Reactor

The episode titles for the fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds were just released, and wouldn’t you know that they include an incredibly tantalizing Next Generation Easter egg.

This is a huge change for Prime Video’s God of War adaptation: After star Ryan Hurst’s on-set injury last month, the video game adaptation will recast the lead role of Kratos. As Deadline reports, Hurst tore a bicep, a serious injury that required surgery and will involve months of recovery.

Well-timed synchronicity is a wonderful thing. There’s nothing quite like the intellectual zing one experiences when one scientific presentation casts an unexpected light on a seemingly unrelated theory or idea. I was the beneficiary of this phenomenon last week, when scarcely twenty-eight years after reading Geoffrey Landis’ “The Fermi Paradox: An Approach Based on Percolation Theory,” a Lindsay Nikole video essay on an entirely unrelated matter suggested an interesting embellishment.

We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Divine Gardener’s Handbook, a sapphic dystopian romantasy by Eli Snow, out from Saturday Books on August 18th. In a Jenga-stacked megacity where glowing blue flowers hum in the dark and palace doors open into secret worlds, getting a job in the Divine Gardens is almost impossible—like being plucked from obscurity by a carnival claw machine. But Cyprin has spent her whole life trying.

Romance is a major theme in ‘90s teen horror: someone’s always hooking up, breaking up, going out with someone they shouldn’t, or wishing they could be with someone they can’t have. Teenage love is never easy, but it gets even more complicated when someone tries to have it all by secretly dating multiple girls (or less frequently, guys).

Science fiction, fantasy, and horror books can be filled with foes of all kinds—from aliens and orcs to ghosts and slashers. But there’s something uniquely and horribly unsettling about having to battle a version (or multiple versions!) of yourself—be they a double, doppelgänger, or clone. Facing off against a double is a fairly common problem in the world of superheroes, with everyone from Superman to Captain America having gone toe-to-toe with themselves.

May began in Chicago, then I took the train home to Montreal, where I have been ever since. Being at home, I read a lot: a total of eighteen books, and some of them were great. But I read four books that were sent to me to blurb—excuse me, I read half of each of them and then stopped reading. And they were all awful and sapped my will to read and talk about books, because oh gosh yuck, I hate everything and want to put my head in a bucket.

The hottest tickets in town (any town) are showings of the 70mm edition of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Such showings sold out instantly, and getting into one now would require you to pay absurd resell prices. IMAX has tried to accommodate the demand by adding showings at seemingly unusual times (who wants to go see a three hour movie at 2 a.m?), but the supply hasn’t come close to meeting the demand.

After a historic box office run, industry analysts suspected it may be quite some time before Obsession gets a streaming release date. And while we had to wait a bit longer than usual for the movie to come home, Obsession is getting a somewhat surprising streaming release date this week. Peacock has confirmed that Obsession will debut on its streaming service on July 17.

It may be hotter than Hades outside, but at least you’ve got your TBR to give you an excuse to visit your friendly neighborhood air conditioned library or independent bookstore. Out of all the nearly sixty science fiction, fantasy, and horror young adult books coming out in July and August, I’m highlighting my sixteen most anticipated. From summerween chills to swoon-worthy romantasy, from cutthroat competitions to creepy small towns, there is a lot to get excited for this summer.