Category: Swords and Spaceships

Happy Friday, shipmates! You made it! This is Alex to bring in the weekend with some news and desert-related book noodling. Oh, and a strong recommendation that you should watch Missy Elliott’s VMA performance because it’s sci-fi as all heck too.

News and Views

The Campbell Award has been renamed. More context on this over at Book Riot if you’ve missed what’s going on. Related: Was John W. Cambpell A F***ing Fascist, or Merely a Fascist?

Fonda Lee (author of Jade War) wrote us a great list about siblings in fantasy.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture forty years later.

New Wild Cards story over at Tor.com!

The TSA has banned “thermal detonator” soda bottles from Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in both carry on and checked baggage.

This week’s SFF Yeah! podcast is about the Hugo awards and the Blade trilogy.

S.L. Huang (author of Null Set) on the danger of swords. Somewhat related: a freelance photographer went to a medieval battle reenactment and got some amazing pictures.

I feel required to mention that the final trailer for Joker is out.

Marvel comics no. Marvel comics why.

I am excited about this documentary on Alien.

Here’s a long piece about The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance‘s journey to the screen.

Thanks to some really questionable choices by big tech, the necessity of ethics is coming back into discussion–and science fiction is part of it.

How firenados work. This is some dragon-level stuff.

You had me at “16,000-year-old puma poop.”

And some cool, science-y nail art!

Free Association Friday

Apparently this August has been one of the top five warmest on record for my city, and I believe it. Colorado has a lot of land that’s near-desert or desert, rainfall-wise, and you can feel it most in the summer when the dry meets the hot. (Which is probably why so much of my writing, like my novels, is set in the desert.) So how about some desert books to capture this August feeling?

There is a lot of desert-based fantasy, and so much of it is really good. Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand is my hands-down favorite because it’s so much about the wild, dangerous magic of the desert. City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty is a close second, though it spends a lot more time in the city of the djinn than out in the sands. That book starts in Cairo, which immediately brings to mind E. Catherine Tobler’s Rings of Anubis if you’re feeling a bit more steampunk to go with the magic, or N.K. Jemisin’s The Killing Moon if you’re looking for something more ancient and deeply mythological. Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed goes fully fantasy adventure–as does Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton, with added gunslingers. Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson combines hacking and magic in a fictional Middle Eastern state.

City of Bones by Martha Wells takes us to an entirely unfamiliar world, still fantasy, where relic hunters sift through bone. The start of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger, has that same sort of combined fantasy and science fiction with blowing dust feel.

The weird thing I noticed as I was making my list of these books is that there’s so much more desert fantasy than there is sci-fi. Because while there might be science fiction that touches on a desert location, it lacks that deep connection to place that has provided so much meat for fantasy. With exceptions, of course. Technically speaking, any book set on Mars that isn’t about a transformed and terraformed version of it is about a desert planet; let’s just take Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars as the prime example of that. And of course, there’s the grandaddy of all desert SFF: Frank Herbert’s Dune. I’d also offer up Iraq + 100 as science fiction much closer to home; it’s short stories by Iraqi authors that imagine their country 100 years in the future.

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See you, space pirates. You can find all of the books recommended in this newsletter on a handy Goodreads shelf. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.

Happy Tuesday, shipmates! It’s Captain Alex, with your Tuesday new releases and news as I try to navigate the strange seas of starting a new job. I also saw a bunch of movies over the last few days, and let me recommend Ready or Not if you’re in the mood for some absolutely wicked, gory fun. Lastly, I need to share this D&D-related Twitter thread with you (via the thread reader app) because it’s beautiful and made me cry.

New Releases

Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff – Orphen and her tiny family (her mother and Maeve) have survived on a tiny island off the cost of Ireland in a world overtaken by the flesh-eating skrake. When disaster strikes, Maeve must abandon the safety of the island for the mainland, where the all-female skrake-fighting force called the Banshee may wait–and non-skrake dangers that Orphen can’t even imagine.

Song of the Abyss by Makiia Lucier – Seventeen-year-old Reyna is the granddaughter of a famed navigator and dreams of being an explorer in her own right. When her ship is attacked by mysterious raiders, she barely escapes with her life–and when next she sees the abandoned ship, her entire crew is missing. Reyna sets off on a dangerous journey to find and rescue them–and learn the truth behind these raiders.

Mind Games by Shana Silver – Arden is a hacker who uploads memories for classmates who want experiences they’d never otherwise have. One day, she whites out and finds her own memories have been hacked, removed rather than simply shared. How can she find an enemy that can erase every memory of their presence?

Overthrow by Caleb Crain – A grad student named Matthew falls in love with a skater named Leif and is drawn into his group of friends, people are are experimenting with what might be telepathy–and hope that their radical empathy will change the world. A government security contractor targets the group and brings the might of social and legal scrutiny down on them; will the group and their relationships survive?

The Passengers by John Marrs – Several years after self-driving cars have been mandated in the UK, eight unrelated people are hijacked by what appear to be hackers, with their pleas for help broadcast worldwide. But all is not as it seems, and each person carries a secret that can be the key to their salvation.

Galaxy’s Edge: Black Spire by Delilah S. Dawson – General Leia Organa has dispatched her spies in a desperate search for allies and sanctuary for the battered Resistance. Her top spy might have found just the place at Black Spire Outpost–if she can survive the First Order stormtroopers hot on her tail.

News and Views

An interview with Samuel Delaney about capitalism, racism, and science fiction.

Here’s a new trailer for His Dark Materials.

Short fiction alert! John Joseph Adams has released the TOC for the upcoming The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

SyFy Wire has a good roundup of some of the big news from Disney’s D23 expo. Hollywood Reporter has a guide to the known programming for Disney’s streaming serice thus far.

Also from D23: JJ Abrams talks about Leia’s role in The Rise of Skywalker and basically I just expect to cry through the entire movie.

This month’s Slate Future Tense short story is out: What the Dead Man Said. The response essay is also worth reading.

io9 has a great video from Flame Con, showing the intersection of scifi/fantasy fandom and drag and burlesque.

This might be the first crime committed in space. Yay?

A cooling vest invented by a Furry is now in use by soldiers in the US military.

Climate change has caused warm-weather-loving cycads to bloom on the Isle of Wight.

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See you, space pirates. You can find all of the books recommended in this newsletter on a handy Goodreads shelf. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.

Hello, shipmates, from the black depths of my post-WorldCon concrash. It’s Alex, back in Denver with a mountain of laundry to do and two extremely clingy cats to fend off while they get this newsletter put together!

News and Views

A really cool look at how fashion embraces our genre.

In this week’s SFF Yeah! Sharifah discusses favorite animal characters.

Tor.com has a great interview with Lauren Shippen about her upcoming podcast-turned-book The Infinite Noise.

And io9 has an interesting interview with the creators of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.

I’d say about 95% of current, non-political social media drama in our circles is about Sony taking Spider-Man back.

There’s going to be a Matrix 4, with both Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss, though solo directed by Lana Wachowski.

Here’s 12 YA books if you’re a fan of the Marauders in Harry Potter. Related: Which Ravenclaw character are you?

Tom Felton and Emma Thompson have a cute reunion.

George R.R. Martin gave out a couple of Alfie Awards at the Hugo Losers’ Party this year.

I am definitely curious about Kirsten Stewart’s upcoming movie, Underwater.

The last time Earth’s magnetic poles flipped, it might have taken 22,000 years to complete.

I found this surprisingly relevant from a writing/worldbuilding perspective: Altruism Still Fuels the Web. Businesses Love to Exploit It.

Free Association Friday

The Hugos are still very much on my mind, so hopefully you’ll forgive me if we noodle on them a bit more. On Tuesday, I gave you the quick rundown of winners for the most relevant categories to us. But I want to dive a little deeper because this was another year where the Hugos were absolutely dominated by women–and a lot of them had extremely relevant things to say.

I already mentioned Jeannette Ng’s acceptance speech, which you can read here, or hear in part on this tweet–including the loud cheering she received for her opinion about John W. Campbell. Due to the tut-tutting and pearl-clutching now being aimed at her because of her speech, here’s another barn burner of a thread from Jeannette–with a reminder that one thing Campbell did was defend the Kent State shooting. (Jeannette wrote Under the Pendulum Sun and has a short story in Not So Stories.)

Carrie Cuin also has a great Twitter thread regarding Campbell apologists. Justine Larbalestier also has a good chunk about Campbell in her excellent historical work The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, and unsurprisingly she is in total agreement with Jeannette.

Ada Palmer (Too Like the Lightning) was the presenter for the Campbell and has posted the text of her speech in full so we can enjoy it without the text-to-speech captioning SNAFU that had a lot of us inappropriately laughing. (Honestly, at first it was impossible to tell if the captions were borked or if this was some sort of intentional joke.)

Rivers Solomon (author of An Unkindness of Ghosts) did not win the Campbell, but she shared the text of the speech she would have given, and it’s well worth reading.

I want everyone in the world to see this adorable photo of award-winners Zen Cho and Jeannette Ng. If you want to see pure joy, she’s gathered a thread of her fellow Malaysians reacting to her Hugo win. (Zen Cho also wrote Sorcerer to the Crown.)

Elsa Sjunneson-Henry became the first deaf-blind woman to win a Hugo as part of the editorial team for Uncanny Magazine; she was on the special Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction issue. She hasn’t had a chance to release the text of her speech yet due to travel, but here’s a twitter thread of hers you should read.

Mary Robinette Kowal’s Hugo acceptance speech for The Calculating Stars is also well worth your time. She focuses on women who have too long been made invisible and it made me want to stand up and cheer.

You should also read Likhain’s speech. She won the Hugo for Best Fan Artist and gave a speech that had me in tears–and also became the first person to speak Tagalog on the Hugo stage.

I’m still having a ton of feelings about Archive of Our Own winning the Hugo for Best Related Work. The Mary Sue has a good round-up post about reactions. Naomi Novik, who has never been shy about writing fanfiction, gave the speech when the award was accepted, and you can read it here. (In addition to fanfic, Naomi Novik most recently wrote Spinning Silver.)

Tor.com has a great “what’s next for the winners” roundup that you might want to check out.

And last, for pure fun, here’s a Hugos “red carpet” Twitter thread.

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See you, space pirates. You can find all of the books recommended in this newsletter on a handy Goodreads shelf. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.

Avast, me hearties! It’s Alex, with the last newsletter they’ll be sending you from Dublin, Ireland. It’s been a massively busy and fun WorldCon, with only a few hiccups. First up, we’ve got news on the Hugo awards!

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Congratulations, Hugo Award Winners!

• Best Novel: The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
• Best Novella: Artificial Condition by Martha Wells
• Best Novelette: If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again by Zen Cho
• Best Short Story: A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies by Alix E. Harrow
• Best Series: Wayfarers by Becky Chambers (The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit, and Record of a Spaceborn Few)
• Best Related Work: Archive of Our Own

• Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
• John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: Jeannette Ng (author of Under the Pendulum Sun) (Also, you ought to read her acceptance speech.)
• For the list of winners in the rest of the categories, see the Hugos site!
• Next year’s Hugos will take place in Wellington, New Zealand at ConZealand, the 78th World Science Fiction Convention.

New Releases

The Cruel Stars by John Birmingham – The Sturm, a society of human “species purists” were thought to have died out long ago. But they’ve returned with a vengeance, and it’s up to a small band of flawed and reluctant heroes, all of them survivors of the Sturm attack, to rise up and resist.

The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories by Ayse Papatya Bucak – A short story collection that explores the fuzzy border between historical memory and myth.

News and Views

An excellent meta-read from Laurie Penny about nerds gaining power in pop culture (and fanfic).

Art Spiegelman (creator of the Pulitzer-prize winning graphic novel Maus) wrote an essay for the intro to a Marvel book about the golden age of comics; Marvel rejected it because it referred to Donald Trump. If you want to read the full essay, the Guardian’s posted it.

George R.R. Martin talks about the Game of Thrones TV show ending in an interview with the Guardian.

An autistic person writes about how Good Omens made them feel represented.

From io9: 30 very good sci-fi dogs.

Stephen Colbert has a Tolkien-off with Lee Pace.

#BoycottMulan started after Liu Yifei, star of the upcoming live-action Mulan, spoke in support of the Hong Kong police.

You had me at “intersectional feminist vampire movie.”

Haley Atwell talks a bit about Endgame.

We might be losing our most-consumed banana species to a fungus. (Bananas are fascinating.)

From the Department of “Why This?”: Colonies of aggressive, social spiders boom after a hurricane

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See you, space pirates. You can find all of the books recommended in this newsletter on a handy Goodreads shelf. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.

Greetings from Dublin, shipmates! It’s Alex, with your Friday newsletter, though forgive me if I’m a bit distracted. Opening ceremonies for WorldCon were last night and we’re into the convention proper now. It’s massive, sprawling, and I’m basically running in circles. Two more days until the Hugo Awards!

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News and Views

Amazon has revealed the first batch of casting for the Wheel of Time series. I don’t even go here, but my twitter list seems really happy about it.

Star Wars Barbies from Mattel!

In this week’s SFF Yeah! podcast, Sharifah and Jen talk about non-human narrators.

Jeremy Renner has an “outdoor collection,” which includes a bow?

This may be the best restaurant ad ever made.

If you had not heard about The Wise Man’s Butt, well, you’re welcome. Some days, Twitter is still a magical place.

There’s going to be a novel about the Lowell factory girls and witches and I AM SO EXCITED Y’ALL.

If you’re looking for books that have that quirky Good Omens flair, these seven might fit the bill.

Gormenghast is getting a TV adaptation on Showtime, with Neil Gaiman as one of the executive producers.

Okay, now I really need to see this movie: Richard Nixon and Vietnam are Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark‘s strangest monsters

Student fillmmakers in Nigeria are making really cool-looking short sci-fi films using cell phones and green-screens.

A UX expert reacts to sci-fi operating systems.

WorldCon kicked off by announcing the winners for the 1944 Retro-Hugos. (The retro-Hugos are retroactive Hugo awards given out to works that were published in years that no Hugo awards were given.)

Archaeologists found a wooden box near Pompeii with a ton of small artifacts in it.

Free Association Friday

Happy birthday, Taika Waititi! He’s 44 years old today, and hopefully it’s been a good one. In honor of his birthday, let’s list some science fiction and fantasy that’s humorous–with a twist. Because I think we could all do with a laugh these days. (Hard mode: avoiding the big names like Adams and Pratchett.)

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu puts us in Minor Universe 31, where a time travel technician (coincidentally also named Charles Yu) helps literally save people from themselves. Warcross by Marie Lu is more of a thriller by plot, about a hacker in a video game who gets tasked with infiltrating the extremely serious tournament for that game–but in the reading, it’s brilliantly funny. Sarah Kuhn’s Heroine Complex (and its sequels) gives us superhero novels with major heart, which are also pretty dang funny.

Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On is about the worst Chosen One ever, and it’s a ridiculous homage to Harry Potter. Patrick Ness’s Some of Us Just Live Here takes a different angle at the chosen one, where the main character is definitely Not Chosen, and still has to deal with extraorindary circumstances from an ordinary life. Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne is a much more straight-forward sendup of epic fantasy, and definitely belongs next to The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Dianna Wynn Jones on any book shelf.

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See you, space pirates. You can find all of the books recommended in this newsletter on a handy Goodreads shelf. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.

Happy Tuesday, shipmates! This is your captain, Alex, and it’s time for some new releases and other news. Greetings from rainy Dublin, where we’re two days from WorldCon starting. But today I’m excited about this game called Elsinore, which combines two of my favorite things: Shakespeare and timeloops. I’m also a sucker for anything that gives Ophelia a better shake.

Now, on with the show!

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New Releases

Pale Kings by Micah Yongo – A young assassin faces the secrets of his past and unravels the mystery of the ancient scroll he carries, which are perhaps the key to defeating the mysterious forces seeking to invade the peaceful Five Lands. (Sequel to Lost Gods.)

Before She Sleeps by Bina Shah – In a dystopian future, disease and sex selection has shifted the ratio of men to women dangerously, where women are forced to take multiple husbands and have children as quickly as possible. But some women resist…

Dahlia Black by Keith Thomas – A journalistic documentary of the Pulse, an alien intervention that can rewrite human DNA and promises to change the path of humanity forever.

The Heart of the Circle by Keren Landsman – A peaceful protest of sorcerers seeking an end to the religious persecution they face comes to a bloody, murderous end. The next sorcerer to be targeted complicates his own survival terribly by falling in love.

The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday by Saad Z. Hossain – A formerly imprisoned djinn king and a mass murdering former Gurkha take on the all-knowing, all-seeing tyrant of Kathmandu, bringing old crimes to light and forcing the city to change for all time.

Bright Star by Erin Swan – A traumatized young woman, held as a servant in the home of a tyrant, makes her escape with a group of assassins and joins their rebellion. In resistance, she finds her strength and becomes a leader.

The Last Hope by Krista Ritchie and Becca Ritchie – After being imprisoned for weeks on an enemy starship, a trio of friends must help a mysterious stranger if they wish to escape. The price of their freedom is a mission they cannot refuse–to search for a baby who can cloak and teleport planets.

News and Views

Looking for some sci-fi books for kids? We’ve got a list of 25 for you to choose from.

The Lord of the Rings Amazon series has been restricted to only the events of the Second Age by the Tolkien esate, which has some interesting (and concerning) implications.

Lavie Tidhar (author of Unholy Land), working with puzzle author Jake Olefsky, has written a non-linear interactive short story called Svalbard.

Subterranean Press has announced a story an novella collection: The Best of Elizabeth Bear

Ken Liu is also getting a new collection: The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

The headline says is all: Dance of the Vampires is the best and worst vampire musical ever made.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is out, and here’s a review to read.

Vulture has ranked all 82 of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

Here’s a look at the upcoming Stranger Things artbook, Visions From the Upside Down.

If you’re a fan of Black Mirror, these short stories will be of interest.

This seems fine: “A remote-start app exposed thousands of cars to hackers.”

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See you, space pirates. You can find all of the books recommended in this newsletter on a handy Goodreads shelf. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.

We made it–it’s Friday! It is I, Captain Alex, and as you read this, there’s a good chance I’m on an airplane, on my way to Dublin for WorldCon. I’m looking forward to having a live view of the Hugo Awards in a bit over a week. But until then, here’s some news and book chat to usher you into the weekend!

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News and Views

This week’s SFF Yeah! podcast is about unusual vampires.

Elsa Sjunneson-Henry wrote a gorgeous piece about what Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness Quartet means to her.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo has an absolutely GORGEOUS cover.

Here’s a really great essay about “lifeboat thinking” in science fiction. It’s not just The Cold Equations.

Dragon Con has opened up voting for this year’s Dragon Awards. Anyone can vote by registering their email address.

Oh my god Snoop Dogg is Cousin Itt.

Lucasfilm’s first non-Indiana Jones/Star Wars project looks like it’s going to be an adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone.

An A+ interview with Angelina Jolie, in which she talks about why we need more wicked women.

Andy Serkis will be directing the sequel to the deeply weird recent Venom movie. (I saw it. I still don’t know how I feel about it?)

Cookies. In. Spaaaaaaaaaaace.

Here’s a fun (and long) piece about the science behind Idris Elba’s character in Hobbs and Shaw.

So there are tardigrades on the Moon now. Whoops.

Free Association Friday

Honestly, I’m still just thinking about the SFF “lifeboat” essay, because it’s so good. (Also, because it never fails when I vent about how much I hate The Cold Equations, someone feels the need to explain it to me. Like I haven’t read the story and understood it and that’s why I loathe it.) And I think it’s something we really need to think about in our genre, when so many books become elaborate, byzantine plots to get characters in situations where murder is the only possible choice.

I’m certainly not saying all fictional violence is bad–I think we all know the difference between fantasy and reality. But it’s something to interrogate, when so much SFF is focused on violence as a solution to all of the questions it poses. (Movies are particularly bad about this, I think.) Why is it treated like the most interesting question one can ask of a person is how far they have to be pushed to pull a trigger?

So what are some books to read that push back against lifeboat thinking and the (very American) focus on violence as a way to solve problems? Or more broadly, deeply humane books that value life?

The essay mentions The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal, because it’s all about figuring out solutions to tough choices… and trying to fit everyone on the lifeboat. Becky Chambers’s Record of a Spaceborn Few is so deeply compassionate that I can’t describe it without tearing up. Walkaway by Cory Doctorow imagines an apocalypse where your neighbor brings casseroles instead of guns (which is more accurate to how humans actually behave, by the way).

Quarter Share by Nathan Lowell is wonderfully slice-of-life, about a ship crew going about their business. Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds is about alien refugees trying to rebuild their civilization on a new world, with the help of a man and a woman who come from different civilizations. And perhaps Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels fit this bill… in which case, start with Excession.

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See you, space pirates. You can find all of the books recommended in this newsletter on a handy Goodreads shelf. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.

Happy Tuesday, shipmates! It’s Alex with some new releases to check out for the week, as well as a helping of SFF news! I had a heck of a good weekend and I hope you did too–and part of my A+ Saturday was seeing the ridiculous action funtimes that are Hobbs and Shaw. Basically, I agree with everything in this review. (And it’s got a massively fun cameo in it that I guess is a spoiler? But at least no one’s yelled at me on Twitter for mentioning it.) Also, baking season is coming.

New Releases

The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang – Sequel of The Poppy War. Warrior and shaman Rin is on the run; addicted to opium and haunted by the atrocities she’s committed, she refuses to die until she has revenge on the Empress. Her best chance may be to join up with the Dragon Warlord, who wants to unseat the Empress and create a republic.

First Cosmic Velocity by Zach Powers – A blending of fact and fiction about the Cold War Soviet space program, a sham that depends on the use of twins to hide the fact that no one it has launched into space has returned successfully to Earth.

Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge: A Crash of Fate by Zoraida Córdova – Jules and Izzy were best friends as children on Batuu. After being separated for years, Izzy returns to Batuu while delivering a mysterious package and runs into Jules again. The two find themselves on the run, dodging danger and sorting out their feelings for each other.

The Gossamer Mage by Julie E. Czerneda – The Deathless Goddess extracts a terrible price for the use of the magic for which she is the only source. Determined to end the certain death waiting for magic users, the greatest mage vows to destroy the goddess–but he doesn’t have the full story.

Cry Pilot by Joel Dane – Earth is at war with a mysterious enemy armed with rogue bio-weapons. Maseo Kaytu volunteers for a suicide mission as a ‘cry pilot’ and finds himself bonding with his platoon of misfits.

News and Views

N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy is going to be a tabletop RPG!

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are going to do a horror-comedy series about ghost hunters for Amazon Prime.

A succinct and hilarious thread that explains who all the cats in the Cats trailer are.

The showrunner for WandaVision pushed for a diverse writer’s room and got a lot of what she wanted.

Leslie Jones livetweeted Avengers: Endgame.

The Alamo Drafthouse will have clown-only screenings of It: Chapter Two. And Stephen King added a totally new scene to that movie, BTW.

A new adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth is coming to TV, from the Star Trek: Discovery team.

Someone watched all of the Fast and Furious movies in 4 days and shared the collected wisdom.

…is Jeremy Renner okay?

Baking bread with ancient Egyption yeast.

A weird and fascinating story about an infectious cancer found in dogs.

Jason Momoa and Dwayne Johnson have joined the ‘Protect Mauna Kea’ protests.

See you, space pirates. You can find all of the books recommended in this newsletter on a handy Goodreads shelf. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.

Happy Friday, shipmates! We all made it, and your reward from Captain Alex is an odd grab bag of news and some free association of novels. Oh, and if you need an end-of-the-week pick-me-up, I heartily recommend the #TerribleMCUCasting hashtag on Twitter.

News and Views

Harry Potter turned 39 on Wednesday.

Author Sherrilyn Keynon dropped her lawsuit against her husband.

Black Nerd Problems has a really great, deep look at David Mogo, Godhunter.

Ada Hoffman (author of The Outside) wrote a great essay about portrayals of disability in Star Wars.

And this is one heck of a question: Too many Star Wars books, or not enough?

There’s a documentary about Ursula K. Le Guin coming to PBS on August 2.

Jaimie Alexander is volunteering for Sif to be Valkyrie’s queen and all I can say is YES. (How about a love triangle where no one loses?)

Madeline Miller’s Circe is coming to HBO.

The creator of Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski’s autobiography, Becoming Superman, just came out, and he talked to SyFy Wire about it.

Fast Color is going to go from being a movie to a series on Amazon!

And there’s a new Dungeons and Dragons movie coming? (Insert uncertainface here.)

An interesting examination of Stranger Things as uniquely suburban horror.

From Tor.com, a great roundup of short fiction from July.

I am excited about seeing Lupita Nyongo’o in the zomcom Little Monsters.

This ancient Roman stylus shows that gifts from tourists really haven’t changed in 2000 years.

It’s been a big week for fossils. A triceratops skull was found in the North Dakota Badlands by a university student. And an 1,100 lb sauropod bone got dug up in southwestern France. And a little Chinese boy found fossilized dinosaur eggs.

Free Association Friday

So today in history, Emperor Majorian got arrested in 461 and deposed… but when I first read that name, I read it as “Majoran” which became “Majora” in my head, and instantly I was thinking about Majora’s Mask and it’s brain-bending countdown and world-salvaging time loop.

The first thing I leapt to was trying to figure out books that use the sort of screaming-tension countdown that has made Majora’s Mask a popular meme. And… my finite knowledge and google skills kind of failed me, I admit. It’s a device I used in one of my own books (Blood Binds the Pack if you’ll forgive the shameless plug) but it’s not really so explicit as an on-the-page countdown in much of anything else. There are definitely some books with tight timelines! Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen has a pretty ramped-up timeline that involves time travel at the end of the book. Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire has a pretty implicit, tight timeline that kicks in partway through the book, which I will not spoil here. And so on.

But time loops? There’s a lot of fun books with time loops… though most of those are triggered by the death of the protagonist rather than a deliberate choice to use an Ocarina of Time-esque MacGuffin. Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver reminds me a lot of Happy Death Day, except without the serial killer. The timeloop in Opposite of Always by Justin A. Reynolds is driven by love. All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka has humans and aliens battling it out over who will figure out how to win the timeloop first. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North is perhaps the most Majora’s Mask-esque, with a timeloop that is one step closer to the apocalypse every time it triggers.

In a slightly different vein, Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes has not so much a timeloop as a… clone loop. And the characters have to figure out what is going on before they run out of clones. And Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde is a fun riff on the infinite lives of video games, which become their own kind of weird timeloop for players.

See you, space pirates. You can find all of the books recommended in this newsletter on a handy Goodreads shelf. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.

Yo ho, happy Tuesday, my merry marauders. It’s Alex, with a good crop of new releases even though we’re at that weird animal known as the fifth Tuesday in a month. I’ve also got an assortment of news for you… and before we get started, I have to share this thing that Brooke Bolander (who gave us The Only Harmless Great Thing) shared on Twitter, because it’s super intense, actually true, and I’m still obsessed with it: “The Man Who Rode the Thunder” which is about a pilot who had to emergency eject at about 50,000 feet and then fell through a thunderstorm.

New Releases

Ascent to Godhood by JY Yang – In the fourth book of the Tensorate series, the Protector is dead… and one woman is both her greatest enemy and her greatest mourner. (Look, if you have not read this amazing, queer series, do yourself a favor and start with The Black Tides of Heaven.)

Shatter the Sky by Rebecca Kim Wells – “Raised among the ruins of a conquered mountain nation, Maren dreams only of sharing a quiet life with her girlfriend Kaia—until the day Kaia is abducted by the Aurati, prophetic agents of the emperor, and forced to join their ranks. Desperate to save her, Maren hatches a plan to steal one of the emperor’s coveted dragons and storm the Aurati stronghold.”

The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen – An undertaker of the Crow caste comes to collect the body of a Prince and finds that he has faked his own death. (The tagline on this is wonderful: “One way or another, we always feed the crows.”)

Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott – An outsider arrives in Rotherweird, a town started long ago by twelve children with unearthly powers who were exiled by Elizabeth I.

The Ember Blade by Chris Wooding – A young man is imprisoned after his father is executed for treason. He’s rescued by a man who hates him and is oath-bound to protect him; on the run, his next task is to steal the fabled Ember Blade and inspire a revolution.

News and Views

Congratulations to the World Fantasy Award finalists! (Moment of personal squee: An anthology that I have a short story in, Sword and Sonnet, is a finalist.) The novel list is GREAT:
In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey
The Mere Wife by Maria Dahvana Headley
The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang
Witchmark by C.L. Polk
Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse

Gorgeous new cover art for Susan Dennard’s Witchlands series. (You can already see it on Bloodwitch.)

50 must-read fantasy books by women.

If you’re in a post-Stranger Things monster slump, here are some books that will help you out.

Everything makes me more hype about the oncoming superheroes-via-fast-cars Hobbs & Shaw: the world premiere had dueling red carpets for the two guys in the title.

By the way, the writer of most of The Fast and the Furious movies says that vroom vroom in space is not out of the question. DO IT YOU COWARDS.

More details about Carnival Row coming out. It’s already been renewed for a second season and it hasn’t been released yet.

Orlando Bloom won’t be in Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series, partly because he says he’s too old to be Legolas again.

Wireless is asking the important questions: Will Heroes in Loincloths Ever Make a Comeback?

A takedown of the face-touching trope that gets used way too often when blind characters are involved.

Researchers have improved on a commercial prosthetic hand so that it has a lighter touch and a sense of touch… and named it LUKE.

The French Army is hiring science fiction writers to creatively identify future threats.

Science fiction is real alert: Scientists can now build feedback circuits in cells.

Here’s a really cool time-lapse video of a storm.

Today in extremely depressing but important: Many Animals Can’t Adapt Fast Enough to Climate Change

See you, space pirates. You can find all of the books recommended in this newsletter on a handy Goodreads shelf. If you’d like to know more about my secret plans to dominate the seas and skies, you can catch me over at my personal site.