Five days into November and the bonfire has barely been lit, but the in-tray is already smouldering. The big stories of the week have had pieces of their own: Maas and Miéville, Steve Davidson, the Ocarina remake, Maya Hawke’s planeswalking, a tighter Dune and horror’s grip on the streaming charts. What follows is everything else, starting with the week’s least likely career path.
Over 9000 Votes: Dragon Ball Z Goes To Court
Among the winners in this week’s US midterm elections is Nathan Johnson, the new Attorney General of Texas, who has one qualification for high office that none of his predecessors could claim. As Variety reports, Johnson composed music for the English-language version of Dragon Ball Z. “I composed the musical scores for 67 episodes and five movies,” he says, the films including The Tree of Might, Fusion Reborn and Wrath of the Dragon. We pass no comment on Texas politics, which is outside our jurisdiction and well outside our competence. We merely note that there is now a state’s chief law officer who knows exactly how long it takes a man in orange to power up, and is presumably the only lawyer in America who can score his own closing arguments with a five-minute crescendo.
Film: Halloween Holds, And India Goes Very Big
We’ve already marked Clayface overtaking The Substance as the highest-grossing body-horror film. For the record, the Halloween weekend went like this: Clayface slid about 57% in its second weekend to just over $10 million, neck and neck at the top with A24’s You Can See Everything in its third, so the champion was decided by Monday’s figures. Laika’s Wildwood dipped a gentle 39%, taking its US total to $25.8 million, and Resident Evil has now passed $400 million worldwide, proving that the undead really are a renewable resource. The weekend’s other milestone belonged to Christmas at the Kringles, which took about $675,000 and has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 0%. Releasing a Christmas film on Halloween weekend is either brave or a horror film in its own right.
Further east, Ramayana: Rise of a Legend has drawn its first British reviews. It’s billed as India’s most expensive film ever, with Nitesh Tiwari directing and a score by Hans Zimmer and AR Rahman. The Guardian calls it a “thoroughly engaging, rousing and spectacular Indian epic melodrama”. It runs about three hours and covers only the first half of the story, so this is the epic in the old-fashioned sense: bring sandwiches, and expect to come back next year for the rest. And for anyone who finds Rama and Ravana too weighty, Paramount has released the full trailer for The Angry Birds Movie 3, in cinemas on 23 December. Our view is that all great mythologies involve at least one catapult.
Television: Grodd In The Dock, Titans In Talks
The oddest DC project in a while has firmed up its cast. The People vs. Gorilla Grodd is an eight-part mock true-crime docuseries from Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda, the creators of Netflix’s American Vandal, and it has Skyler Gisondo reprising Jimmy Olsen from Superman and Peacemaker as he reopens the case of whether the telepathic gorilla was wrongly convicted. Jimmy Tatro is officially set to play Grodd. Beck Bennett, Mikaela Hoover and Wendell Pierce return as Steve Lombard, Cat Grant and Perry White. Reports that other Peacemaker regulars will drop by remain unconfirmed scuttlebutt. We look forward to the inevitable podcast spin-off, in which a man with a microphone asks the hard questions, such as whether a 600-pound primate with mind control can get a fair trial in Metropolis.
The MonsterVerse may get another season on the small screen. According to Variety, Apple TV is in talks with Legendary about a third season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, with new showrunners and writers and, crucially, new Titans. Nothing is official yet, and the streamer has been quiet since season two wrapped in May. A spin-off following Wyatt Russell’s younger Lee Shaw is also said to be in the works. So the franchise is, much like Godzilla himself, not dead, merely resting somewhere very deep and very wet.
Games: Arkane Finds Suitors
When we last looked, Arkane Lyon and its abandoned Marvel’s Blade were hunting for a new home against the clock. Now, according to Bloomberg, several companies have made offers for the studio, with Ubisoft the one named and at least two others circling. Microsoft has also reportedly weighed a sale to the studio’s own management. A deal is expected to let Arkane finish the game, with a French legal deadline in early December now concentrating minds. It would be a fitting outcome for a vampire hunter: buried in June, back on his feet by Christmas.
The Golden Joystick Awards announce their winners on 11 November, with public voting live on GamesRadar+. The genre-leaning names on the console and PC shortlists include Resident Evil Requiem, SAROS, PRAGMATA, Nioh 3, The Blood of Dawnwalker and Star Wars Zero Company. Our money is on whichever one gets the most fans to remember to vote, which is how democracy works this week in more than one place.
Books And Fandom: Chills, Queens And Zines
The Horror Writers Association has launched its first annual Chills of Winter poetry series, curated by its Dark Poetry Blog team. The opening instalments are “A Whisper of Silence” by T.S. Moon and “The House by the Creek” by Jonathan Maberry, which is a title that already sounds like something you should never rent on Airbnb. Over on John Scalzi’s Whatever, Nancy Kress explains the big idea behind her new novel The Queen’s Witch, which concerns Anne Boleyn, “Henry VIII’s second queen (of six; he was hard on wives)”. For fanzine fans, Chris Garcia’s The Drink Tank has reached issue 467 with a Justice League theme, under a Frank Wu cover.
A couple of deadlines worth noting. Recommendations for the Otherwise Award, for 2026 speculative fiction that explores and expands our understanding of gender, close on 8 November. And the 2027 Carnegie Medals have drawn 125 nominations, 62 for Writing and 63 for Illustration, with longlists due on 23 February, shortlists on 17 March and winners on 22 June. If you’re in Rochester, New York, before 10 January, the Strong National Museum of Play is running “Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep: Shear Genius”, with recreations of 62 West Wallaby Street and Mossy Bottom Farm. Cheese, Gromit, is presumably not included in the price of admission.
Science: The Moon, Mars Dust And A Cosmic Coin Toss
China says it is pressing ahead with a crewed Moon landing before 2030. Details aired at the Seventh Manned Space Symposium in Beijing, as reported by Leonard David, include uncrewed tests of the Mengzhou spacecraft and Lanyue lander, a pair of Long March-10 rockets and, along the way, the Chang’e-7 robotic lander. Meanwhile, swatches of spacesuit material riding around on NASA’s Perseverance rover suggest that Martian dust may be less abrasive than the lunar kind, according to Phys.org. That’s good news for any future colonists, though the researchers warn that “astronauts to Mars will have to be prepared.” Science fiction has been telling them that since Bradbury.
Finally, the SETI Institute has been using game theory to decide where and when to listen for aliens. The idea is that two civilisations that want to find each other, but can’t confer, might independently pick the same obvious place, and the anti-solar point (the spot in the sky directly opposite the Sun) is an obvious choice. A pilot survey with the Allen Telescope Array, published in The Astronomical Journal, found no evidence of alien technology. Not yet, anyway. It’s the cosmic equivalent of agreeing to meet under the clock at Waterloo without fixing a time, and we’ve all been stood up there before. Here at SFcrowsnest we’ll keep listening, and if anyone out there is reading this from the anti-solar point, do drop us a line.
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