Another week, another heap of genre news, and this one came with a pleasing sense of balance. Serious literary novelists wrote about impossible animals, a sixty-foot radioactive lizard was finally judged too violent for the children, and Warner Bros decided the gremlins weren’t to be fed until 2028. We also looked for anyone in the field who’d left us. We’re glad to say we didn’t find anybody.
Top Of The Pile: Naomi Alderman Goes Hunting For Mimmoths
Naomi Alderman, whose The Power did more for electric eels than anything since Galvani, is back with The Strangers (Fig Tree). It’s a hybrid of science fiction and memoir. Alderman’s own grief, over her mother’s death, lost pregnancies and an ageing father, runs alongside the arrival of strange new animals called ‘mimmoths’ that refuse to be caught or explained. Anyone who’s ever tried to get a cat into a travel box will sympathise.
The Irish Times liked it a great deal, calling it “a work of emotional magnitude” and concluding that “Alderman has uncompromisingly written the book that she wanted to write, and the result is something wonderful.” Authors don’t always get to write the book they wanted. Some of us have had the invoices from our publishers’ marketing departments to prove it.
New On The Shelves (Tuesday 22nd)
Alderman had plenty of company on Tuesday. Sabaa Tahir wrapped up her Heir Duology with Empire, which should keep the YA fantasy crowd quiet for at least a weekend. Tananarive Due, who has been scaring readers properly for decades, returned with Mazywood (Simon & Schuster). The horror shelf also took in Keith Rosson’s Crone (Saga Press), in which a former detective and recovering addict investigates a murder and turns up decades-old conspiracies tied to his missing daughter. On top of that came Alma Katsu’s Incarnate and Adalyn Grace’s The Wretched Divine, so October’s spooky season has effectively started a week early. Bookish Goblin has the full list for the day.
Our pick for anyone who likes their short fiction with some ideas in it is Revolution in the Heart: Stories Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin (Titan), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The line-up is very strong: Charlie Jane Anders, Ann Leckie, Kelly Link, Karen Joy Fowler, Aliya Whiteley, Premee Mohamed, Darcie Little Badger, Ai Jiang and Chana Porter. Le Guin once said that the writer’s job is to imagine alternatives to how we live now. Fifteen of them have done exactly that, which saves the rest of us a job.
Next Tuesday (29th) looks just as busy. Django Wexler’s The Only Way Out Is Up (Little, Brown) sends a junkheap scrapper and his robot companion into a high-stakes tournament. Micaiah Johnson’s The Unhaunting has friends inheriting a 170-year-old house built to prevent tragedy. Michael Wehunt’s Nightjars (Henry Holt) involves mysterious photographs and a serial-killer father. There’s also Forged in FIYAH (Tordotcom), a ten-year anniversary anthology from the Black speculative fiction magazine edited by DaVaun Sanders, and Kyle Winkler’s The Ship of Death (HarperCollins), which is cosmic horror told through tabletop RPG playtest reports. We’ve all been in that gaming group. Andrew Liptak has the rest of the run-down.
On Screen: Big Lizards, Small Monsters And One Tragic Couple
Godzilla goes grown-up. We’ve covered the Godzilla Minus Zero trailers here more than once, but this week brought something new. Takashi Yamazaki’s sequel has become the first film in the franchise’s 72-year history to receive an R rating, for “strong/bloody violence”. The big fella has been flattening Tokyo since 1954, so the censors have taken their time noticing. It’s set in 1949, Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe are back, and it arrives in North America via GKIDS on 6th November.
Don’t feed them after midnight, or until 2028. Warner Bros has pushed Gremlins 3 back from 19th November 2027 to 6th October 2028, and it announced the delay with a teaser that simply reads ‘10.6.28. Only In Theaters.’ Chris Columbus, who wrote the 1984 original, is directing, with Steven Spielberg back as executive producer. Joe Dante isn’t returning. The good news is that the gremlins will be practical puppets rather than CGI, which is how it should be. Mogwai were never meant to be rendered.
Eggers does Shakespeare. Robert Eggers, fresh from vampires and with his werewolf picture Werwulf due this Christmas, has lined up Romeo and Juliet as his next film for Focus Features. According to Gizmodo, Focus won a bidding war against A24, Sony and Warner Bros, with a budget in the high seventy millions. Expect period authenticity so thorough that the Montagues will probably smell faintly of tallow. There’s no cast yet, although we’d put a small wager on Willem Dafoe turning up somewhere in Verona.
Strange New Worlds signs off for the season. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds closed its fourth season on Thursday with ‘Tomorrow’s Enterprise’. Two Enterprises, a white hole, a black hole and two Uhuras have to work together across time to save Scotty. TrekCore called it one of the stronger episodes of the run and “a welcome closeout to an uneven season.” There’s one more season to come, and it will be the last.
Doctor Who’s future is still up in the air, but its past is heading to the cinema. The BBC is still running its tender for the show’s next production partner. While that goes on, David Tennant and Billie Piper are coming back to the big screen for Doctor Who Day on 23rd November. The Satan Pit Extended Cut is a feature-length edit of ‘The Impossible Planet’ and ‘The Satan Pit’ with deleted scenes and unseen footage, showing in more than a thousand cinemas across the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It’s a good excuse to shout at the Ood in public.
Industry: Choose Your Own Adventure Gets A Mortgage
Readers who grew up turning to page 47 (and keeping a thumb on page 12 in case they died) are the target of Chooseco’s new adult imprint, CYOA Unbound. The first titles are a reworked Pride and Prejudice from C. Davitt Bell in July 2027, where you get to steer the Bennet sisters’ romantic choices, and Culty by Fancy Feast in September 2027, pitched as ‘White Lotus meets Sex and the City‘. Horror, mysteries and thrillers are promised to follow, with more to be announced at New York Comic Con in October. We’re hoping for at least one book where every single choice gets you killed on the next page. It’s traditional.
Obituaries
We checked, respectfully, and we haven’t found any notable losses in the SF, fantasy or horror world this week. That makes two quiet weeks running. We’ll take it gratefully and hope it lasts.
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