'So much blood'

It is unclear if the two cases are connected

'Stonewall is sacred ground'

'Where is the concern for the victim?'

Books Seeds of Story Not in My Atmosphere! — The Pitfalls of Project Orion Can a terrible idea for spaceship propulsion inspire exciting new science fiction? By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on February 10, 2026 Credit: NASA / Marshall Space Flight Center Comment 3 Share New Share Credit: NASA / Marshall Space Flight Center Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Most weeks, I’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. But occasionally we’ll do a “retro edition,” looking at a seed where the science has moved on, or just moved in new directions. What was so appealing—and is there anything left to mine from these ideas? This week, I talk about a terrible idea for spaceship propulsion, and the tradeoff between achieving escape velocity and making the area around your launch facility uninhabitable. How It Started, How It’s Going I begin this column with the caveat that I am a cognitive psychologist, not a rocket scientist. There will be no equations and my ability to evaluate exhaust velocity versus thrust tradeoffs is limited. My ability to stare at an idea and go “What the hell were you thinking?”, however, is excellent. Project Orion was a 1950s DARPA (then ARPA) study on the feasibility of a nuclear-powered spaceship. If you’re picturing a nice, well-controlled nuclear power plant, think again: the goal was to launch enormous masses using nuclear bombs—a series of them, outside the ship, producing thrust against a metal “pusher” plate. In theory, you could get a ship the size of a small city off Earth this way, and then send it galloping around the solar system. Freeman Dyson led the project along with fellow physicist Ted Taylor. ARPA provided funding for only a year, from 1958 to 1959; work continued supported by other sources until 1964, its end spurred by the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963. You will be reassured to know that the idea was never tested with actual nuclear bombs. Tests with chemical explosions were used for proof of concept. The appeal, of course, was the sheer amount of mass that could be lifted this way. No more stress over every spare ounce of luggage! Big experiments! Maybe whole colony projects! My sources (Wikipedia, Stanford, StackExchange) range from dubious to optimistic about the whole idea, which clearly still appeals to a certain type of rocket scientist. Freeman Dyson calculated that the average number of deaths per launch would be under 1, an obviously worthwhile tradeoff for interplanetary colonization. I question this calculation because ’50s estimates of fallout danger tended to be low, and because his funding depended on a comfortable answer to this question. Several articles suggest that you could minimize the problem by launching from a relatively uninhabited polar area, which sounds particularly great when you recall that climate change now sends Arctic air spiraling down the North American coast on a regular basis. Of course, we’ve since had a small war’s worth of nuclear explosions, atmospheric and otherwise, from tests alone, with no spaceships to show for it at all. We did just set a record for longest period without such an explosion since they became possible. We should keep that up. Stories of Old Science I first encountered Project Orion in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Footfall, which I’m afraid I read and enjoyed in college. Obviously when the alternative is alien elephants proving themselves dominant over humans, a completely improvised Orion spaceship—put together using heisted parts, if I recall correctly—is the way to go. It did make for a very exciting launch scene. And there’s a definite sense that the excuse was welcome… there is a certain sort of book that suggests that major crises (alien invasions, nuclear war, asteroid strikes) make the perfect excuses to put aside annoying luxuries like gender equality and long-term ecosystem viability. Project Orion also shows up in Heinlein’s first short story, “Blowups Happen,” which is notable for overestimating the stress and danger of working in a nuclear power plant. Project Orion fits with a long tradition of imagining wild ways to get off Earth, and of playing with the kinship between explosion-based weaponry and spaceships. There’s a reason Verne’s rocket was created by the Baltimore Gun Club. I remain extremely fond of Jordin Kare’s “Kantrowitz 1972 (HEL Crew’s Song),” and the risk factors for laser launches are probably lower than the risk factors for nuclear bomb launches. You want to be really careful about where you aim lest people start talking about death rays but, frankly, that’s true (if less cinematic) about most spaceship propulsion technology. Most stories about real (or real-life proposed) launch methods tend to favor those methods. Often, this includes bonus mockery of the short-sighted fools worrying about things like safety. But there’s also a long tradition of stories about bad-idea launch methods. For example, Alfred Bester’s “Adam and No Eve” involves a “catalyst in iron solution” propulsion that, um, destroys all life on Earth. That does seem like a worst-case scenario, until you consider that one episode when Star Trek suggests warp drives are breaking the universe, and then we never talk about it again. Digging for Salvage Orion-style launches have apparently continued to appear in occasional 21st-century science fiction (most of which I’ve managed to miss), including the Ascension miniseries, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, and Stephen Baxter’s Ark. It’s a good way to imply either extreme urgency to the launch, or very specific attitudes and capabilities related to cleaning up your messes. In the spirit of Sarah Gailey’s River of Teeth, though, there’s space wide open for an alternate universe in which the Orion Program continued—and caused all the problems you’d expect. A world in which we didn’t shut down Orion is also probably a world in which we didn’t scare ourselves off of saner nuclear power designs, so it might be a net gain, even with the cleanup program making for seriously chewy plot. In general, Orion seems like it ought to fit well with modern ecofiction. We’re much more willing to examine the downsides of our tech than we were in the ’50s, and to acknowledge that humans can throw an entire planetary ecosystem out of whack. We have a lot of Cold War stories about nuclear winter, but not a lot of 21st-century work about non-war-related nuclear alternate history. That video linked above gives a vivid sense of the ways that nuclear weapons can make (have made) a mess even if never used on another city. Why not give the EPA something more exciting to clean up than yet another chemical spill? In all fairness, I should note that some Orion proposals involve either getting your massive mass off Earth using non-nuclear means or building off of Earth entirely, and then using bomb propulsion in the safety of interplanetary space. This raises a whole separate set of issues—see A City on Mars for how badly this would tear up existing treaties and freak out whichever countries did not have orbital bomb-production facilities—but does avoid the immediate ecological problems. New Growth: What to Read Freeman Dyson’s son, George, wrote Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship. Get it from the horse’s mouth, or at least the horse’s kid’s mouth. Francis Spufford’s Backroom Boys plays with other rocket science futures that never were. If you’re trying to design (or write about) a ship that works, K.F. Long’s Deep Space Propulsion: A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight looks like a good introduction to physically plausible propulsion methods and their constraints, as does Eugene Mallove and Gregory Matloff’s The Starflight Handbook: A Pioneer’s Guide to Interstellar Travel. Iver Cooper’s But Will It Fly?: The History and Science of Unconventional Aerial Power and Propulsion looks fun if you’re trying to design (or write about) a steampunk ship. Want to argue for cinematic propulsion techniques or share anecdotes about Freeman Dyson? Join in the comments below![end-mark] The post Not in My Atmosphere! — The Pitfalls of Project Orion appeared first on Reactor.

News One Piece One Piece: Into the Grand Line Trailer Is Jam-Packed With Characters (And Dinosaurs and Whales) The show departs for the Grand Line in precisely one month By Molly Templeton | Published on February 10, 2026 Photo: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Netflix With the release of the latest trailer, One Piece is now One Piece: Into the Grand Line. (Everyone loves retitling shows lately!) But it’s still the same gang of lovable pirates—with a whole pile of new characters along for the ride. Netflix has been teasing the new faces in season two bit by bit over the last few months, but this trailer goes all in with more Tony Tony Chopper (Mikaela Hoover), more smirking Nico Robin/Miss All Sunday (Lera Abova), the excellent Katey Sagal as Dr. Kureha, and a whole lot of ship action. I lost count of how many shots there are of the very big ship going into very ominous territory. Laboon the whale is cool, though. In season two, the Straw Hats face Baroque Works, a gaggle of extremely inventive-looking assassins that includes a machine-gun-wielding otter, Charithra Chandran as Miss Wednesday, Jazzara Jaslyn as Miss Valentine, Sophia Anne Caruso as Miss Goldenweek, Daniel Lasker as Mr. 9, Camrus Johnson as Mr. 5, and David Dastmalchian as Mr. 3. Joe Manganiello is also in this season as Crocodile, and Sendhil Ramamurthy as Nefertari Cobra. There is a lot of talk of danger, but mostly the trailer is about the joy of going on a journey with your best pals. It looks like fun! There isn’t even any blood in the swordfights! “At the end of the first season, our characters made this pledge around a barrel to achieve their dreams,” showrunner Joe Tracz told Tudum, continuing, “We’re going to see how those dreams are put to the test. Every place they stop in the Grand Line is going to test one of the Straw Hats in a unique way. And they’re going to learn that if they’re going to fulfill their dreams, they have to have each other’s backs.” One Piece stars Iñaki Godoy as Monkey D. Luffy, Mackenyu as Roronoa Zoro, Emily Rudd as Nami, Jacob Romero as Usopp, and Taz Skylar as Sanji. The second season premieres March 10 on Netflix.[end-mark] The post <i>One Piece: Into the Grand Line</i> Trailer Is Jam-Packed With Characters (And Dinosaurs and Whales) appeared first on Reactor.

News Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Star Wars: Behold, the Battle of Hoth Storyboard That Features Prancing AT-ATs The fight sequence in The Empire Strikes Back is a memorable one, even without AT-ATs that skip across the snow By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on February 10, 2026 Screenshot: Lucasfilms Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Lucasfilms Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back contains many great moments, one of which is the Battle of Hoth, which features some memorable fighting between the Resistance and the Empire’s forces (which include the imposing All Terrain Armored Transports, aka AT-ATs). If you’ve wondered how some of those sequences came together, Lucasfilm released a video today that will delight you. The two-minute clip features the battle we see on screen on one side, while the other side is the synced storyboard put together beforehand. It’s a fun watch, not only because it’s amazing how close the storyboarding hews to the final sequence, but also where it doesn’t. At around the sixteen-second mark, for example, you see an AT-AT galivanting in the background, almost prancing across the snow. The AT-ATs we’ve come to know are not nearly agile enough to skip along their path of destruction, and I’d argue that’s perhaps for the better. The last part of the sequence, where the AT-AT that is tangled in the lines falls over, also hits better in the final version, where the four-legged tank falls over straight-legged rather than having its legs crumple underneath it. I can’t help but wonder why those changes occurred. Was it an artistic decision? Or was it driven by the practicalities of the technology of the time? It’s something to ponder, perhaps, while watching the video. May the Force be with you. [end-mark] The post <i>Star Wars</i>: Behold, the Battle of Hoth Storyboard That Features Prancing AT-ATs appeared first on Reactor.

Books Horror Highlights Urban Legends and Lifestyle Influencers: Horror Highlights for February 2026 This month’s releases blend horror with mystery, family drama, and a touch of the apocalypse. By Emily C. Hughes | Published on February 10, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Seems fake that the world can be on fire while it’s also this cold out, huh? If you’re stuck inside waiting for various forms of ice to melt and can’t bear to watch The Thing one more time, pick up one of these five February horror books I’m particularly excited about. Mama Came Callin’ by Ezra Claytan Daniels, illustrated by Camilla Sucre (Feb 3, William Morrow) I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not always on top of what’s happening in the comics and graphic novel space, but this one caught my eye (that Paul Tremblay blurb didn’t hurt!). At five years old, Kirah narrowly avoided becoming a victim of the Gatorman, a monstrous urban legend with a tendency to prey on Black children. The cops blamed her father, and he went to prison for it. But twenty years later, he’s paroled, with a warning for his daughter: “He’s coming for you.” Now Kirah has to uncover the truth of her family history and what the Gatorman wants from her—all while trying to survive. (The Gatorman concept is based on a racist trope that’s a real-life historical horror—one Daniels connected to our own contemporary horrors in an op-ed for the LA Times last summer.) Trad Wife by Saratoga Schaefer (Feb 10, Crooked Lane) I’ve been waiting for trad wives to hit horror fiction basically since I first learned of their existence—some concepts are just a natural fit for the genre. Schaefer’s novel follows Camille, a trad wife influencer whose flawless life is missing only a baby to show off to her followers. And so Camille makes a wish in the dilapidated well on her farmland, and her wish is granted—she’s pregnant. But something’s off—her pregnancy is advancing at an unnatural pace, and she’s craving raw meat. A new spin on Rosemary’s Baby for the influencer set. (In one of those serendipitous book world coincidences, Sarah Langan also has a book called Trad Wife publishing in May—I’m excited to read both!) Kayak by Kristal Stittle (Feb 17, Tenebrous) The cover was the first thing that grabbed me—how could it not?—but the premise, which is something like Tremors (1990) meets Flow (2024), sunk its hooks into me. An extraterrestrial threat has driven what remains of humanity onto water in order to survive. Keith, 18, is a lone survivor in a kayak, paddling his way back and forth across a lake and occasionally braving dry land for supply runs. Through flashbacks, we see how the world got this way, what Keith has endured on his travels, and the people he’s lost. As with so many apocalyptic stories, Kayak touches on survivors’ guilt, perseverance, and self-preservation vs. self-isolation, and the execution is atmospheric, eerie, and heartfelt. Little Red Flags: Stories of Cults, Cons, and Control edited by Noelle W. Ihli & Steph Nelson (Feb 17, Dark Matter INK) Stories of cults and other high-control groups provide a window into how people move from one reality to another and (sometimes, if we’re lucky) how they come back. In a world where the concept of a shared reality seems like more of a relic every day, there’s value to that. This anthology, edited by two venerable horror and thriller writers, features authors like Marisca Pichette, Jade Jiao, Nick Kolakowski, Jessica Levai, and many more. Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward (Feb 24, Nightfire) Most of Ward’s published novels occupy a tantalizing genre gray area somewhere between horror, thriller, mystery, and psychological drama, and her newest, Nowhere Burning, is no different. It’s tough to sum up any of Ward’s plots in a tidy sentence or two, but this one tells the story of a massively famous, deeply troubled movie star and his Neverland Ranch-style retreat in the high Rockies, a neglected teen girl trying to take care of her little brother, a devastating fire, and the community that rises out of the ashes. (There is, I should note, also a crocodile named Tinkerbell.) While Nowhere Burning doesn’t have the metafictional elements found in her last novel, Looking Glass Sound, it does feature Ward at her best, nimbly skipping between different timelines and character POVs. I have never once regretted letting one of Ward’s books jump the line in my TBR, and you won’t either. It never gets easier choosing just a few books to highlight from the many released each month—to see the full list of February’s new horror books and beyond, head over to my website.[end-mark] News and Notes The Bram Stoker Awards preliminary ballot: The preliminary ballot for this year’s Bram Stoker Awards is out now, and the final ballot will be announced in mid-February after HWA members vote in the first round! Personally, I’m thrilled to see Neena Viel’s Listen to Your Sister (First Novel), Neil McRobert’s Good Boy (Long Fiction), Becky Spratford’s Why I Love Horror (Long Nonfiction), and Ally Russell’s Mystery James Digs Her Own Grave (Middle Grade) make the cut! Horror at the Oscars: And on the cinematic front, horror is officially Oscar-worthy again (according to the Academy, at least – horror fans have been saying it.) On the acting front, the wonderful Amy Madigan and Wunmi Mosaku are both up for Best Supporting Actress for their respective roles as Aunt Gladys in Weapons and Annie in Sinners, Michael B. Jordan and Jacob Elordi snagged Best Actor nominations for their turns as Smoke and Stack in Sinners and the Creature in Frankenstein, and the LEGENDARY Delroy Lindo got a long overdue nomination for playing Delta Slim in Sinners. (Rose Byrne is also nominated for Best Actress for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which I’d strongly argue also counts as a horror movie, so I’m claiming that one too.) And then of course there’s the big news: Sinners, with its sixteen nominations, is the most! nominated! movie! in Oscars! history! If that’s not a crowning achievement for the genre, then I don’t know what is. The Mummy: Though I am, of course, a die-hard fan of the Brendan Fraser-Rachel Weisz 1999 version, I have to confess I’ve been waiting for a properly scary take on the classic mummy story, and Lee Cronin, you have my attention. The post Urban Legends and Lifestyle Influencers: Horror Highlights for February 2026 appeared first on Reactor.

Legislation to authorize a women’s history museum would also allow men who identify as women to be featured, some conservatives warn. The House Committee on National Resources is holding a legislative hearing on Tuesday for the “Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum Act,” which would permit the Smithsonian women’s museum to be located on the National Mall. The museum was created in 2020, but Congress still needs to authorize the land for the facility. However, the bill doesn’t include a definition of a woman, opening the door for displays dedicated to men who identify as women, according to May Mailman, senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and former White House advisor. The museum’s website already features several biological men who identify as women. While “woman” shouldn’t need a definition, it would be helpful to make sure that judges and administrators “don’t monkey around” by honoring men at the museum, Mailman said. “The way that language works is that language has to have a meaning, and a woman can’t be a man, otherwise it has no meaning,” she told The Daily Signal. Mailman said the Trump administration should require lawmakers to define woman based on biology, as a condition of the museum receiving federal land. “I would say not a square inch of land shall be allocated if I was the Trump administration for the Women’s History Museum, until and unless Congress clarifies that the definition of woman is woman,” she told The Daily Signal. “Essentially like a contract that this land shall be allocated under the clear directive that the Women’s History Museum is for women.” Featuring men in the Women’s History Museum “lacks any logical basis,” Mailman said. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. The Trump administration has been pushing the Smithsonian to back off “divisive narratives” for months. The president’s next target should be ensuring the same protocols at the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, a conservative operative said. “Unfortunately, this museum might not be about American women at all, rather, men dressed as women,” the operative told The Daily Signal. “There is nothing in the bill creating the museum nor this bill to grant the land authorization to prevent a national museum dedicated to telling the story of female contributions to American history from promoting, or featuring biological men.” The simple fix is to include a biological definition of woman in the bill, but the operative doubts progressive members of Congress will know how to define the term. The museum’s website includes tributes to female-identifying males, such as activists Jazz Jennings, Marsha P. Johnson, Cecilia Chung, and Sylvia Rivera, and tennis player Richard Raskind, who underwent sex reassignment surgery and changed his name to Renee Richards. Concerned Women for America also distrusts the Smithsonian’s agenda. “In its American History Museum exhibit titled ‘Girlhood,’ the singular example of a girl was a male child,” said Maggie McKneely, director of government relations at Concerned Women for America “This is not an institution that has proved it is willing to be either accurate or objective.” “It is going to take explicit language and vigorous congressional oversight for any women’s history museum run by the Smithsonian to pass the accountability test,” she told The Daily Signal. The post Conservatives Warn Bill Authorizing Women’s History Museum Could Allow Exhibits Honoring Biological Men appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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