Sommaire pour Issue 159 de SciFi Now

Where does Season Three find June? [Y]ear three is ‘blessed be the fight’ – it’s that radicalisation of June, it’s thinking beyond herself and to others, and she’s up against a mountain of oppression… How can [June] get acceptance with the Martha network? Because she defied them when she didn’t choose freedom with Emily and Nicole… [W]e’ve entered new territory in year three as she wrestles and reckons with Gilead and tries to make a difference, not just survive. What can you tell us about Bradley Whitford’s Commander Lawrence? He’s an architect of Gilead and yet he helped Emily and Nicole get free. So can he be counted on to be supportive or not? What side is he on? Bradley Whitford brings that character to life in a pretty delicious…

KEY: ANTICIPATION // PROGRESS // PROBABILITY IT WILL HAPPEN WILLOW INVOLVED: Ron Howard, Jonathan Kasdan, Disney+ STATUS UPDATE: Howard is keen to revisit Willow with a TV series set to be a sequel to the 1988 film and even claims to be in “serious discussions” regarding development, with Solo: A Star Wars Story writer Jonathan Kasdan set to pen the script. Don’t hold out too much hope though: Warwick Davis and George Lucas tried to get a sequel off the ground back in 2005 to no success. EXPECTED RELEASE: TBA CHILD’S PLAY INVOLVED: Don Mancini, David Kirschner, Nick Antosca, Syfy STATUS UPDATE: Unlike the upcoming Child’s Play reboot, franchise creator Mancini and EP Kirschner are involved with the TV series, and are developing it alongside Channel Zero creator Antosca for…

The Suicide Squad EXPECTED RELEASE August 2020 ROLES THE POLKA-DOT MAN: Male, 40+ years old, any ethnicity. A villain that decides to launch a crime wave based on spots and dots in Gotham City. Any actor found pulling disturbing pranks on set will be asked to leave. RATCATCHER: Female, 20-25 years old, any ethnicity. A female version of DC’s Otis Flannegan, a former member of Gotham City Sanitation Department with an affinity for poisonous gases and highly trained rats. PEACEMAKER: Male, 40-60 years old, any ethnicity. A pacifist diplomat committed to peace but willing to use force in the pursuit of it. Would suit funny WWE star. KING SHARK: He’s a shark. He’s a shark. He’s a f***ing shark. CONTACT jamesgunn@warnerbrosrules. com REPLIES David Dastmalchian, Daniela Melchior, John Cena, Michael…

YOU MIGHT THINK the hardest part of making Black Mirror is coming up with dozens of unique, stand-alone stories, all with an intriguing sci-fi twist. But no, it seems the real challenge is describing those stories without letting slip any spoilers. “We are shit at this,” writer and co-showrunner Charlie Brooker declares, after five minutes of him and fellow showrunner Annabel Jones struggling to sum up the upcoming Season Five episodes. Really, Black Mirror is the sort of show that works best when you go in blind, unsure of where the story will take you. Will it be a soaring romance that restores your faith in humanity, or will it be horrifyingly bleak nightmare-fuel? Or both, somehow? This is Black Mirror, after all – you never really know what direction…

When news of Disney buying Fox broke, comic book movie fans immediately started thrilling to the possibilities. Could there finally be a Fantastic Four movie that made everyone happy? Could Deadpool reallycrossoverinto the MCU? But perhaps the biggest question in all this shared universe discussion was: what did this mean for the X-Men? While the Disney Marvel movies have changed the cultural landscape and broken records on records, the mutants blazed a trail WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK for comic book movies back in 2000, following in the footsteps of Blade and predating Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man by a good two years. What’s more, thanks to some inventive timeline wizardry, the films have maintained a single continuity (well, pretty much). But all things come to an end, especially when there’s the prospect of a bigger, broader…

Being a part of the MCU is pretty magical, but it becomes even more so when you get to leave the studio lot to film on location. Much of Spider-Man: Far From Home’s production took place on a sound stage in London, but the cast and crew still got to head to cultural European cities, including Venice, to make Peter Parker’s class trip as authentic as possible. “Venice is absolutely beautiful, but it’s also pretty crazy,” says Zendaya. “I don’t think you really understand it until you are there. It’s like: ‘Wow, this is literally a city on water!’ You see the pictures, but seeing it in person is such a different experience.” As an internationally famous singer, Zendaya spends a lot of time in the air and on the…

ST BASiL'S CATHEDRAL Now one of the greatest wonders of Moscow’s Red Square, the cathedral was originally known as the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat. Now it’s known as St Basil’s Cathedral. Its famous onion domes are not only eye-catching, but completely hollow, making them an ideal spot to lure a mark and take them down. MAYAKOVSKAYA, MOSCOW METRO A stop on the Zamoskvoretskaya line of the Moscow Metro, Mayakovskaya is often considered to be one of the most beautiful subway stations in the world. Filled with ceiling mosaics, polished floors, Art Deco columns and hidden corridors that perfectly lend themselves to stakeouts, the station is a destination in itself. CATHERiNE PARLACE Built in 1717 by Catherine of Russia, this stunning structure located…

CHUCKY This Good Guy doll is a little chatterbox who is surprisingly resistant to most forms of damage. Perfect for lonely kids looking for a buddy. WARNING: May contain soul of serial killer. May take ‘friend till the end’ too seriously. HUGO Are you a budding ventriloquist? Hugo has personality to spare and he’ll have the crowds eating out of the palm of your hand! WARNING: May eviscerate you emotionally to the point of insanity. ZUNI DOLL Do you wish you had the courage to stand up for yourself? This Zuni doll contains the spirit of ‘He Who Kills’, and it’s a great talking point. WARNING: The doll is called He Who Kills so you see how that could go wrong. SUZIE If you can’t find a friend, make one.…

Walter F Parkes and Laurie MacDonald are more than just a producing super-team: they’re also a real-life married couple, with decades of partnership experience (both on and off the studio lot) under their belts. Happily, their relationship means they have a bit of an extra something that most other producing teams don’t, and are often far more in tune with each other’s ideas. “Let’s just say we finish each other’s sentences!” says MacDonald. “We’re very in tune. We’ve worked together for – how many years now, Walter?” “I don’t even want to think,” laughs Parkes. “It might be 30…” “It might be 30!” MacDonald sighs. Both MacDonald and Parkes had been working in the industry for years – MacDonald in television and Parkes as a film writer and producer –…

CARICE VAN HOUTEN (Melisandre) “I don’t know if [the shadow baby birthing scene] was my favourite scene to shoot, [but] it was an epic scene. It was absurd. I was half naked with a prosthetic belly that was connected to tubes that someone else was blowing into. It deflated whenever I opened my robes. [Liam Cunningham] was standing next to me and we were in a cave in Northern Ireland at night and I had my legs wide and had to give birth to something, I had no idea what it was going to look like.” GWENDOLINE CHRISTIE (Brienne of Tarth) “[I had to] bite off a man’s ear and spit it back into his face.”…

JOE DEMPSIE (Gendry) “Game Of Thrones is the acting equivalent of getting constant food envy… The Hound is my favourite character. If I was to play another part I would love play Theon Greyjoy. Alfie [Allen]’s phenomenal in that role.” CARICE VAN HOUTEN “I just keep coming back to Samwell Tarly. Everything about him… In a world of so much awfulness, he’s the one person that you hold onto a bit.” ISAAC HEMPSTEAD WRIGHT “Jaime Lannister is one of my favourite characters. He’s had a similar arc to Bran in some ways, what with him losing his hand, which was his key feature in the same way that Bran’s legs were his. We’re immediately made to think that he’s awful and then we’re made to question our values and what…

Release Out now Director Robert Hartford-Davis Cast Kenneth Connor, Terry Scott, Frank Thornton Distributor Network Certificate U Format Long held as one of the strangest, daftest examples of the Sixties film industry’s attempts to cash in on popular music acts by throwing them into a movie, Gonks Go Beat is a pretty baffling experience for theuninitiated. Carry On veteran Kenneth Connor plays an alien named Wilco Roger who’s sent to Earth in the future to end the conflict between the feuding citizens of Beatland and Ballad Isle. At some point it becomes a Romeo And Juliet riff as Wilco and the imperious Mr A&R (Frank Thornton) hatch a plan to bring them together. There’s basically nothing by way of a plot, so the running time is filled with long music…

Release 10 June Director Adam Robitel Cast Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Wall, Tyler Labine, Jay Ellis, Nik Dodani Distributor Sony Pictures Releasing Certificate 15 Format • Centring on six strangers fighting for their lives inside an escape room, Adam Robitel’s latest can’t help but bear resemblance to Saw. But unlike that franchise,EscapeRoom sidesteps gore and clichés to create something more engaging… for the most part. Every character – from shy Zoey and struggling store clerk Ben to traumatised war vet Amanda – is refreshingly three-dimensional, making revelations about their pasts, and why they’ve been selected for the experience, much more impactful. The imaginative set pieces are great too, like the upside-down billiards bar with a floor that drops out beneath the players and a hypothermia-inducing, ‘outdoor’ landscape. It’s…

Release Out now Writer Claire North Publisher Orbit Price £8.99 Given that it was originally published online as three separate but connected stories, Claire North’s The Gameshouse works surprisingly seamlessly as a novel. Indeed, once you dive in you’ll find it’s very difficult to put down thanks to the author’s gift for world-building and her construction of a breathless, intricate thriller. While the book is indeed divided into three sections, beginning with Venice at the interchange between 16th and 17th centuries, continuing in Thailand in 1938 and concluding with a globe-spanning tale set in the here and now, the Gameshouse remains at the centre of the story. It’s unremarkable from the outside, and the lower levels are set aside for games of skill like poker and chess, but players who…

Release 13 June Writer Blake Crouch Publisher Macmillan Price £14.99 Time travel is a common enough storytelling device that, by now, we all already know a fair few different ways that it can break reality. There is, of course, the classic Back To The Future model, where changing the past changes the present the traveller came from, risking a grandfather paradox. And then there’s the multiverse model (or Trousers Of Time theory), where changing something causes a separate timeline to be created, which means going back in time to stop a horrible massacre actually only saves one dimension’s worth of victims. If you are already getting a splitting headache thinking about it all then Recursion won’t really be for you, but if temporal paradoxes are your jam, you’re going to…

Release 20 June Writer Jackson Ford Publisher Orbit Price £8.99 Teagan Frost works for a moving firm. Or at least, that’s what China Shop puts on its website. What the company actually does is more secretive. Teagan’s part of a shadowy government agency – and with her special abilities, she’s the shadowiest of the lot. As the title suggests, she can move, well, things, with her mind. Thanks to some genetic meddling on her parents’ part, Teagan has psychokinetic abilities. Having spent her childhood being experimented on, she’s keen to avoid being dissected, so she finds herself under the protection of the mysterious Moira Tanner, along with a crew of other indentured misfits. When a job goes wrong, though, she has 24 hours to prove there’s someone else out there…

With The Winnowing Flame trilogy, Jen Williams combined fantasy and SF to glorious effect, delivering a wonderfully detailed world full of monsters and conflict. Sadly, all good things come to an end and The Poison Song brings the war between the Eborans and the Jure’lia to its conclusion as Vintage, Tormalin and Noon are each confronted with their own tough choices… The Poison Song closes out the trilogy in such a beautiful, bittersweet way; was it an ending you had planned? Thank you! It was a combination of the two, really. There are a couple of key things that happen in The Poison Song that I knew had to happen from the beginning. I was less certain how and where they would take place, but I knew while I was…

Among Watanabe’s recent projects was an excursion into the Blade Runner world which influenced Cowboy Bebop. Black Out 2022, directed by Watanabe and available (legally) on YouTube, is a 15-minute anime showing an event between the live-action films; namely, the catastrophic power blackout which struck Los Angeles soon after the original Blade Runner. While it’s far from Watanabe’s best work, Black Out is interesting for its crossover images, with a fighting artificial woman who could hail from Ghost In The Shell or Alita as easily as Blade Runner. Moreover, if you’ve seen Watanabe’s own thriller anime Terror InResonance,thenBlackOut’sclimactic imagery will look very familiar. A 13-part anime series, Blade Runner – Black Lotus, is now being prepared, also set between the live-action films. Watanabe is attached as creative producer, but whether…

Loosely based on the pulp novel The Space Vampires by Leicester-born author Colin Wilson, Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce was deemed to be a surefire bet for summer box office success in 1985. Backed by a mind-blowing budget that totalled $25 million (considerably more than was afforded to some of the year’s biggest hits, including Back To The Future and Ron Howard’s Cocoon), the endeavour was financed by the much-missed Cannon Films – eager to escape the schlock-merchant label by entering into a loftier field of high-concept genre cinema. Hooper, at the time, also seemed like a safe bet. Whilst Poltergeist (1982) was rumoured to have benefited from the extensive involvement of producer Steven Spielberg, the creator of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) had, in truth, already shown his ability to…

We’ve been waiting a long time for this, but the second season of Netflix’s German SF Dark is coming at the end of June. The first run was up there with the best that the streaming service has ever given us, a fiendishly intricate but profoundly affecting time travel tale that demanded your attention while it put you through the wringer. Following that final scene, we’ve got a lot of questions about where Season Two will take us and we can’t wait to get a few of them answered.…

1 Welcome home The trailer begins with a look at one of the book’s creepiest sequences, as Beverly (Jessica Chastain) returns to her childhood home… 2 January embers As we get glimpses of younger Bev, her grown-up counterpart finds that old love note, reminding her that there were some happy times. 3 Freeze! There’s something wrong with the kindly old lady and the way she freezes in her rictus grin is arguably scarier than anything in the first movie. 4 Family business As her host capers in the background, Bev notices a family photo…The Great Pennywise, The Dancing Clown! 5 Back on the street Here’s our first look at the Losers’ Club today. James McAvoy, Bill Hader, Isiah Mustafa and Jay Ryan join Chastain… but where’s Stan? 6 Losers Assemble…

After years of waiting, the TV series of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens is finally upon us, but the goodness doesn’t stop at the screen. In addition to releasing The Quite Nice And Fairly Accurate Good Omens Script Book, Headline Books has brought us The Nice And Accurate Good Omens TV Companion. Written by Matt Whyman, the coffee table tome is an exhaustive and delightful guide to the story’s journey from script to screen. It’s packed with interviews with the cast and crew, concept designs and character sketches, and, in short, it shows the colossal amount of work involved in bringing one of the best loved works of genre literature to television. If you’re a Good Omens fan, this is an absolute treat. Artwork extracted from The Nice…

The adorable Ashley Too robot at the heart of ‘Rachel, Jack And Ashley Too’ was a blend of a practical remote-controlled robot and digital effects, as visual effects supervisor Neil Riley explains: “We were working on [Ashley Too] from two months before the show started shooting. It was one of the first things we were looking at: what is the doll going to be? It was going to have such an influence on how you shoot, where you shoot, what the sets are going to be, how big the sets are going to be, what sort of surfaces you want the doll to be on. There was an awful lot of character design done just to hone in on what we wanted the little doll to be.” Although around 90%…

Black Mirror’s first two seasons were popular with British viewers on Channel 4, but for its Season Three Netflix launch it was going to have to find a way to grab the attention of an international audience – and ‘San Junipero’ was the episode that grabbed people the most. “‘San Junipero’ has been special because it had such a wonderful and totally unexpected response on such a large scale,” director Owen Harris says, “and it was the first time Black Mirror was on Netflix, so to reach that scale of audience with something that was enjoyed in that way [was great]. When we shot and edited it and finished it, we were all really proud of it but we had no idea whether anyone would like it.” Harris explains that…

No matter how hard he tried Peter Strickland could not find funding for his first feature film, Katalin Varga (2009) (image one), so after an inheritance from his uncle he started making it and paid people out of his own pocket. It’s a poetic rape/revenge thriller set in Transylvania about a woman who is abandoned by her husband after he finds out she has been raped and their son is a product of that horrific crime. Two Romanian producers eventually backed the film so it could be finished and it got its world premiere at Berlin film festival to rave reviews. Working outside of the film industry was not an easy feat but it did give Strickland the freedom to be daring and make his mark as a boldly independent…

Reviewed 3 years ago via Quantum Realm LEIPZIG/HALLE AIRPORT, GERMANY Nothing was open even though we were there in the middle of the day. When I visit an airport I expect to at least be able to grab a Burger King before boarding. Pretty poor service. Thank Scott Lang Reviewed 5 years ago via mobile TAHITI It’s a magical place. I don’t remember any of it. Thank Phil Coulson Reviewed 7 years ago via Bifrost Mail PLANET EARTH What can I say about planet Earth? Hideous. Odious. Dull. In my time, I have travelled far and wide across the universe, and Earth is easily the most ridiculous place I have ever had the misfortune to visit. And I have experienced an extended stay on Sakaar. That is saying something. The…

IT CHAPTER TWO Released: 6 September Director: Andy Muschietti Dauberman took over scripting duties for the first movie after Cary Fukanaga and Chase Palmer stepped away. He has got solo credit for writing the second half, which follows the adult Losers’ Club’s return to Derry to face Pennywise one last time. SWAMP THING Released: 31 May Director: Len Wiseman Together with co-writer Mark Verheiden and producer James Wan, Dauberman is working on DC Universe’s TV reboot of Swamp Thing. From the looks of the amazing first trailer it definitely seems like they are doubling down on the horror. ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK? Released: 2020 Director: DJ Caruso The classic Nickelodeon kids TV show will get a big screen reimagining courtesy of Dauberman and co-writer BenDavid Grabinski. While the…

At the time of writing this, we still don’t know how Game Of Thrones ends. We go to print days before the season draws to a close, so we’re not going to pretend to know who’s going to end up on the Iron Throne – or, indeed, if there’ll be an Iron Throne left to sit on. But what we do know, already, is how unbearably tense and final the whole thing is. In a time where TV shows and movie franchises run and run, it’s slightly unusual to find yourself saying goodbye to a whole universe of characters, without even the closure of a happy ending. The cast, too, felt that sense of finality as they went into Season Eight. For Joe Dempsie, who plays Gendry, it was especially…

“THERE’S NO CURE FOR BEING A C**T.” “I UNDERSTAND THAT IF ANY MORE WORDS COME POURING OUT YOUR C**T MOUTH, I’M GOING TO HAVE TO EAT EVERY F***ING CHICKEN IN THIS ROOM.” “ANY MAN WHO MUST SAY ‘I AM THE KING’ IS NO TRUE KING.” “I’VE KNOWN A GREAT MANY CLEVER MEN. I’VE OUTLIVED THEM ALL. YOU KNOW WHY? I IGNORED THEM.” “I AM THE GOD OF TITS AND WINE.” “THE MAN IS AS USELESS AS NIPPLES ON A BREASTPLATE.” “IT’S A SHAME THE THRONE ISN’T MADE OUT OF COCKS, THEY’D HAVE NEVER GOT HIM OFF IT.”…

LIAM CUNNINGHAM “Tywin is just the best character, he’s fabulous. If you look at the strength of personality of Cersei and Jaime, but as soon as they’re put in front of Tywin they turn into two-year-old children. And I love that about it. Charles Dance has incredible gravitas and weight.” ISAAC HEMPSTEAD WRIGHT “I think it has to be between Ramsay and Joffrey. I think Joffrey’s just really stupid as well, whereas I think Ramsay has genuinely got a number of screws loose.” RICHARD DORMER (Beric Dondarrion) “Ramsay Bolton is the devil himself.”…

Fear The Walking Dead originally centred on the Clark-Manawa family, led by Madison (Kim Dickens) and Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis), along with Travis’ son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie) and Madison’s children Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Clark) and drug addict Nick (Frank Dillane). They were joined by sociopath Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) and the Salazar family, whose patriarch Daniel (Ruben Blades) has a dark past. Only Debnam-Carey, Domingo and Blades remain of the original cast. They’re now joined by former scout Luciana (Danay Garcia), sharpshooter John (Garret Dillahunt), journalist Al (Maggie Grace), nurse Laura (Jenna Elfman) and Morgan Jones (Lennie James). This group have set out to save as many people as they can.…

Release Out now Director Michael Chaves Cast Linda Cardellini, Raymond Cruz, Patricia Velásquez, Roman Christou, Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen Distributor Warner Bros. Pictures Certificate 15 The Curse Of La Llorona is tenuously part of the Conjuring Universe. In it, social worker Anna (Cardellini) is convinced that her children are being stalked by the vengeful spirit of a woman who murdered her children and seeks advice from Father Perez, a priest Annabelle fans might recognise. His inclusion makes no impact story-wise (he turns her away as his run-in with the doll put him off demon-vanquishing), but it’s significant in another way; it creates expectation. Sadly, La Llorona has more in common with the woefully-received film that Perez made his debut in than it does the franchise’s other emotional, innovative outings. So often, it…

Release 3 June Director Jake Castorena Cast Troy Baker, Eric Bauza, Darren Griss, Kyle Mooney, Rachel Bloom Distributor Warner Bros Certificate 12 Format • How do you make a crossover between Gotham’s Dark Knight and the pizza loving turtle bros work? By embracing both the gloriously silly possibilities, that’s how. Somehow, Batman Vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles manages to honour both its core mythologies and results in a fun hour and a half, as the Turtles pitch up in Gotham to foil Shredder, who’s teamed up with Ra’s al Ghul to do something terrible with the ooze. Along the way, Batman teaches the Turtles about responsibility and in turn gets some lessons about family and appreciating what he has. The fight scenes are fantastically realised (the featurette on how the…

Release 22 July Director Matthew Butler-Hart Cast Alex Hassell, Graham Butler, Fisayo Akinade, Conleth Hill, Tori Butler Hart Distributor Lionsgate Certificate 15 Format Following a limited theatrical release, Matthew Butler Hart’s 1846-set chiller The Isle deserves to find an audience on DVD. Co-written by (and co-produced and starring) Tori Butler Hart, the film begins with merchant sailors Gosling (Alex Hassell), Bickley (Graham Butler) and Ferris (Fisayo Akinade) lost at sea. Luckily for them, just when all seems lost they spy land and wash up on an island off the west coast of Scotland. The locals seem friendly and agree to put the trio up while they recover, but there’s something weird going on. Any polite enquiries about boats to the mainland are politely deflected, almost everyone seems to have fled…

Release Out now Showrunner Christopher Keyser Cast Kathryn Newton, Gideon Aldon, Sean Berdy, Natasha Liu Bordizzo, Olivia DeJonge, Alex Fitzalan, Jack Mulhern, Rachel Keller Distributor Netflix Certificate 15 Format A sci-fi mystery gets juicy and tragic in Netflix’s latest teen drama series. Following a school trip gone wrong, a group of teenagers return to their upper middle-class New England town of West Ham to find it completely deserted and with no way out. Over the next few days, they begin to suspect that they’re not back home at all, but rather in an exact replica of their town elsewhere. With no adults or children around, they are forced to rebuild their society, which they rename New Ham, all the while trying to find out what happened and how to escape…

Release Out now Writer Various Cast Orson Welles, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Donald Pleasence, Susannah York, Ian Holm, Eli Wallach, Jane Seymour Distributor Network Certificate 12 Format This long-unavailable anthology show finally comes to DVD courtesy of Network and fans of anthology chillers should not hesitate to snap this up. First broadcast in 1973, the Anglia TV series featured Orson Welles as host, a wonderful John Barry theme and an incredible cast. This first volume has adaptations of stories by Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and more, and range from supernatural horror to grisly revenge tales with very few misses. There’s not much by way of a unifying theme, except that Welles offers an introduction and epilogue to each, full of vague wisdoms and amiably sinister warnings from…

The Four Ways To Forgiveness “A lovely, well writen book by Ursula Le Guin. Is science fiction and much more. #BookClub” @CiFiccionarios The City In The Middle Of The Night “Beautiful writing, compelling characters, fascinating world building, exciting plot. It’s got it all!” @TonyRenner The Clockmaker “Drew Neary and Ceri Williams. A gothic thriller that kept me hooked. The clockmaker and his scary creations. #BookClub” @PokemonLass Green Valley “A few years ago this book would have been outrageous and unbelievable. It’s now just scarily realistic. #BookClub” @STBwrites IQ84 “Because it was utterly bonkers. #BookClub” @LapTopRob01…

“I’m reading It by Stephen King. It’s been great so far but it’s starting to get, uh. A little weird. #BookClub” @givemethepie “Pandora’s Star #amreading #SFF by Peter F. Hamilton. 1st book of The Commonwealth Saga. Published in 2004. Haven’t gotten very far into it, but am loving it. #BookClub” @writerjmj “I’m reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick, and I’m hoping to finish a few of his other novels real soon as well. #BookClub” @StellarStylus “Priest Of Lies by Peter McLean - just as much fun as I was expecting. Peaky Blinders with swords. #BookClub” @andyangel44 “Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel. I am not fan of the 1st person narrative, but the structure and story of this book have got me. #BookClub” @Shane_Rees “Blood Music…

Release Out now Writer Guy Gavriel Kay Publisher Hodder & Stoughton Price £19.99 The latest from author Guy Gavriel Kay, A Brightness Long Ago is based on early Renaissance Italy and the various familial machinations and rivalries that shaped it. Danio Cerra is a lower-class boy whose smarts allowed him to attend a renowned school. His intelligence is the greatest thing in his possession, but it gets him tangled up in an ongoing feud between two mercenary commanders as well as with a noblewoman’s daughter trying desperately to escape her lot. Danio Cerra’s older self takes on the narration here and that gives the story a melancholic and nostalgic air from the beginning. Cerra is always quick to throw in a foreboding sentence, but plays coy with the details until…

GIVEN THE FACT that Gene Wolfe’s four-volume epic The Book Of The New Sun is revered by everyone from George RR Martin and Neil Gaiman to the late Ursula K Le Guin, the rich and complex tale still doesn’t have the broader popularity of those authors. It can seem like a fairly daunting prospect in its size (although each of the volumes is actually fairly short) and Wolfe’s fascinating use of language has often drawn comparisons to Joyce’s Ulysses. However, if you haven’t yet treated yourself to Severian’s journey, the time has come. Set a million years in the future, it follows the young torturer as he breaks the rules when he falls for one of his victims and grants her a quick death. Rather than being executed himself, he’s…

Wendee Lee, who voiced Faye Valentine in the English-language version of the anime, tells us what the character meant to her. “I was inspired by the artwork first and foremost, the well-designed characters and the relationships between them. I listened to the Japanese Faye, and gave my own spin to this wonderfully good and bad girl. “Faye is a survivor. She has experienced so much and has so much to risk, if people really know how vulnerable she truly is. Her relationship with the Bebop crew is like a brother/sister relationship in many ways, but there’s an always an agenda. She’s always prepared to take advantage of whatever comes her way. Talking about Faye brings back little favourite moments. Some are simple things like a costume change: the gorgeous opera…

Some critics concluded that the late, great Tobe Hooper was a one-and-done success, unable to recapture the success and uniquely horrifying style of his original art-horror hit The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). SciFiNow argues otherwise, with this guide to five of his more underrated shock-jaunts… 1 DEATH TRAP (1976) Tobe was sacked from his sophomore shocker (another backwoods slasher, also known as Eaten Alive), but the end result still captures enough of his focus on dirt, slime and grime (Hooper was rumoured to have mysophobia) to be a credible follow-up to this initial horror hit. Look for an early appearance from Robert Englund too. 2 SALEM’S LOT (1979) Stephen King would later praise this taught and terrifying adaptation of his hit novel and it is easy to…

YELLOW ZOMBIE RUNS AMOK Figuring that if they destroy the brain of a re-animated corpse ‘like they did in that movie’ then their problem will be solved, Burt, Frank and Freddy decide to release an angry-sounding zombie from a meat locker and bash its head in. Things go hilariously, anarchically wrong as a pickaxe to the skull and decapitation by bone saw doesn’t stop it from running amok. In this movie, killing a zombie requires reducing it to nothing more than ashes. TRASH’S CEMETERY STRIPTEASE It’s pretty hard to think of a more eye-catching way to earn yourself the moniker of ‘scream queen’ than by your character fantasising about being eaten alive and then performing a striptease on top of a tombstone. Linnea Quigley’s Trash cemented the actress’ place in…

GETTING TIRED 1. In which year was the first Nightmare On Elm Street released? 2. Which two Nightmare On Elm Street instalments were the only films directed by Wes Craven? 3. Who wrote the screenplay for A Nightmare On Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge? 4. Which film in the franchise is the only one that was helmed by a female director? 5. What is the subtitle of A Nightmare On Elm Street 4? NODDING OFF 6. On which hand does villain Freddy Krueger wear his famous metal-clawed glove? 7. What does Nancy use to stay awake and avoid being murdered in the first film? 8. What is the name of the Walshes’ teenage son in A Nightmare On Elm Street 2? 9. Which Academy Award-winning actress made her debut as…

16-20 NANCY THOMPSON You’re scream queen royalty. You have seen some shit but you don’t let it define you. Your methods may be unconventional but you know how to look out for yourself (someone’s got to). 11-15 FREDDY KRUEGER Fuelled by violence and horrifying finger-knives, you are someone people don’t like to mess with not matter how hard you mess with them first. Your schemes are occasionally overthrown but you’re quick to bounce back. 6-10 NEIL GORDON Just because you mean well doesn’t mean you do well. Having good intentions isn’t enough to save the day. We’d say leave the difficult stuff to the experts, but you have no problem doing that already. 0-5 MARGE THOMPSON For the mother of a hero you sure are useless. You might have been…

DESPITE THERE BEING fleeting moments of optimism peppered throughout The Handmaid’s Tale since it began in 2017, it’s a concept that’s not often associated with the overwhelmingly bleak, dystopian drama. But according to O-T Fagbenle, that might not be the case once the upcoming third season rolls around. “Hope is a big aspect going forward,” claims the British actor, who plays Luke Bankole, as he hints at what’s to come this season. “There’s a real sense of people being called to action. Things are seriously starting to change.” While it may sound a little different from what fans have grown used to seeing on the show, the trailer – which promises ‘the birth of a revolution’ – proves he’s certainly not making empty promises. After the Season Two finale saw…

Chances are that you don’t need us to tell you about the Haynes Star Wars books. They’re so vital that Alden Ehrenreich carried the Millennium Falcon Owner’s Workshop Manual around with him on the set of Solo: A Star Wars Story, and they’ve just added another title. The TIE Fighter Owner’s Workshop Manual is the definitive technical guide to the lethal spacecraft, detailing its journey from inception through its various evolutions up to its most recent incarnation in the First Order fleet. It’s written by Ryder Windham, veteran of over 70 Star Wars books, and is fully authorised and approved by LucasFilm. As well as photographs, the book is packed with specially commissioned cutaway, schematic and computer-generated artwork, not to mention a comprehensive size comparison chart for Imperial and First…

BEST FILM CHILD’S PLAY When it comes to horror posters, it’s usually a good shout to either go completely over-the-top or keep it simple. This new entry for Lars Klevberg’s upcoming reboot of Child’s Play does a bit of both. The design and layout is minimalist, but the image itself, which depicts Chucky’s massacre of the rootinest tootiness cowboy around, Toy Story’s Woody, is just on the right side of pushing it too far. We wonder how Andy is taking it… RUNNER UP NIGHTMARE CINEMA This entry for Nightmare Cinema is a good example of horror posters going over-the-top and having it pay off. BEST OF TV LUCIFER God bless Netflix for keeping the devil in LA and on TV. This suave and sophisticated poster for the new season is…

Some Black Mirror episodes leave you elated, and feeling like humanity, for all our faults, will come good in the end. Others leave you in a pit of despair, in the firm belief that the universe would be a better place if we were all wiped out. Here’s where we stand on some of the key episodes… I FEEL GREAT! HANG THE DJ It was a bit rough for a while there in the middle, but this episode turned into Black Mirror’s most cheerful instalment to date. SAN JUNIPERO Sure, it’s about choosing between a definite digital afterlife versus faith in an uncertain theological afterlife, but it’s also an uplifting love story. NOSEDIVE Come on now, who hasn’t wanted to say a big FUCK YOU to the ridiculous oneupmanship of…

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Welcome to Africa’s hottest technology hub, as voted in TripAdvisor’s Travellers’ Choice award 2018! Located in sub-Saharan Africa between South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, Wakanda is known to the rest of the world for being the homeland of famed hero Black Panther, but it is so much more than that. The country’s beautiful and mystical plains are almost as wondrous as the technologically advanced cities that make Wakanda what it is. It has to be experienced to be believed, and the gloriously warm climate can be enjoyed at any time of year. Visit Wakanda today! KING T CHALLA, PROTECTOR OF THE NATION…

BEST SCENE KRISTOFER HIVJU (Tormund Giantsbane) “I think the Battle Of The Bastards was one of the great ones because we shot it chronologically. We shot a minute a day and then we could follow the whole process of the battle, we could mentally follow it the whole time and it was hundreds of extras and hundreds of horses and it was just a crazy, crazy shoot. All of those sequences have a feeling like we did something that was never done on TV before.” LIAM CUNNINGHAM (Davos Seaworth) “I have a great fondness for the first day that [Stephen Dillane, Carice van Houten and I] worked together, when we were on the freezing cold, middle-of-the-night, windy, pain-in-the-arse beach and the three of us were starting our first scene, our…

ISAAC HEMPSTEAD WRIGHT (Bran Stark) “I think a particularly cool one was when Bran was in the vision and he got to walk through the army of the dead and got grabbed by the Night King, because that was genuinely real. I was there in this massive quarry with all this snow, with a hundred, two hundred extras there, in full zombie gear, and I got to walk through them, and there was the Night King with his guards on their horses next to him. Not many characters get to get touched by the Night King and live to tell the tale, so that was quite a neat way of getting to do that.” JEROME FLYNN (Bronn) “For me personally, the loot train scene, because I’d been gagging to get…

Over the last few years, there’s been an exciting new wave of independent British films that use geography and rural locations to exact a political point. In 2017 Hope Dickson Leach’s family drama The Levelling and William Oldroyd’s period drama Lady Macbeth made a huge impact on the festival circuit. They were followed by Michael Pearce’s Jersey-set thriller Beast and Clio Barnard’s Brexit parable Dark River in 2018. First-time feature director William McGregor’s Gwen follows in their footsteps. But as a brutal, anti-capitalist folk horror it also has a lot in common with Babak Anvari’s Under The Shadow or Robert Eggers’ The Witch as it mines social issues for chills. With Extinction Rebellion knocking down the government’s door with nonviolent protest and calling out capitalism’s catastrophic effect on climate change,…

Release Out now Director Park Hoon-jung Cast Kim Da-mi, Jo Min-soo, Park Hee-soon, Choi Jung-woo Distributor Signature Entertainment Certificate 18 Format VOD The story goes that when a foundling child appeared on their farm, warm-hearted Jonathan and Martha Kent adopted him as their own and raised him with their homespun rural values before sending him out into the world. This legend casts its shadow over The Witch (Manyeo), except that the eight-year-old girl who turns up, injured and amnesiac, at the Koos’ farm has not come from a dying planet, but rather from a shadowy research facility whose walls she left plastered with the soldiers’ gore. So while, ten years later, Koo Ja-yoon (Kim Da-mi) may be a mild-mannered high-school senior, we know that she carries within her a latent…

Release 10 June Director Dean DeBlois Cast Jay Baruchel, America Ferrara, F Murray Abraham, Craig Ferguson Distributor Universal Pictures UK Certificate PG Format • It’s been nine years since the first How To Train Your Dragon soared into our hearts and there’s something wonderful about director Dean DeBlois’ determination to give the fans a proper ending. For all the high-flying aerial battles, it’s the relationships that give these films their soul and you can see the love and effort that’s been put into evolving these characters. The problem with The Hidden World is that the plot surrounding them never matches the emotional complexity of their journeys, and that everyone kind of gets pushed to the side to make room for Hiccup and Toothless. As a consequence, with the exception of…

Release Out now Director Chris von Hoffmann Cast Sam Strike, Virginia Gardner, Julian McMahon, Robin Tunney, Lance Reddick Distributor Altitude Film Entertainment Certificate 15 Format There’s a promising idea floating around in Chris von Hoffman’s stylised and unpleasant feature debut, as a trio of thieves suddenly realise the event they’re pretending to be the caterers for is actually a party for serial killers who have put their knives away and gone cold turkey. The cast is certainly adept at chewing the scenery, with a moustachioed Julian McMahon and a tightly wound Lance Reddick having a lot of fun. However, the problem is that very little of that fun translates. Von Hoffman doesn’t seem particularly interested in his three heroes and the killers’ posturing, sneering and screeching quickly becomes self-indulgent and…

Release Out now Showrunners Charlie Brooker, Annabel Jones Cast Anthony Mackie, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Miley Cyrus, Andrew Scott Distributor Netflix Certificate 15 TBC Format The arrival of all-new Black Mirror episodesis always cause for celebration, and anyone worried that, five seasons in, the show might be running out of ideas can relax – Charlie Brooker’s brain is as fascinatingly messed-up as always. These episodes are lighter than you might expect from Black Mirror. There’s no pitch-black ‘Crocodile’ in amongst this batch, and one of them is positively a romp, but that’s not to say that the themes aren’t heavy. ‘Striking Vipers’ is a raw exploration of what it takes to maintain a relationship when tech gets in the way, while ‘Smithereens’ turns a critical eye to the power social media…

Release Out now Showrunner Jesse Alexander Cast Ricky Whittle, Ian McShane, Pablo Schreiber, Emily Browning, Orlando Jones Distributor Amazon Prime Certificate 18 Format American Gods had a hell of an image problem to face ahead of its second season debut, with showrunner changes, budgetary issues and reports of chaos on the set. Still, with source material and a cast this good, how wrong could things really go? As it turns out, there’s a lot working against the second season, including aimlessness and lack of drive. There’s endless talk about the war to come as characters venture off on side quests that go nowhere and the show leans heavily on its cast and their ability to reel off monologues, many of which lack the impact of their equivalents in Season One.…

Release Out now Writer Louis Greenberg Publisher Titan Books Price £7.99 Imagine what would happen if technology companies finally went too far and we all decided that we would be better off going back to the old way of doing things without constant surveillance and intrusion. In Louis Greenberg’s latest, the titular locale is the only place where you’ll find anyone plugged in: Green Valley is entirely independent with its walled-off citizens living in a VR world. So when investigator Lucie Sterling’s niece looks to be the latest kid to go missing from there, she’s forced to cross over and find out what’s really going on in the high-tech paradise. Well known to genre readers as one half of SL Grey (along with Sarah Lotz), Greenberg covers a lot of…

Release Out now Writer Adam Christopher Publisher Century Price £20 After Gwenda Bond’s Suspicious Minds, the second Stranger Things novel hews closer to the show as Jim Hopper tells Eleven about his days as a homicide detective in New York City. Back in the summer of 1977, Hopper and his new partner Delgado were investigating a string of murders when the Feds rolled in and took the case away. Hopper and Delgado don’t take that lying down and the duo is suddenly mixed up in a cult’s doomsday prophecy. In addition to writing excellent novels of his own Adam Christopher has plenty of experience of working within established worlds. He nails Hopper’s voice, and mirrors his happiness in his role as El’s dad with his memories of being a husband…

Release Out now Writer Tim Major Publisher Titan Books Price £8.99 Caitlin Hext is a Charmer, someone who has the ability to create a complete replica of themselves, known as a Skin, every seven years. Normally, Skins disappear after a short period, but when Caitlin’s doesn’t she is forced to reckon with a world in which there are two of her. Elsewhere, reporter Gerry Chafin decides to investigate the Fall, the start of the Charmer phenomenon, and government aide Russell Handler is about to get closer to a secret that goes right to the top. There are some big ideas in Tim Major’s Snakeskins. The initiating event of the Fall is brief, but the consequences ripple out over time. Individual autonomy and what constitutes selfhood is rightly at the heart…

Like Alita, which was finally released as a Hollywood blockbuster this year, the idea of a live-action Bebop has been kicked around for ages. From 2008, it was developed as a film with Keanu Reeves as Spike. Perhaps it might have been influenced by Reeves’ best science-fiction film (you heard us!), the quasi-animated Philip K Dick drug trip A Scanner Darkly. In any case, the now-confirmed Netflix version will be a new take, with four of the cast already announced: Spike is played by John Cho, best-known as Sulu in the recent Star Trek films. Jet Black is played by Mustafa Shakir (Bushmaster in Luke Cage) and Faye by Daniella Pineda (Sophie in The Originals). Their adversary has been cast too. Vicious, Spike’s anime nemesis, is played by Britain’s Alex…

What happens when you mix a cast of veterans and newcomers, add in a zingy horror-comedy screenplay, budget-defying ‘splatstick’ special effects and a raucous soundtrack and put it all in the hands of a talented maverick like Dan O’Bannon? You get The Return Of The Living Dead, that’s what happens. Anarchic, kinetic and subversive, O’Bannon’s mid-Eighties romp has seen its initially positive reception snowball over the decades to the point that it’s now regarded as a genuine cult classic. The movie’s rich cocktail of elements is deftly handled by O’Bannon as the tale of escaped noxious chemicals creating an epidemic of re-animated corpses gleefully lurches from one memorable set-piece sequence to the next. Upending traditional genre tropes, creating its own and approaching the whole exercise with a highly infectious, twisted…