Books
fromThe New Yorker
3 days agoThe Sci-Fi Novelist Who Disappeared for Decades
Cameron Reed's science fiction explores cognitive estrangement, revealing alien worlds that reflect and challenge our own societal norms and moral dilemmas.
This is a shame, because his best work belongs with the greats of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi. Summer of Night is a tighter, more satisfying version of Stephen King's It. Carrion Comfort is a brick-sized epic about psychic vampires that reads as breezily as a trade paperback. The Terror, which inspired the well-regarded show, is for its first three-quarters a brilliant and non-supernatural speculative take on a real doomed Arctic expedition.
The last five years have seen a tremendous resurgence of role-playing games, from the turn-based masterpieces of Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, to the action-packed Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. And staggeringly, it looks like that trend is set to continue well into 2026. While there's undoubtedly a handful of games we don't know about, even what we do have looks like it's going to make this another banner year for RPGs.
We spend one-third of our lives asleep. This biological fact is something that, with time and technology, is less and less taken for granted. In many science fiction stories, the future of sleep is cozy and idyllic - an elevated state living within dream world. In others, sleep is more of an evolutionary shackle that gets in the way of productivity. The latter focuses on questions that haunt anyone who feels there are not enough hours in the day. What if we didn't have to sleep?
What is available is the daydream-a limitless realm of freedom. In this other world, one might be famous or rich, finally catch the attention of their beloved, or simply sit on a beach as a waiter brings them cocktails. They might fly or speak to animals, heroically save a child, tell off their boss with no consequences, win the Super Bowl at the whistle, or travel to another continent, planet, or time period. No one can stop them; no one can even object.
Subsequently, runaway children turned the valley into a fortress, surviving on food they could catch or grow, with occasional forays into the towns below. Riley has heard the rumours, but it is only when she sees a green-clad boy or is it a girl? hovering outside her bedroom window offering directions on how to find Nowhere that she realises this might be her chance to escape and save her little brother from their sadistic guardian.
Maul is one of the most fascinating characters in the Star Wars universe. For the fans who only watch the movies, he's the Zabrak who was bisected in The Phantom Menace and then popped up in the post-credits scene of Solo. But for those who watched The Clone Wars and Rebels, he's the subject of one of the most enduring stories in Star Wars canon, stretching from the beginning of the prequel trilogy to the end of Rebels.
In 2017, New Zealand artist Rachel Smythe started publishing the webcomic Lore Olympus on her Tumblr page. It was a lush, watercolor reimagining of the story of Hades and Persephone in a world where Hades is a sensitive but guarded romantic hero dressed in business suits, and Persephone is a bright-pink young woman whose hair reveals her emotions. The bright colors of Lore Olympus will be reflected in an animated series.
Jenny G. Zhang: After a series premiere that seemed to be received pretty well by viewers-although the diarrhea smash cut was certainly divisive-we open the second episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms with another jump scare: big dong alert, courtesy of Ser Arlan of Pennytree, who is truly packing the heat. (While he is probably not a Best or a Worst Person in Westeros this week, he certainly deserves some kind of title.)