an epic fantasy debut publishing with Red Tower Books on May 7^th.

Chapter One

Royo
City of Umbria, Yusan

Gold for blood—that’s my advertisement and the words I live by.

The merchant slowly counts out gold mun, his gloved hands shaking as each coin lands in his palm. He’s a little taller than me, but my shoulders are twice as wide.

“Hurry it up. I don’t got all night,” I say.

My deep voice startles him, and two bronze mun clatter onto the ground. He lets the coins roll away but pauses to consider chasing them down. Ten Hells. This is gonna take two lifetimes.

Finally, he slips the money into my hand, paying for the broken nose and leg. Then he darts away, fur-lined cape flapping in the night breeze. It’s not a noble living, being muscle for hire, but the upper class ain’t great neither.

I count my gold as I lumber between the soot-covered buildings. All there. I put the money in my coin purse and tuck it into my inner jacket pocket. Behind me, my latest victim whimpers in the darkness of the alley. If he keeps up that noise, the hael birds will peck him clean before morning. And the rich merchant prick didn’t pay for a kill.

“Can you stop that racket?” I say.

The whimpering dies down.

“Thank you,” I say. He’s silent—shut up by my manners or his pain.

I think about going back to help. I always think about it. But it’s none of my business. It’s not my problem, what happens after my jobs are done. Or why the merchant wanted to send a message in the first place.

Those are roads that lead nowhere. And I’ve got somewhere to be.

I blow a warm breath in my gnarled hands. This fucking cold. Frost shines on the cobbled streets, and the runoff has already started to freeze. What trees there are in this cramped city are long bare. Winter comes quick in Umbria. But then, death always does.

I should probably buy some warm gloves, but my stomach tightens at the thought of parting with even one silver mun. Every coin counts, and I don’t really need posh shit anyhow.

When I get to Inch Street, two well-dressed couples split around me. They’re all fur muffs and expensive, feathered hats. Swells. They give me a wide berth, then scurry away like I’m contagious or something. I guess if my size don’t intimidate people, the scar dividing my face does the trick. People stay away.

Good.

With a grunt, I shoulder open the heavy wooden door of Butcher & Ale. I’ve been in cleaner, nicer places with better grub, but those pubs don’t fit me. The tavern is warm without being hot and noisy, without being loud, and that’s all I need. Butcher & Ale is home. It’s where I started doing business ten years ago. Right after I turned fifteen, I set up shop in the corner—forty pounds less muscle with no scar on my face. They know what I do here, but I keep the place safe, so they look the other way.

I sit on my usual stool at the end of the bar. Yuri sees me and pours me a pint. He could be forty; he could be sixty. Who knows with that bald head. But he’s not the chatty type, and I like that.

He slides a beer across the worn wood. The glass is mostly clean. “Someone’s been looking for you.”

Buy the Book

Five Broken Blades

Mai Corland

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Five Broken Blades

Mai Corland

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I raise my eyebrows and chug a gulp of ale. Somebody’s always looking for me—to fight, to hurt, to kill. This ain’t news. “Why should I care?”

Yuri puts the bar towel over his shoulder and leans forward. “It was a girl.”

I stop drinking. My heart thuds and then lodges in my throat. I will it back down and play it cool. “What’d she look like?”

“Pretty,” Yuri says. Not the most helpful description. I curl my hand into a fist and stare. His eyes widen, and he rubs his nose somebody else broke a while ago. Then he starts yammering. “About my height, big brown eyes, kinda short black hair. Around your age—like mid-twenties. Red velvet cloak.”

I swallow, digesting his words. A tall, twenty-something girl asking about me is unusual. And I guess “pretty” makes a difference—can’t remember the last time a pretty girl looked for me. Maybe she wants an old boyfriend taught a lesson or revenge on another girl. I don’t hurt girls, though.

“She’s staying at the Black Shoe Inn,” Yuri adds.

The nicest joint in maybe all of Umbria. So she has money and she’s not from here yet somehow knew to look for me. Here. This reeks of trouble.

“Not interested,” I say.

Yuri shrugs. “Suit yourself.”

He wanders down the bar to serve another customer. A guy looking old for his age sits on the stool four paces down from me. He only makes eye contact with Yuri, so he’s also here to drink alone. Sometimes it feels less lonely to drown your sorrows in a shared barrel of ale. To vanish in the pub crowd. Even if you don’t say a word to nobody. Most nights, that’s me.

But I can’t disappear tonight. I know in my guts it’s going to be one of those times when I can’t forget no matter how much I drink. So why give myself a headache that’ll hit behind my eyes tomorrow?

I down my beer, leaving the dregs. I push back from the bar, the legs of the stool scraping the sticky floor. “I’m outta here.”

Yuri’s bushy eyebrows rise. It’s like what he didn’t get on his head went to his face instead. “Already?”

He’s right to be surprised. I’m normally good for a few beers as I take up my corner and wait for my next job to come in. Trouble always has a way of finding me. Usually it’s quick, but sometimes it takes four beers. Tonight, it’s just the one.

“Headache.” I tap my temple like he don’t know where my head is. But it’s a lie. And from his beady eyes going side to side, Yuri doesn’t believe it for a second.

But he nods. “Night, Royo.”

I take a step to leave, and something strange happens. An off feeling hits me, like a heart skipping a beat. Out of the corner of my eye, I swear there’s a blur of red. I blink hard, look around, then glance into the bar mirror. Nothing. Just my scarred face and shorn head looking back at me. Nothing red in sight. I shake my head. I’m real off tonight. Best I leave now.

I trudge my way out of Butcher & Ale and back onto the frigid street. I’ll need to repair the laces of my boots soon, probably patch the leather again—they still got some wear left.

I swear it got colder when I was inside. My exhale now makes little fogs in the air. I blow a hot breath into my hands again as I walk.

Five blocks in the wrong direction later, I pass the Black Shoe Inn. I can’t help but slow down and stare at the lamps glowing in the windows. I wonder… then shake my head.

What am I doing? What am I even looking for?

I walk double time to get away. It’s too suspicious. Too off. My instincts are always right, and the scars I bear are reminders of the times I’ve ignored my gut. The last time cost me everything. I’m not doing it again.

It’s about a fifteen-minute walk along Avalon Road to my shack on the cheap end of town. The buildings get more run-down, smaller, as I leave the business district. Umbria’s been going downhill since King Joon rose to power back when I was a kid. The whole country has.

The road bends, and then I have the river on my left. You’d think being near the water would be nice, but not in Umbria. The only waterway we got is the dirty Sol River. People empty chamber pots and dump trash right into the thing. And it’s even colder, the bone-chilling kind, when you’re close enough to hear the water lick the filthy shore.

I try to stay aware of my steps, my surroundings. There are too many dangers in Umbria from gangs, from men like me, from the hael birds, to be caught sleepwalking. But I’m off my game. Distracted.

I blame Yuri. He’s a barkeep, not a messenger. He could’ve kept all that noise to himself.

But I’m not really mad at Yuri. Truth is, I’m thinking about her. When Yuri said it was a girl, I hoped. And hope is a jagged knife. Hope pieces together dreams out of broken glass only for reality to come and smash them all over again. Hope is the cruelest punishment of them all. Because without hope, I know: it’s not her, you fool. It can’t be. It can never be.

Because I killed her.

Excerpted from Five Broken Blades by Mai Corland. Reprinted with permission from Red Tower Books, an imprint of Entangled Publishing. All rights reserved.

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News Star Wars Outlaws

If Star Wars Outlaws Hurts Nix We Will Riot

Who wants to rob a space millionaire?

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 9, 2024

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The story trailer for Star Wars Outlaws, the first open-world Star Wars game, is here, and I have only one thought: DO NOT HURT NIX. The floppy little alien is the best bud of the main character, Kay Vess, and he is a precious ball of sunshine who must not be harmed.

But there’s a lot more going on in this trailer, which looks, in a word, incredible. Outlaws is a heist game, following Kay as she tries to outwit a whole lot of shady underworld characters and pull off a major job. All she wants, she says, is to live free. But we all know how easy that is in the galaxy. You’d think there’d be enough planets to go around, but somehow, there’s always some greedy Imperial and/or crime lord looking to take over a place.

Here’s the very short synopsis:

I like “emerging scoundrel.” It implies something like “emerging artist”—a suggestion of fresh-faced, creative scoundreling that hasn’t been seen before.

Naturally, Kay encounters some familiar faces (including a carbonite-frozen Han and a sarlacc) and locations (who doesn’t love visiting the Outer Rim?). And since this is a heist, she has to put together a crew. But this trailer does a great job of balancing familiar Star Wars elements with new characters, strange vistas, and attitude. StarWars.com has a lengthy interview with creative director Julian Gerighty, which digs into the criminal syndicates, the design—so much about the design, from identity of every cantina to the personality of the ships. (Kay’s is “cross between a turtle and a pickup truck.”) In combination with the trailer, it makes the game even more enticing.

Star Wars Outlaws will be available August 30th for Xbox, PlayStation 5, and PC. [end-mark]

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Column Close Reads

Considering the Perfect Knits of Coraline

Have you ever contemplated the effort it takes to make an iconic costume?

By Michelle Jaworski

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Published on April 11, 2024

Credit: LAIKA Studios

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Credit: LAIKA Studios

Welcome to Close Reads! Leah Schnelbach and guest authors will dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, Michelle Jaworski breaks out the knitting needles (and possibly some extra buttons) to talk about Coraline’s amazing tiny sweaters.

Have you ever contemplated the effort it takes to make that famous and immediately eye-popping sweater or knitted garment that appeared on the screen (and just became your new obsession)?

Sometimes, a film or TV show’s costume designer might purchase it before purposely ruining it to illustrate a character’s utter disregard for taking care of their things. Sometimes, a knitter will make it by hand, putting care into items that populate a lived-in world or turn into the most iconic part of a character’s costume. Sometimes, the inclusion feels so effortless and invisible that nobody else seems to appreciate it how you do.

And then there’s sometimes an instance where a film is so painstakingly crafted with such detail, care, and precision before you even consider the knitwear that it blows your mind when you finally get around to it. A film like LAIKA Studios’ 2009 stop-motion animated classic Coraline—from stop-motion legend Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Wendell & Wild) and based on the 2002 novel by Neil Gaiman—and its perfectly tiny, hand-knitted sweater might do that to you.

Introduced about 45 minutes into the film, Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning), the 11-year-old heroine of Coraline, sneaks through the hidden door in her new home to another world, one which offers affectionate parents, presents, delectable food, and instant entertainment. Her Other Mother (Teri Hatcher) and Other Father (John Hodgman), who look and sound just like her real parents save for the black buttons sewn into their eyesockets, aren’t home. But her Other Mother left Coraline a gift: A new outfit made just for her, and an invitation to visit their neighbors after lunch.

What’s in the box? A bright and sparkling blue sweater imbued with silver stars that catch your eye in the light, black corduroy pants, and boots much closer in hue to Coraline’s iconic blue bob. After donning this outfit, Coraline witnesses the full spectacle of this other world with a showstopping performance, as well as the Other Mother’s cruelty. She learns the truth of what the Other Mother plans to do with her with the only light coming from the glow of the sweater’s stars and the three young ghosts who fell victim to the Other Mother before her. And even as Coraline and Other Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.) are captivated by the show Coraline’s neighbors put on, you can’t keep your eyes off that sweater.

As a knitted piece of clothing, Coraline’s sweater is deceptively simple. It’s a pullover that limits itself to a single combination of thread (compared to the multi-colored striped gloves Coraline tries on in a store in our world) and doesn’t contain flourishes like cables; the stars were attached after the fact. Coraline’s costumes often stand out with whichever world she’s inhabiting—she’s usually the most colorful person in the room in the real world’s gloomy atmosphere and appears to dim the more time she spends in the fantastical Other World—and the chameleonic nature of the sparkly thread used to knit it further amplifies that. The stars also glow in the dark, making it look even cooler.

Coraline’s sweater was captivating enough in its own right that as part of the film’s marketing, Jenn Jarvis was tasked with creating a human-sized pattern—with both children and adult sizes included—geared toward fans who wanted to make a sweater of their own; Jarvis’ pattern is no longer officially online, but you can find it if you know where to look. 

It’s Althea Crome, a fiber artist who’s been making conceptual knitted garments (meaning without a set pattern) on a miniature scale for decades, who is responsible for creating that original starry sweater and Coraline’s striped gloves; she’s listed as “Knitwear Creator” in the film’s credits. According to a 2009 interview with The Oregonian, Crome said that LAIKA’s costuming department contacted her about making knitted pieces for the film, which involved weeks of searching to find the right combination of threads—a mix of holographic and polyester—to match what LAIKA had in mind. Once Crome got the go-ahead to knit the sweater, she was sent a version of Coraline’s body to make it fit on the puppet; she eventually made 14 sweaters and six pairs of gloves for LAIKA.

But that doesn’t begin to cover the scale of it. It’s one thing to hear or read about it. It’s another to view Crome’s documentation of her work on Coraline, which includes photos of the threads she used or photos of what it looks like for her to knit something on that scale. It’s another to watch Crome fully in her element, which we can do courtesy of a LAIKA behind-the-scenes video where she discusses her miniature knitting.

“I think knitters are often fascinated by the fact that I use such tiny needles,” Chrome says in the video. “Some of the needles are almost the dimension of a human hair.”

Um… yes?

I’m in awe of what Crome has created not just because, as she put it, she shrunk a “craft or skill into something so tiny it asks the viewer to imagine how it was done.” I’ve been knitting for about seven years, so even before you shrink a hand-knitted garment, the wheels turn to calculate what goes into making something like a sweater or pair of gloves. My eyes are straining from the sheer thought.

But Crome’s work only amplifies that. To put it in perspective, the smallest set of knitting needles I own is a US 0, which has a diameter of 2mm; I might use them to work on a pair of socks or gloves. It’s kind of easy to misplace them, or accidentally break one of those needles if it’s made of a material like wood. Crome knits with needles so thin that she compared their fineness to human hair.

Crome’s needles are much smaller, the thread much thinner, and the scale is on a minuscule level (the entire span of the sweater is about four inches). One of Coraline’s gloves, measured from cuff to fingertip, isn’t much bigger than one of our fingernails. I can see Crome knitting on needles small enough to be used for sewing or embroidery, and I see what the result of that is on the screen, but all this time later, my mind still can barely comprehend it.

It’s that level of fine detail that makes Coraline’s world of stop-motion come to life. Even if you’re not thinking about the sweaters as often as I might be, it’s the kind of element that feeds into making Coraline’s more nightmarish elements feel that much more real.[end-mark]

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News David Lynch

Netflix Turned Down Snootworld, a “Wackadoo” Animated Project from… David Lynch?!

Lynch created the script years ago with Caroline Thompson, screenwriter for The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Addams Family

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 8, 2024

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David Lynch, the mastermind behind Twin Peaks and the Dune movie (pictured above) that came before Denis Villeneuve’s endeavors, started working on a script about Snoots with Caroline Thompson (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, and 1991’s The Addams Family) over two decades ago.

“I don’t know when I started thinking about Snoots but I’d do these drawings of Snoots and then a story started to emerge,” Lynch told Deadline. “I got together with Caroline and we worked on a script. Just recently I thought someone might be interested in getting behind this so I presented it to Netflix in the last few months but they rejected it.”

I also now can’t stop thinking about Snoots and what the hell these magical creatures from Lynch’s imagination might be like.

According to Thompson, the script is “wackadoo.”

“It takes my breath away how wacky it is,” she told Deadline. “The Snoots are these tiny creatures who have a ritual transition at aged eight at which time they get tinier and they’re sent away for a year so they are protected. The world goes into chaos when the Snoot hero of the story disappears into the carpet and his family can’t find him and he enters a crazy, magnificent world.”

Lynch had some thoughts on why Netflix made the dumb decision to pass. “Snootworld is kind of an old-fashioned story and animation today is more about surface jokes. Old-fashioned fairytales are considered groaners: apparently people don’t want to see them. It’s a different world now and it’s easier to say no than to say yes.”

Someone please make this and make Netflix rue the day they passed on it! I want to watch this lil’ Snoot get teenier and enter the quantum realm, or whatever world Lynch has concocted with his brain cells. Let Lynch be Lynchian! Bring on the Snoots! [end-mark]

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