October has arrived in the traditional manner, with publishers tipping the horror cupboard onto the front tables and streaming services suddenly remembering that Halloween exists. It makes for a well-stocked science fiction and fantasy news roundup. Stephen King booked himself into two consecutive days of next week, Madeline Miller finally produced some new fiction, CD Projekt gave Geralt a free facelift, and Naruto announced a comeback before telling everyone to wait for New York Comic Con to find out what it actually is. We also went through the obituary pages, and are relieved to report nothing new.
Top Of The Pile: Stephen King Has Next Week Covered
If you were planning to read anybody other than Stephen King next week, Constant Reader, the man has other ideas. On Tuesday 6th October, Scribner in the US and Hodder here publish Other Worlds Than These, the third and final Talisman novel, forty-two years after Jack Sawyer first flipped into the Territories. Peter Straub died in 2022, but before he went he sent King a long letter of ideas for a closing volume, and King has built the book from those notes, with Straub keeping his co-author credit. It runs to 624 pages, comes with black-and-white illustrations by Gabriel Rodriguez, and formally walks Jack into Roland Deschain’s cosmology, which means the Dark Tower faithful will be buying it whatever anybody says. Early notices have been kind: Bloody Disgusting found it a satisfying and rather moving farewell to Straub, while warning that readers with no patience for Mid-World should probably stay on this side of the door.
A day later, on Wednesday 7th, Prime Video drops all eight episodes of Mike Flanagan’s Carrie, which we last saw as a trailer back in July. The reviews landed this week and they are warmer than a prom-night gymnasium. Summer H. Howell’s Carrie and Samantha Sloyan’s Margaret have been singled out, King’s 1974 story has been moved firmly into the age of phone cameras and online pile-ons, and the first critics’ tally sits in the low eighties. The usual Flanagan caveat applies, with a few reviewers feeling that eight hours is a lot of padding for a novel slim enough to fit in a blazer pocket, and one subplot about a spiteful meme account taking particular flak. Flanagan has said he’d love it to be the first of three seasons. Prime Video has not, at the time of writing, agreed. Nobody we read claims it has dethroned De Palma’s 1976 film, which is probably healthy for everyone.
New On The Shelves (Tuesday 29th)
Tuesday belonged to Madeline Miller, whose Mestra (Ecco) is her first new fiction since Circe in 2018. Before anyone gets the bunting out, it is a standalone short story of around ninety pages, in the same format as Galatea, rather than a novel. Mestra is the daughter of Erysichthon, the Thessalian king who felled a grove sacred to Ceres and was cursed with a hunger nothing could fill, as Ovid tells it in the Metamorphoses. Poseidon gives her the power to become anything she can imagine, and her father promptly treats this as a renewable revenue stream. Most reviews have been rapturous, with a minority grumbling that eight years is a long wait for ninety pages. Miller’s readers have had plenty of practice at waiting.
T. Kingfisher, meanwhile, has written the Astarion book that a sizeable portion of the internet has been writing unofficially for three years. Baldur’s Gate 3: Astarion (Random House Worlds) is a licensed prequel set during the vampire’s long servitude to Cazador Szarr, with an aasimar paladin called Hahn offering a possible way out. The audiobook is read by Neil Newbon, who voiced Astarion in the game, so we suspect a good many copies will be listened to rather than read.
Seanan McGuire reached book twenty of October Daye with A Divided Duty (Tor), in which Toby has a newborn to look after and Faerie, as ever, refuses to keep office hours. As usual, a novella comes bundled at the back, this one narrated by her squire Quentin. The series now turns up roughly every September like a fae harvest festival, and its readers seem perfectly happy with that arrangement. Rebecca Yarros also went back to the Empyrean with Threshing Day, a story collection to keep the dragon riders fed until the next novel, and Ryan Cahill’s The Truth continued The Bound and the Broken.
Next week brings one of the longest-promised books in British fantasy. Jasper Fforde’s Dark Reading Matter, the eighth and final Thursday Next novel, has been “coming next” for longer than some readers’ children have been alive. It reaches America on 6th October from Soho Press, and Hodder publishes it on 15th October. The blurb promises Martians who have escaped from their H.G. Wells novel, a BookWorld losing its imaginative energy to Big Tech, a stamp collector with murder in mind and a partially redacted donkey, which is about as Fforde as a sentence can get. Kirkus has already given it a starred review. Swindon, we are told, is braced. The same Tuesday brings V.E. Schwab’s Victorious, which wraps up her Villains series, so next week is shaping up as a festival of finales. If your shelves can take more, Gizmodo’s October list runs to 125 titles.
Comics: Murderbot Gets Drawn, Against Its Will
Cosmic Lighthouse, the British outfit run by Paul Cornell and Lee Harris that specialises in turning genre prose into comics, is adapting Martha Wells’ All Systems Red as a graphic novel. Erica Schultz writes the script, Gary Erskine, whose CV includes Dan Dare, draws it, Yel Zamor colours it and Simon Bowland letters it. The Kickstarter opens on Thursday 15th October, with a general retail release pencilled in for 2028. Murderbot, a construct that regards being looked at as a form of mild assault, will presumably hate every single panel.
On Screen: Old Voices, New Faces And A Lot Of Tiny Crows
Heroes of the Highway. HBO spent the weekend raiding the games’ cast list again for season three of The Last of Us, due in 2027. John Goodman and Ian Alexander play Joey and Paco, a pair of survivors who call themselves the Heroes of the Highway, and Laura Bailey joins as Elizabeth, one of the leaders of the Seraphites. Bailey voiced Abby in The Last of Us Part II and Alexander voiced Lev, so the show keeps up its slightly eerie habit of letting the game’s actors return wearing different bodies. For a story about a fungus that does much the same thing, it feels oddly appropriate.
Laika goes long. Wildwood, Laika’s first stop-motion feature since Missing Link in 2019, is due to have its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on 11th October before opening in American cinemas on 23rd October. Travis Knight directs, Chris Butler adapted Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis’s novel, and the voice cast includes Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett and Richard E. Grant. At 132 minutes it is reportedly the longest stop-motion film ever made, which works out at a heroic number of tiny adjustments to a heroic number of tiny crows.
The rest of the October screen slate is filling up fast. Paramount+ starts the new animated series Avatar: Seven Havens on 9th October, the next generation of benders discovering that the world has not become any less complicated. Marvel’s VisionQuest, whose official trailer we picked over on Thursday, follows on Disney+ on 14th October. Then on 20th October Netflix returns to Night City with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, which has an entirely new cast of characters, presumably because the first lot are in no fit state to come back.
Games And Tabletop: Geralt Gets A Wash And Ravenloft Gets An IPO
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered went live on Tuesday as a free upgrade for anyone who already owns the game, on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S and Switch 2. As we noted after Gamescom, it reworks combat and skills as well as the visuals, and the Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine expansions are now free to base-game owners. Eleven years on, Geralt is still muttering about the weather in Velen, but at least he does it in a higher resolution. A third expansion, Songs of the Past, follows in 2027.
Over at Naughty Dog, the studio says it will fully reveal its science fiction game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet in 2027 and won’t be showing any more of it this year, while confirming it has two projects on the go that will widen the canon of The Last of Us. And Suda51’s Grasshopper Manufacture, the cult studio behind Killer7 and No More Heroes, is independent again after splitting from NetEase, which bought it in 2021. Whatever the studio makes next, we doubt it will be any less peculiar.
On the tabletop, Wizards of the Coast has started teasing something called Project Lamordia, which takes Ravenloft’s resident Frankenstein domain and drops it into the present day as a techno-thriller. The teaser material describes Mordenheim Kinetics, a private tech campus swallowed by the Mists and run by darklord Viktra Mordenheim, a prodigy obsessed with abolishing death. Whether it’s a book, a digital release or something else entirely, Wizards will reveal on 13th October. Ravenloft has gone Silicon Valley, and the monster probably has share options.
Anime And Manga: Naruto Returns, Maomao Reopens The Dispensary
Viz Media announced on Monday that Naruto is getting a new limited TV anime series, then promptly asked everyone to be patient. Details will be revealed at a “NARUTO: What’s Next?” stage at New York Comic Con on Saturday 10th October, which happens to be Naruto’s birthday, with Junko Takeuchi and Noriaki Sugiyama (Naruto and Sasuke in the Japanese version) on stage and a worldwide livestream. Long-memoried fans will recall four anniversary episodes announced in 2023 and shelved a week before broadcast. Nobody has said whether this is that project brought back from the dead, but in a franchise that has a reanimation jutsu, it would hardly be the strangest return.
The autumn anime season opened today with the third season of The Apothecary Diaries, Maomao’s palace poisonings streaming weekly on Crunchyroll. The season is split in two, with the second half due in April 2027, and an original film, The Deceased Empress’ Treasure, opens in Japan on 11th December. Tomorrow, Konami’s Suikoden: The Anime debuts on Japanese television with a sixty-minute opener. It adapts Suikoden II, the 1998 PlayStation RPG that still turns up on best-ever lists, and runs for two cours to March 2027. We have yet to see an international streamer confirmed, so recruiting all 108 Stars of Destiny from Britain may take a little patience.
Obituaries
We checked, respectfully, and as of Friday morning we haven’t found any newly reported losses in the SF, fantasy or horror world this week. That makes three quiet weeks running, a run we would happily see extended.
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