Future Stories

The night is darkest before the dawn, unless you happen to be a Vampire equipped with daylight-blocking armor. Screenshot: Netflix Castlevania ’s final season , even if it takes a little while to get going, delivers some of the best action the series ever got to take a crack of the Belmont family whip at. But while we might be drawn to the high stakes spectacle of the series’ finale for gory glitz and glamour, early on in the season we’re treated to a heart-stopping sequence ripped right out of Kentaro Miura’s playbook. Following on from season 3's exploration of the Council of Styria—a quartet of female vampires who were former lieutenants of Dracula , now planning to form their own Empire by invading human territory—early on in the season we get to catch up with one of those vampiric leaders, Striga (voiced by Ivana Milicevic), leading her forces on an expansionist campaign. When the humans decide to be clever and attack the Styrian camps at dawn, burning the vampire forces...

A member of the Brood. Image: Leinil Francis Yu, Sunny Gho/Marvel People’s longstanding fear of swarming insects like cicadas is enshrined in our pop culture. For years we’ve reimagined bugs as everything from larger-than-life creatures poised to take over the planet to hyper-intelligent mimics hellbent on supplanting humanity . Now, with millions of the United States’ Brood X cicadas digging their way out of the ground, it’s a perfect time to revisit the X-Men’s most recent encounter with the Brood. The real-life screaming bugs are once again on people’s minds the way they become every 17 years when their maturation cycle reminds people of their constant existence beneath the ground. That idea of hordes of bugs lying in wait to descend upon an unsuspecting population’s something that made Marvel Comics’ latest Brood (galaxy-conquering parasitic aliens) story especially memorable in X-Men #8 and #9 from writer Jonathan Hickman, and artists Mahmud Asrar, Leinil Francis Yu, and S...

Inset of Clyde Caldwell’s cover for D&D creator Gary Gygax’s first Greyhawk novel, Saga of Old City. Image: Clyde Caldwell/Wizards of the Coast First, Gary Gygax created Dungeons & Dragons . Then, he created the fantasy world of Oerth and its greatest city, Greyhawk . Then, he set his mind to writing a D&D novel set in Greyhawk—the tale of Gord, a young street urchin who rises from poverty and imprisonment to become one of the greatest thieves on the planet. And in writing Greyhawk: Saga of Old City , Gary Gygax created something quite dreadful. First things first: We need to separate Gygax the role-playing game pioneer and Gygax the novelist. One can be the creator of the most popular RPG ever and the author of a very bad book; the two are not mutually exclusive. And it’s definitely worth noting that 1985's Saga of Old City is Gygax’s first-ever novel, (although of course, he wrote a million D&D adventure modules before creating Gord the Rogue) but that do...

The Doctor is in, and so very good. Image: Big Finish Despite the fact that his first audio drama in the role has been out for a few weeks now , it still feels kind of shocking to live in a world where Christopher Eccleston is back in the proverbial leather jacket as Doctor Who ’s Ninth Doctor . But we indeed are, and it’s mostly fascinating : if only because it’s perhaps not quite the Ninth Doctor you could expect. The Ninth Doctor Adventures: Ravagers is not so much three stories to mark Eccleston’s return to the world of Doctor Who since his dramatic exit from the series in 2005 as it is one wider plot told across three parts. They don’t all quite work so well—for all the energy it wants to hit the ground running with, hitting us en media res as Eccleston’s Doctor tries to stop a sinister gaming corporation with his new companion Nova (Camilla Beeput), opening tale Sphere of Freedom feels oddly slow. The second and third stories, Cataclysm and Food Fight , capture more o...

A crop of the cover of Bacchnal by Veronica G. Henry. Image: 47North June is upon us, which means it’s time to fill your summer reading list with all the brand-new sci-fi and fantasy books you can stuff into a beach bag. Good thing we’ve got 54 titles to choose from, with time travelers , reluctant heroes, people who can talk to the dead , and carnival stories among the highlights. Image: DAW Adrift by W. Michael Gear The fifth entry in the Donovan series finds the colonists from the Maritime Unit about to embark on their first exploration of Donovan’s offshore reef. It’s a dazzling adventure... until the children among the group begin to exhibit signs of being possessed by a violent alien intelligence. (June 1) Image: Tor Books Alien Day by Rick Wilbur Set on both a near-future Earth and an alien planet, this sci-fi adventure follows unlikely heroes as they get pulled into “murderous sibling rivalries and old-school mercantile colonialism,” as well as puzzles about...