Geekdom

The thought occurred to me from the very first scene, even if I wasn’t fully cognizant of it. A woman lies unconscious, sprawled across a conference table in a windowless conference room. As she st…

Readers all over the country seek out my staff picks. They regularly take my recommendations both in-store and online. I can sometimes hand a book to a familiar customer and tell them to buy it wit…

In 1504, a copper globe was built somewhere in Europe. It stood only 4.4 inches in diameter and 13.6 inches in circumference, so it was nothing terribly overwhelming. Tiny ships and monsters adorne…

Disney, Amazon, and Netflix are dominating streaming—but each one has a very different approach to their business.

With the shutters coming down on this particular iteration of the DC Extended Universe, it seems fair to acknowledge that the DCEU had its peaks and troughs.

Pat Naoum’s puzzler, The Master’s Pupil, was made by one developer over seven years and countless brush strokes.

Mattel is officially releasing a doll based on Kate McKinnon’s Weird Barbie character, but the release shows the company doesn’t understand the movie.

Sci-fi has always rebelled against the status quo and held a mirror up to current society, helping us to imagine something better.

(Before the Golden Age. Cover by Tim Lewis. Doubleday, 1974.) This month’s editorial will be rambling and not straightforward. For one, now is the time to reveal my thought process with regar…

So let’s talk about monarchy, or, because I’m not a historian but a storyteller, let’s talk about the stories we tell about monarchy, or, because I want to tell a story, let&#8217…

This controversial article compares paid MovieTok influencers to traditional critics.

On a Friday night in May 1942, the Shadowland Ballroom in St. Joseph, Michigan, hosted a match between Karol Krauser, a Polish wrestler, and Gorilla Grubmyer. Grubmyer was an ugly man with cauliflo…

In my writing, I often begin a scene by drafting two versions of the same event: the event as it would look captured on camera, the “view from nowhere,” in as much as such a thing can ever exist—an…

New science fiction and fantasy novels from S.L. Huang, Temi Oh, Kiersten White and others challenge our understanding of what the good life entails.

For many book writers, AI is a threat to their livelihood and the very idea of creativity

The characters that actors portray in films, television and on stage conform too closely with traditional gender roles—according to new research by academics at Northumbria and Durham universities.

Do you read science fiction? Do you care if people call it sci-fi or SF? Do you like hopepunk? What about cli-fi? Do we need that one or is climate a subset of science, bookishly speaking? Is it st…

During the early twentieth century, the world’s scientists were wonderstruck by the revelation that the spontaneous disintegration of atoms (previously assumed to be indivisible and unchangeable) p…

In the past two years, a thriving subgenre has emerged within SFF romance where plucky young witches living in cozy witch enclaves find love. These books often have winning cartoon covers and cute …

What happens when you take Quechua, the most widely spoken Indigenous language in the Americas, and fuse it with K-pop, the global musical sensation with roots in South Korea?

Discussion of Hugo Award nominees for best novel, other science fiction novels, and analysis of the awards. We read all the nominees before we vote.

This charming animated series – adapted from the popular web comic – has the potential to be wonderful. Sadly, the 25-minute episodes are full of gimmicky characters and repetitive takes

TikTok recommendations are driving sales and launching authors’ careers as the social media app continues to reshape the industry

Despite recent stories about the popularity of BookTok, Neilsen’s survey found more of those aged between 14-25 searched YouTube for new reads

Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t the first successful attempt to marry cinematic aspirations with the traditional branching narratives and simulationist world-building of CRPGs. 2009’s Dragon Age: Origins had a very similar mission statement, offering a spiritual successor to BioWare’s earlier Baldur’s Gate titles long before Larian took us back to the titular city (and its surrounding areas).