…It was January 8, 2064. His last recorded memory was from July 31st, 2063.. Waking up from a deep sleep to find yourself in a restaurant that’s about to be flooded by an apocalyptic storm is disorienting enough. Much worse when you and your coworkers are robots, your employers have left town ahead of their
What do you know, we actually managed to finish watching a season of TV less than six months late! And wow, what a season. Pluribus has had some amazing episodes, with a story that’s been both delightful and heartbreaking and which never went where we were expecting. So it really means something to say that
Two of the remaining three novelettes this year could be considered dystopian (depending on how negatively you view the universe of Martha Wells’s Murderbot series), and the third takes place in America in what could be called the Golden Age, just not for everyone. “Never Eaten Vegetables” – H.H. Pak She glides through the night
How does a house, lacking flesh, feel fury? I went into Freya Marske’s novella completely cold, and I thought maybe this was going to be a humorous retelling of Cinderella. Ha ha, a poor house that has to slave away for its evil stepmother and two evil stepsisters, how droll. Nope. This particular retelling is
The investigation into the murder of Marcus Vanston is moving ahead at breakneck speed. And for this week only, Cecil’s covering the latest developments in a hard-boiled, film noir style that only gets weirder (and more fun) when you add Night Vale’s tendency to mess with metaphors (we WILL be trying to work “the hornet’s
Let’s take a break from hard-hitting topics for a while and bring in some frikkin’ whimsy. The novellas by Amal El-Mohtar and Olvia Waite have wildly different settings: a small town on the border of Fae and the banks of a river where the water is highly-concentrated magic, versus a detective story in space. But
Catherynne Valente, Scott Lynch, and Cameron Reed all have novelettes up for a Hugo Award this year, and the scope of the conflict in each of them is wildly different. The first three novelettes I’m reviewing range from a dystopian story of generational wealth-hoarding running smack into one girl’s complicated relationship with her own body,
“Does anyone hear that sound behind the sky?” (Get used to hearing that question if you listen to this week’s Welcome To Night Vale, because Cecil asks it a lot.) There are some updates on the Marcus Vanston murder investigation, cooking tips involving mud, and the Philosophical Society is gonna get you to break your
I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife… It’s one hell of an opening line in T. Kingfisher’s latest reinterpreted fairytale. The king in this case is still grieving a horrific betrayal, and what he had to do in response to that betrayal, and now