News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Forbidden Books, Magicians, and Alien Alternatives All the inescapable font deep dives and underrated sci-fi series you need while you wait for the Hugo Awards. By Molly Templeton | Published on August 14, 2025 Screenshot: Lionsgate Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Lionsgate If you are not among the multitudes descending on Seattle this weekend for WorldCon, you may find yourself in need of some sort of distraction while you wait for the Hugo winners to be announced, right? Here are a few suggestions for the weekend of August 15th! Space Adventure Hour(s): Killjoys I was thinking about the phrase “Space Adventure Hour,” which was the name of the fourth episode of Strange New Worlds’ third season, and I realized: I haven’t yelled at anyone about Killjoys for a hot minute. That, my friends, is a space adventure hour (give or take a number of minutes). Killjoys stars the MCU’s Ghost, Hannah John-Kamen, as Dutch, a space bounty hunter with a very complicated past. (For one thing, in later seasons John-Kamen also plays another character who—for complicated reasons—looks exactly like Dutch.) Dutch has a very cool spaceship in which she flies around with two brothers, Johnny and D’avin Jaqobis, one of whom is played by Aaron Ashmore (the Ashmore twin who didn’t play Iceman in X2) and the other by Luke Macfarlane. Johnny is kind of in love with their ship. D’avin is kind of in love with Dutch. Except when he’s not.  There is a truly excellent bartender, a rich girl working as a doctor in the bad part of town, other much more terrible rich people who sometimes accidentally grow consciences, more Canadian SFF character actors than you can shake a stick at, and plots that inch right up to going wildly off the rails but never quite do. The found-family space series I never knew I needed, Killjoys ran for five perfect, over-the-top, playful, affecting, underrated seasons, and that was not enough. Someone really needs to give creator Michelle Lovretta another show.  Because the universe is a cruel and uncaring place, Killjoys does not appear to be streaming anywhere. But you can treat yourself to an episode or two on Apple TV+ or Prime and see if you get hooked. Is It Time to Reread the Books We All Read Too Early? On Bluesky, author John Wiswell (Someone You Can Build a Nest In) offered a fun prompt: “Quote this with a book you read way too young that explains why you are the way you are.” Answers range from the nigh-inevitable V.C. Andrews to a whooooole lot of Stephen King, Clan of the Cave Bear, and well beyond. I still haven’t seen anyone admit to reading the books Anne Rice wrote as “A.N. Roquelaure,” but I did. Way too young. Waaaaaaay too young. I mention this because the replies are so sprawling and wonderful—and may give you some reading flashbacks—and because it is never a bad time to reread the books that made you who you are (for better or worse!). There are enough Clan of the Cave Bear kids to start a book club.  Gorton: The Inescapable Font You Might Never Have Heard Of Remember when there was a whole movie about Helvetica? This isn’t that. Marcin Wichary’s February piece, “The Hardest Working Font in Manhattan,” surfaced multiple times in my social feeds this week, and I’m so glad it did. Way back in the 2000s, Wichary noticed an odd font in Manhattan. And then noticed it again. And again. And didn’t know what it was. Ten years later, he found out: The font is called Gorton, and its history is deeply fascinating.  Not a font nerd? It’s still a deep dive into how things used to be made. Don’t care about New York? Gorton is everywhere. I learned about how keyboard keys were and are made! I learned about engraving machines! This story has everything. This font went to space! The history is not what Wichary initially thought it was! And Gorton really is everywhere. This is worth it for the photos alone. And the fact that you’ll never look at an apartment buzzer panel or an engraved bossy street-side sign the same way again. Now You See Me, Now We’re All Family? Before Superman, there was a trailer for Now You See Me Now You Don’t, which might win this year’s award for “movie that by all rights should have a different name.” (Seriously, Now You 3 Me is right there.) Having never seen one of these magical heist flicks, I found myself with a burning question: Is this series essentially the Fast and the Furious franchise but with magic?  No, hear me out! The sprawling cast. The over-the-top villain. The reluctant team-ups. The far-flung locations. The sheer amount of money on display (though in diamonds, here, instead of ridiculous vehicles). Have these movies always been like this, or is this a conscious shift on the part of the hands behind the franchise? Have I been missing out all this time? Do I need to investigate? Do you need to investigate? Exciting August movie and TV releases are a bit thin on the ground (though those who are less baby than I will definitely be watching Alien: Earth this week). Might as well try something different? Or, on a related note, you could just have a Fast and Furious marathon—sort of. On Saturday, Netflix is adding seven of the Fast and/or Furious films. For unknown reasons, they’re skipping Fast & Furious, aka Fast 4, and going straight from Tokyo Drift to The Rock Takes Brazil—I mean, Fast 5. My personal favorite remains Fast 6, for an assortment of reasons that includes Han (Sung Kang) and his snacks; the presence of Black Sails’ Anne Bonny (Clara Paget); and the 18.37-mile-long runway in the climactic sequence. Yes, it has to be that long. The BBC did the math. A Different Sort of Space Adventure Hour(s): Bethany Jacobs’ Kindom Trilogy If you are the sort of person who is reluctant to pick up a book series until it’s complete, now is the time to start Bethany Jacobs’ Kindom Trilogy. The third book, This Brutal Moon, is out in December, so you’ve got time for a leisurely read of the first two books, These Burning Stars and On Vicious Worlds. These books are so tightly wound that they’re difficult to describe; a blurb from Kate Elliott on the first one says, “Like every good revenge story, it is baroque, intense, inventive, vivid, violent, and visceral.” These things are all true! It’s also kind of a good time, amid all the cat-and-mouse games, near-death scenarios, and, in book one, an incredible twist. If you crossed the obsession-worthy characters of The Raven Scholar with the huge-scale plotting of The Expanse, you might end up with something like this. But Jacobs does entirely her own thing. [end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Forbidden Books, Magicians, and <i>Alien</i> Alternatives appeared first on Reactor.