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In the upcoming film Snow White and the Huntsman, that classic fairy tale receives a modern rejiggering complete with a guest appearance by Thor and (hopefully) a golem made out of poison apples. More »
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Science fiction and fantasy stories transport us to a whole other world. And immersing us in a fantastical place needs more than just great world-building — it needs a sense of mood. The best speculative fiction authors are experts at conjuring the mood of a particular time or place. More »
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The last important casting decision in the Hunger Games franchise rests with Finnick Odair, the flirty red head who kills with a trident and wears nothing but a fisherman's net when he's representing District 4 in the parade for the 3rd Quarter Quell Hunger Games. He's bold, charming, and super-sexy. So who does Hollywood want to play him? The same people they want to play everything, apparently.

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It's not even 10:30 in the morning, and I'm already holding an archaic deadly weapon in my hands. I'm in a nondescript warehouse in Seattle, to which I've traveled so that award-winning science fiction novelists can demonstrate how they could cut me in half if they felt like it. Somebody has just pulled a sword out of its scabbard and is passing it around. I'm holding its hilt in both hands, just to make absolutely sure it doesn't slice off something it's not supposed to. It's lighter than I always figured a sword would be. More »
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Welcome to the monthly meeting of the io9 Book Club. In May, we read Nick Harkaway's novel Angelmaker. Jump into comments to get started talking about it! More »
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The new issue of New Scientist's Arc Magazine is out, subtitled "Post Human Conditions." And it includes brand new science fiction by Jeff VanderMeer and Nick Harkaway. VanderMeer's story is called "Komodo" and it starts with a dying woman talking to a young child. More »
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Back when queer activist Kate Bornstein was a boy named Al, she was a leading member of the Church of Scientology. She served aboard L. Ron Hubbard's flagship, and even worked directly with Hubbard on a campaign to control Scientology members more completely. Bornstein's new memoir A Queer and Pleasent Danger explains why she found Scientology so appealing, and what she brought to it. Here's an exclusive excerpt about Bornstein's work with Hubbard. More »
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Holy cow, the first ever footage from Stephenie Meyer's latest book adaptation The Host is drowning in angsty teen romance. Watch as an collection of attractive teens run through tunnels while dealing with their alien possessed friend played by Saoirse Ronan (who plays "Wanda" the alien stuck inside the teen Melanie's body). Forget the alien vs. human war raging on the surface of the planet — how's Melanie's boyfriend going to react now that his girlfriend has an alien inside of her? More »
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If you possess any sort of fluency in the German language, there's a good chance you've encountered children's author Heinrich Hoffman's 1845 bedtime classic Struwwelpeter. In this collection of morality tales, children are — with gleeful abandon — immolated, humiliated, and mutilated by men with giant scissors. Pleasant dreams, everyone! More »
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Last night's Game of Thrones was the only episode thus far to be almost completely self-contained and free of "meanwhiles." But that didn't mean it was simple. If anything, this episode put several of the show's main characters under a microscope and let us see how they performed in an insane situation. More »
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Over at science e-book review Download the Universe, Carl Zimmer says he's found the greatest science e-book yet created — and he just may be right. The book is Leonardo da Vinci Anatomy, and it's an iPad app that explores a collection of Leonardo's anatomy drawings (many of which were hidden from the public until the twentieth century) and explains the magnitude of the artist's contribution to science. Though Leonardo sometimes misinterpreted what he discovered, he nevertheless produced some of the most accurate anatomical studies of human musculature and organs ever seen before in the West. More »
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In the early 1990s, the Voyager Company looked into creating "Expanded Books," digital books that would offer an enhanced onscreen reading experience. Appropriately, one of the titles they converted into an expanded books was a series that revolves around a digital book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Douglas Adams recorded a promo on the history of books, hailing e-readers as the future of reading. More »
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Last week, io9 featured a post about the making of my Eddard Stark artwork for George R.R. Martin's 2012 A Song of Ice and Fire Calendar. This week, let's have a look at the process behind my Bran Stark artwork. More »
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What's amazing about the complete scan of 1882's brilliant, batty, bizarre How to Become a Magician over at the Public Domain Review isn't just the fact that it tells you how to make ice in a "red-hot vessel" (you'll need a platinum cup and "sulphuric" acid). Rather, it's that this book has that weird Victorian moralism that doesn't quite fit into the world of illusions. More »
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When we try to imagine the world after an apocalypse, we often end up thinking of a particular era from history. It's not surprising — because the end of the world as we know it often means we'll lose a lot of the fruits of progress. People often talk about bombing someone "back to the Stone Age," for example. More »
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The love of Star Trek and other classic space operas is built on compromise, and a certain amount of irony. So many tropes in these shows are stylized to the point of unreality, and things happen to punch up the story, rather than for any real reason. Especially the deaths of "redshirts," or random extras. More »
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The New Yorker's first ever science fiction issue comes out May 29, and it includes a new story by Jennifer Egan, author of the award-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad. But if you can't wait until Tuesday, you'll be able to read Egan's story on Twitter, starting tonight, via @NYerFiction. A new 140-character extract from the story will appear every minute between 8 and 9 PM, and this will continue for 10 straight nights. (As someone who loves any kind of serialization in fiction, this makes me incredibly giddy — even though a better format would be something more spread out, like Dan Sinker's @MayorEmmanuel tweets.) More »
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First they tried to drag us back to the 1960s with Austin Powers. Now they're doing it again with Men in Black III, whose plot time-jumps to the 1969 Apollo launch. But why go back to this world-changing decade with bad science fiction when you could mainline the good stuff? Here is a book list that will introduce you to some of the best SF published in the 1960s. More »
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Military science fiction author Elizabeth Moon has raised some eyebrows with her argument that everybody should have a unique identifier such as a barcode or chip, which would be "permanently attached" and "imprinted on everybody at birth." More »
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You may know Kim Stanley Robinson from magnificent works like the Mars Trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt. Now he's back with a new novel called 2312, out today, which is about colonizing the solar system 300 years from now. But it's also about a lot of other things, like art and family and the place of science in our lives. As always, Robinson's worldbuilding is incredible — the attention to detail makes this future feel as realistic and complicated as the present. Here we have an excerpt from early in the novel, which introduces just one of the many amazing places you'll visit in its pages. More »
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Stanley Fish is perhaps most famous for chipping away at the idea that texts have real meanings and moral principles matter, with all his deconstruction-y lit-crittery. But now he's causing a new stir, by claiming that spoilers don't matter, and people who complain about spoilers aren't really enjoying texts the right way. More »
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Greg Rucka has rocked the worlds of comics and novels for years, including memorable Batman writing, plus the Queen and Country series and the Atticus Kodiak books. But he might be best known for being a man who writes a lot of "strong female characters." More »
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Now is your time to pledge your fealty to Nightmare Magazine — before it is fully manifested, and able to inhabit your brain with its raw terrors. The horrifying brainchild of John Joseph Adams, who's brought you Lightspeed Magazine and countless anthologies, Nightmare is poised to overwhelm you with the forces of darkness. More »
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Sieges are a major part of warfare in Westeros — they're the reason for those stout castles, and a huge reason why dragons were such game-changers. Last night's episode of Game of Thrones was all about people preparing to be under siege. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5911994&view=rss&microfeed=true If you're in New York tomorrow evening, you should stop by the Soho Gallery for the Digital Arts around 6:30, when Charlie Jane Anders will be reading from her novelette "Six Months, Three Days" with Lost Everything author Brian Francis Slattery. This is part of the long-running and illustrious New York Review of Science Fiction reading series, guest curated by Tor.com and Tor Books' Liz Gorinsky. More details here and here. More »
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Everybody wants to be successful. And if you've ever told anyone that you're writing a novel (or screenplay, short story, comic book, rondel, etc.) you'll find out that most people you know are writing or planning on writing or want to write something too. This means there are a lot of people who want to be successful writers out there. More »
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The Hugo Awards are given to the best science fiction or fantasy works of the previous year. Unfortunately, they've only been awarded since 1953. That's where this column comes in - Jess Nevins will be awarding honorary Hugo Awards to the best novels of the Victorian era... and beyond. More »
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The future may seem to be closer or farther off, depending on the era you're living in. That's one of the possible conclusions you can draw from this chart (embedded below), created by Stephanie Fox for io9, based on research we've done over the past month. We wanted to know whether there are historical trends in how far in the future we set our science fiction — and there definitely are. Here we present our data, as well as some preliminary conclusions about why the future changed so much from decade to decade over the past 130 years. More »
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John Picacio is a super-talented cover artist whose art has graced many of your favorite novels — but many people now know him best as the creator of the 2012 Song of Ice and Fire calendar. Picacio's iconic art has helped to capture the splendor and squalor of Westeros for many readers. Here, in the first of a series of articles, he gives us a step by step tutorial on how he created the calendar's version of Eddard Stark, lord of Winterfell. More »
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In Chuck Wendig's new novel Blackbirds, protagonist Miriam Black is a young woman with a superpower. Only, it's a terrible superpower – when she touches someone, she can see the exact date, time and method of their death, in a vivid and morbid vision. And there's nothing she can do about it. More »
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Lots of science fiction and fantasy novels have twist endings — but a few of them have twists so startling, they actually change your understanding of what's been going on in the whole book. The coolest twist endings turn the whole reality of the story on its head and leave you rethinking everything you've read thus far. More »
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We all know that reading about heroic characters in impossible situations can be thrilling and a great escape from our otherwise drab lives. But new research shows that reading fiction can actually make us better people as well — the more we identify with fictional characters on the page, the more we try to act like them. More »
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There are many themed iterations of a specific famous real estate baron board game, but very few of them involve the horrors of the Lovecraftian mythos descending upon South Jersey and destroying the boardwalk. Behold The Doom That Came To Atlantic City, a satire by artist Lee Moyer, designer Keith Baker, and sculptor Paul Komoda (who worked on The Thing and Cabin in the Woods).

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Next time the government wants new ideas about how to protect our nation's security, it should consult an octopus. That's the unusual proposition of marine biologist Rafe Sagarin, a pioneer in the infant field of "natural security," where experts use models from nature to help them come up with emergency responses to everything from terrorist attacks to pandemics. Sagarin has just published a book about his work called Learning from the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters, and Disease. Any scientific theory that involves the superiority of cephalopods is automatically intriguing, so I called up Sagarin to talk about it. More »
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Almost every article you read about books lately bemoans the fact that nobody reads any more — except that now, in the age of ebooks, you're starting to hear the opposite complaint. A recent New York Times article says people are reading too much, and too quickly. More »
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Over at Tor.com, there's a fantastic story by There and Back Again author Pat Murphy, called "About Fairies." A woman is working on developing a virtual fairyland for a toy company that sells fairy dolls, but she and the other members of the team start developing their own secret fairylands. It turns into a beautiful meditation on fairies, while the main character is also grappling with the impending death of her father. More »
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The io9 Book Club meets every month to discuss a book, and then the author usually joins us for a chat. This month, we're reading Nick Harkaway's novel Angelmaker (we reviewed the book here). We'll meet May 29th to discuss the book. Watch for a post that day announcing the book club, and jump into comments for discussion. There's still time to read the book, too, so get moving! More »
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Peter David isn't just a prolific contributor to comics, novels, television and various other media, he's also a huge player in the field of movie novelizations. (As opposed to media tie-in novels, which he also casts a massive shadow in.) One day, future scholars will study the novelizations of Peter David, with elective courses in "The Embedded Ironies in David's Novelization of Ang Lee's Hulk.") And when scholars pore over David's novelizations for signs of Peter David's distinctive voice seamlessly integrating with whatever Hollywood archetypes he's dealing with this time around, they'll find his novelization of Battleship an important cornerstone. More »
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This is the year of the fairy-tale adaptation, from dueling Snow White movies to Grimm and Once Upon a Time. But quite possibly the most memorable take on fairy-tale archetypes isn't on any screen yet — it's Cinder, the cyborg Cinderella story by new author Marissa Meyer. More »
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Leave it to Queen Cersei to come out with a brilliant bit of life advice. You have no choice but to love your children, but you should love as few other people as possible, if you want to be powerful and free. Last night's Game of Thrones saw several characters flirting with huge betrayals — and the choice between freedom and obligation has never seemed quite so murky. More »
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