Science Fiction and Fantasy News Roundup: 1st July 2026.
Apple TV+ is sending us back underground with the third season of Silo, with Rebecca Ferguson once again stalking around a bunker that appears to have been designed by someone who regarded natural light as a dangerous continental fad. The new run begins on Friday, with episodes arriving weekly through to early September. This is either a nicely rationed summer feast or Apple’s way of stretching a single season across the calendar like budget Marmite. Either way, Silo remains one of the more satisfyingly grim bits of television architecture currently standing, or rather crouching, beneath the soil.
Elsewhere in the long, clanking corridor marked “Surely They’re Actually Making It This Time”, Neuromancer continues to edge towards the screen. Apple TV+’s adaptation of William Gibson’s cyberpunk cornerstone has added Mark Strong as Armitage, the enigmatic fixer who offers Case, played by Callum Turner, the sort of job that never comes with dental, pension or a happy ending. Briana Middleton plays Molly, which means we are now officially close enough to the thing to start forming opinions and then immediately distrusting them.
Strong arrives after Dune: Prophecy, so he is clearly keeping his dystopian corporate gravitas properly polished. There is still no firm release date beyond “later this year”, but after roughly four decades of Neuromancer adaptations wandering the Earth in a development-hell dressing gown, Gibson fans may permit themselves one small cheer. Not a large cheer, obviously. That would only tempt the production gods.
Netflix, meanwhile, is pressing on with 3 Body Problem, filming its second and third seasons back to back. This is presumably to avoid the traditional streaming experience of leaving viewers hanging from a cliff edge until everyone involved has aged into a different tax bracket.
In bookish matters, Jennifer Saint continues her mythological reclamation project with This Immortal Heart, this time turning her attention to Aphrodite. The goddess of love is set against Ares, the god of war, across several mortal lifetimes of divine romantic aggravation. Given the Greek gods’ historic inability to make even a sandwich without causing dynastic trauma, we should probably expect passion, bloodshed, sulking, and at least one mortal discovering they are collateral damage in a celestial situationship.
Jean Kwok, better known for literary fiction, takes a sharp turn into fantasy with Dominion, the first volume in her Silk and Iron trilogy. It comes armed with an amnesiac heroine, a brooding metal-mage warrior, and a large battle tyger who presumably does not enjoy being described as “large” by anyone hoping to retain all their limbs. The ingredients suggest Chinese mythology, romantasy, survival trials, and the sort of heroine who wakes up with no memory and immediately finds the universe has left her a to-do list written in teeth.
Whether Dominion leans closer to Fourth Wing, The Hunger Games, or some entirely new beast with claws in the curtains will depend on how many trials, betrayals and emotionally unavailable magical men can be squeezed in before the sequel starts sharpening its knives.
A quieter, sadder note now for C.J. Cherryh, the Hugo-winning Grand Master whose career has given the field the Foreigner series and a shelf-load of other worlds that readers have moved into emotionally and refused to leave. Cherryh has announced that she is no longer able to write, after complications from repeated anaesthetics took their toll. Her message was gracious, generous and very much in character: thanks to her readers, her editor and her partner Jane, without theatrical thunder or self-pity.
Finally, over on the industry deals desk, where manuscripts are weighed, contracts are summoned and editors pretend not to be powered entirely by coffee and dread, Akwaeke Emezi has sold a new dark epic fantasy, Eclipse & The Wolf, to Voyager. Debut horror writer Marie Croke has also landed Hush Little Hauntings at Saga Press.
Both go into the “keep an eye on these” drawer, which is already groaning ominously and may need reinforcing with eldritch timber.
