News One Piece One Piece Season 2 Trailer Features Mr. 13, Nico Robin, and Lot of Colorful Assassins Okay but can we talk about that otter By Molly Templeton | Published on January 12, 2026 Image: Netflix © 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Netflix © 2025 It’s less than two months until the second season of Netflix’s hit manga adaptation One Piece sets sail. News tidbits about season two have been on a steady drip for months already, from the announcement of new cast members (including Cole Escola and Xolo Maridueña, who are set to join the show in season 3) to a behind-the-scenes featurette. But now there’s a whole teaser—appropriately chaotic, mildly threatening, and introducing Nico Robin (Lera Abova), the vulture-riding otter Mr. 13, and a whole pile of assassins from the Baroque Works organization. Because this is One Piece, said assassins have delightfully outlandish outfits and wigs that hide machine guns. As one does. Here’s the synopsis: Netflix’s epic high-seas pirate adventure, One Piece, returns for Season 2—unleashing fiercer adversaries and the most perilous quests yet. Luffy and the Straw Hats set sail for the extraordinary Grand Line—a legendary stretch of sea where danger and wonder await at every turn. As they journey through this unpredictable realm in search of the world’s greatest treasure, they’ll encounter bizarre islands and a host of formidable new enemies. There are piles of new characters coming this season, including Callum Kerr as Captain Smoker, Julia Rehwald as Tashigi, Charithra Chandran as Miss Wednesday (also known as Nefertari Vivi), Brendan Sean Murray as Brogy, David Dastmalchian as Mr. 3, Joe Manganiello as Crocodile, Sendhil Ramamurthy as Nefertari Cobra, and Mikaela Hoover as the voice of Tony Tony Chopper. One Piece stars Iñaki Godoy as Monkey D. Luffy, Mackenyu as Roronoa Zoro, Emily Rudd as Nami, Jacob Gibson as Usopp, and Taz Skylar as Sanji. The series is based on the manga by Eiichiro Oda, and has Ian Stokes and Joe Tracz as showrunners. It’s already been renewed for a third season—but first, season two premieres March 10th on Netflix.[end-mark] The post <i>One Piece</i> Season 2 Trailer Features Mr. 13, Nico Robin, and Lot of Colorful Assassins appeared first on Reactor.

News Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Trailer Teases a Totally Different Mummy Than That Other Mummy Nobody’s going to make any excellent declarations about being a librarian in THIS movie, I bet By Molly Templeton | Published on January 12, 2026 Photo: Warner Bros. Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Warner Bros. To be fair, writer-director Lee Cronin made Evil Dead Rise, which was generally quite well-received. But he’s not exactly a household name—which makes the choice to call his new film Lee Cronin’s The Mummy an odd one. Presumably it is to differentiate between this Mummy and the various other Mummys, though of course in this house there is only one true Mummy. But you could just, you know, pick another title. At any rate, there’s a teaser for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, and it is mostly just creepy bandaged vibes—plus a bit of the quickly-growing-ubiquitous slightly-distorted-voice-repeats-some-words thing that everyone is doing in the wake of the trailer for 28 Years Later. Is this the new “haunted-child-sings-slowed-down-pop-song?” I guess it could be worse. At least the opening of the trailer doesn’t go ping. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is about a family whose little girl goes missing in the desert. “Eight years later,” the synopsis says, “the broken family is shocked when she is returned to them, as what should be a joyful reunion turns into a living nightmare.” Or is it an undead nightmare? Cronin told IGN that his film is “almost one part Poltergeist and one part Seven, but put through my lens and the way that I like to entertain people.” He also said, “This movie is coming from a very different place, and it’s not even a reinvention of mummy lore; it’s looking into darker places and doing something different with what we think we might already know.” Lee Cronin’s The Mummy stars Jack Reynor (The Peripheral), Laia Costa (The Wheel of Time), May Calamawy (Moon Knight), Natalie Grace (Raymar), and Veronica Falcón (Imaginary). It has superstar horror producers James Wan and Jason Blum on board, in case you need some extra reasons to give it a chance. This Mummy stalks into theaters on April 17th.[end-mark] The post <i>Lee Cronin’s The Mummy</i> Trailer Teases a Totally Different Mummy Than That Other Mummy appeared first on Reactor.

Column Babylon 5 Rewatch Babylon 5 Rewatch: “The Face of the Enemy” Sheridan’s father is arrested, and Garibaldi offers to help his former commander plan a rescue operation… By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on January 12, 2026 Credit: Warner Bros. Television Comment 6 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Television “The Face of the Enemy”Written by J. Michael StraczynskiDirected by Michael VejarSeason 4, Episode 17Production episode 417Original air date: June 9, 1997 It was the dawn of the third age… The Army of Light forces are in a brutal firefight against EarthForce ships. Some of the latter have retreated from the battle, but others, including the Cadmus, are continuing to fight even though they’re outgunned. Sheridan practically begs them to surrender, as he doesn’t want to destroy them, but he will if they keep it up. The Cadmus captain, Leo Frank, finally replies, saying they’re dead anyhow. They were told that every EarthForce ship that Sheridan has defeated have had their crews executed and replaced with Minbari. MacDougan comes on the line and tells Frank that he’s an even bigger idiot than he was at the Academy, and assures Frank that he’s been fed a line of bull. Frank then surrenders. On Mars, Garibaldi informs Edgars that he has set up Sheridan’s father David to be captured. Edgars promises that, once Sheridan is in custody, Garibaldi will be told the whole truth. Elsewhere on Mars, Franklin and Alexander arrive. Number One remembers Alexander from the last time she came through Mars, and is pissed that she didn’t reveal at the time that she was a telepath. And Number One is even more pissed at their cargo of a whole mess of teeps in stasis tubes. Later, over dinner, it’s clear to Franklin that everyone in the resistance really hates telepaths, and Alexander explains about the Bloodhound Units that scan anyone suspected of being in the resistance without their permission—and these are deep scans, which are not only violations of privacy, but also can cause heart attacks, strokes, and other fun things. She also mentions a serial killer of telepaths; the mundane police didn’t really care to investigate thoroughly, so the Psi Cops (with whom Alexander was interning at the time) took it upon themselves. They found the guy and put horrible images in his head—to this day, he’s in a hospital in a straitjacket. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The Agamemnon shows up and Captain James offers to join the Army of Light. Sheridan is delighted to have his former command by his side, and he goes on board. Then Garibaldi contacts him and says that Clark’s people have his father. Garibaldi claims to have some people who can get him free, but they want to meet in person with Sheridan, alone. Sheridan verifies this information independently, and then, despite the advice of both James and Ivanova, he agrees to meet, using one of Agamemnon’s shuttles to sneak onto Mars. He also instructs Ivanova to take a White Star and take command of the fleet in his absence. She does so, asking Delenn to keep an eye on things on the station, because they don’t have the budget for another guest star to play a watch officer. Sheridan meets with Garibaldi, who immediately puts a tranq patch on Sheridan’s hand, at which point folks come to take him into custody. Sheridan resists arrest, and gets the shit kicked out of him for his trouble. Edgars finally reads Garibaldi in on the whole thing. While Clark is a problem, he’s a temporary one—one way or another, he’ll be out of power soon enough. But the Psi Corps won’t give up the power he’s given them, and it’ll be the end of humanity’s dominance over telepaths. Unless, of course, they level the playing field. Edgars has developed a virus that specifically targets the chromosome that controls telepathy. It’s airborne, 100% contagious, and fatal. The antidote is the vial Garibaldi helped Lise and Wade smuggle through B5. Once infected, the telepaths have to get regular injections of the antidote, or they’ll die. Once Edgars and Wade are done explaining their plan, they leave Garibaldi alone. Unbeknownst to them, Lise overheard all of it, and is appalled. When he’s alone, Garibaldi removes a hollow tooth and activates a signal. He then goes to a tram. Lise joins him, but Garibaldi is cold to her, telling her to go back home, even though she’s disgusted by what her husband is doing. After Lise departs, Bester boards the tram, saying he got Garibaldi’s signal. Bester scans Garibaldi and learns all about Edgars’ plan. He’s also appalled, and intends to take care of it in very short order. He debates what to do about Garibaldi, now that his mission is complete. First, he informs Garibaldi what actually happened to him. The Shadows wanted Garibaldi because he was one of the three people most likely to take over the Army of Light if Sheridan was lost, and of those three (the others being Ivanova and Delenn), he was the one most likely to be susceptible to psionic tampering. So he was captured and sent to Psi Corps. Bester was able to divert him and use him for their own ends. It wasn’t a full reprogramming, just a bit of rejiggering—Bester needed his natural inquisitiveness and doggedness and investigative instincts intact, as well as his disdain for authority. Bester hadn’t expected Garibaldi to resign as head of security, but that worked out for the best, as it isolated him, making him easier to manipulate. Credit: Warner Bros. Television Eventually, it led him to be a mole in Edgars’ organization. But now, Bester isn’t sure what to do with Garibaldi—but ultimately, he decides to free him. Not that that’s doing him a favor, as everyone knows he’s the one who turned Sheridan in, so he’s pretty much cut off from his friends. When the mental blocks fall, Garibaldi screams in anguish. But by the time he can make it back to Edgars’ mansion, both Edgars and Wade are dead and the virus and its antidote are gone from his safe. Of Lise there is no sign—before dying, Wade says that she wasn’t in the house when they were ambushed. Ivanova rendezvouses with the fleet just in time to get the news of Sheridan’s capture, which ISN is crowing about (and also lying about, saying that he’s being treated well, unlike his own prisoners, and that he has expressed regret over his actions—in truth, he’s continued to get the shit kicked out of him and he’s bound in an empty cell). When asked what they’ll do next, Ivanova says they keep going. A person is expendable, the mission isn’t (a line Sinclair said in “War Without End,” though Ivanova credits Sheridan with saying it). Cole also says that Garibaldi has tried to contact them and the station, and Ivanova makes it clear that she has nothing to say to him, and also that if he shows up on B5, he’s to be shot on sight. ISN declares a day of celebration and rest, as the capture of Sheridan means that the resistance is broken. They also report Edgars’ murder, saying it was probably members of the resistance, and also that apparently it was Sheridan’s former security chief who turned him in, and ISN thanks him for his patriotism. Get the hell out of our galaxy! Last week, Sheridan was saying that he was getting worried that everything was going too well, and this episode bears out that paranoia, as he’s captured by the bad guys. Ivanova is God. Ivanova takes over command of the fleet from Sheridan. Both Clark and Edgars make it clear that they think losing Sheridan will break the resistance, but the look on Ivanova’s face in the latter portions of this episode make it abundantly clear that that is not the case. Credit: Warner Bros. Television The household god of frustration. We finally find out what’s been up with Garibaldi since the Shadows took him back in “Z’ha’dum.” If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Sheridan is insistent that a human be in command of the Army of Light fleet. It can’t be Delenn, because if a Minbari commands a fleet heading for Earth, it’ll feel like the Earth-Minbari War all over again. The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. As has been hinted at several times—particularly in “Whatever Happened to Mr. Garibaldi?” “Epiphanies,” and “Moments of Transition”—the Psi Corps is behind Garibaldi’s weird behavior this season. The Shadowy Vorlons. The Shadows helped put Clark into power, but they also provided the tech that enabled Edgars to develop the telepath virus. Typical Shadows, playing both ends… No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. When Sheridan is captured, Delenn wakes up and cries out his name, which is a common, if tired, practice among writers who want to show a love connection between characters… Looking ahead. For the second episode in a row, a character mentions the likelihood of a coming war between telepaths and mundanes (Edgars last time, Alexander this time). J. Michael Straczynski always intended to show that war on-screen, going so far as to have J. Gregory Keyes skip over it in his Psi-Corps trilogy of novels and having the movie A Call to Arms and TV show Crusade take place after it. But it has yet to be dramatized in any form. Welcome aboard. Recurring regulars Efram Zimbalist Jr., Mark Schneider, Diana Morgan, and Richard Gant make their final appearances as, respectively, Edgars, Wade, the ISN propaganda-spewer, and MacDougan. Other recurring regulars include Walter Koenig, back from “Moments of Transition” as Bester; Marjorie Monaghan, back from “Lines of Communication” as Number One; Denise Gentile, back from “The Exercise of Vital Powers” as Lise; and David Purdham, debuting the recurring role of James. Koenig and Gentile will both return in “Rising Star,” while Monaghan and Purdham will be back in “Between the Darkness and the Light.” Additionally, Ricco Ross plays Frank, and creative consultant Harlan Ellison makes his only physical appearance on the show as the Psi Cop Bester talks to in the flashback. Ellison previously did the voice of Sparky the computer in “Ceremonies of Light and Dark,” and he’ll come back to voice Zooty in “Day of the Dead.” Credit: Warner Bros. Television Trivial matters. Alexander came through Mars to get to B5 in “Divided Loyalties.” The guy who murdered telepaths was previously mentioned by Bester in “Epiphanies”; the full story of that rogue investigation and punishment was told in the novel Deadly Relations—Bester Ascendant, the second book in J. Gregory Keyes’ Psi-Corps trilogy. Garibaldi helped Lise and Wade obtain the cure for the virus in “Conflicts of Interest.” He was captured by the Shadows in “Z’ha’dum,” returned to B5 in “The Summoning” and resigned as head of security in “Epiphanies.” Efram Zimbalist Jr. tripped over the line “the telepath problem,” as that was (deliberately) very similar to rhetoric used by the Nazis against the Jews. It wound up working, as it meant that even Edgars realized the enormity and horror of what he was planning. Wade refers to telepaths as “homo superior,” which is a term first used in Marvel’s X-Men comics in the 1960s to refer to mutants (people born with super-powers). MacDougan says his entire crew is intact, though one assumes that his first officer is in the brig after what happened in “No Surrender, No Retreat.” The echoes of all of our conversations. “The truth—the whole absolute truth—is only a few days away. How many people can say that?” “I don’t know, but I think the last guy got thirty pieces of silver for the same job.” —Edgars giving Garibaldi assurances and Garibaldi feeling very Judas-y about the whole thing.  Credit: Warner Bros. Television The name of the place is Babylon 5. “They believe that you’re a pain in the ass, sir, but they trust you.” It took seventeen episodes, but we finally find out the full story of what happened to Garibaldi after the Shadows took him in “Z’ha’dum,” and it’s a doozy. Walter Koenig does magnificent work here, slowly explaining what’s going on while sitting across from an insensate Jerry Doyle. Koenig’s Bester is his usual awful self and it’s magnificently played. His only concern is for his own ambitions. I particularly like the way he refers to “my” telepaths, even though he doesn’t actually run Psi Corps (at least not yet). Then there’s his bland declaration that he’s not capricious or cruel, which is only half right. He’s definitely not capricious, as every single thing Bester does is calculated. But he’s incredibly cruel. While it’s plausible that he has no personal animus against Garibaldi—I doubt he cares enough about him to dislike him—he’s still perfectly happy to be as nasty as possible to him. Garibaldi is now in the worst possible place, having betrayed his friends, his colleagues, the husband of the woman he loves, and the cause he believes and fights for, and with no obvious way to prove otherwise. (As usual, Bester reckons without the fact that Lyta Alexander is now a badass psi, but we’ll get to that two episodes hence.) And that’s only a piece of this episode in which a lot happens. There’s Garibaldi’s actual betrayal of Sheridan, there’s Edgars’ revelation of his master plan, there’s MacDougan giving Frank a verbal smackdown (I really wish we’d gotten more than two episodes out of Richard Gant’s MacDougan, he was truly fabulous), and there’s Sheridan’s happy reunion with his former crew. What’s most impressive about this episode is that two very lengthy chunks of the episode are basically monologues of exposition, one by Edgars, one by Bester. Both are leavened on a scripting level, the former by Wade and Garibaldi putting their own comments in, the latter by the flashbacks. But truly it’s the performances and the directing of same by Zimbalist, Koenig, and director Michael Vejar. There’s a reason why Vejar is the franchise’s most prolific director, and this episode is a particularly strong example of why. There are many powerful visuals in this, from the closeups of Bester during his monologue at Garibaldi, the shadowy closeups of the stone-faced Garibaldi while Bester monologues at him, and so on. I particularly like the long shot in the flashback of Bester and two other Psi Cops standing over the comatose Garibaldi, one of the Psi Cops slowly moving to close the door, a magnificent visual metaphor. And then there’s Ivanova sitting in the command chair of the White Star, determined to keep the fight going. One of the themes of the past few episodes has been the importance of Sheridan to the Army of Light, and how vital it is to remove him. This, however, flies in the face of reality. As Bester says at one point, there are three people ready to take over from Sheridan if he’s lost, and while Bester himself did a bang-up job of removing Garibaldi from that particular chess board, the erstwhile security chief is also (by far) the least of those three options. Among Sheridan, Ivanova, and Delenn, Sheridan is the one who scares me the least. All capturing Sheridan gets them is an unfettered and pissed-off Ivanova, and that doesn’t improve their position overmuch… Next week: “Intersections in Real Time.”[end-mark] The post Babylon 5 Rewatch: “The Face of the Enemy” appeared first on Reactor.

Books Jo Walton Reads Jo Walton’s Reading List: November 2025 Heists! A gentleman-thief! Plus some very good romance (with and without magic)… By Jo Walton | Published on January 12, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share November was a month I spent entirely at home in Montreal, reading, working on my novel, and doing the page proofs for Everybody’s Perfect, the totally finished novel coming out in June next year. I read nineteen books, and some of them were great. Then in early December I got a migraine before I finished writing this post and forgot to finish it, which is why it’s so late. Sorry! Nicked — M.T. Anderson (2024)The story of a monk going from Bari to Myra to steal the corpse of St Nicholas with a group of assorted people with their own motivations for making the trip. I wanted to like this more than I actually did. It was fine, but reading it always felt like a bit of a slog. It never surprised me, or really drew me in; it hit all the beats you’d expect from the premise. Windfall — Jennifer E. Smith (2017) YA romance about a boy who wins the lottery and the girl who bought him the ticket. Smith is a very good writer, and so I enjoyed it. In many ways this was the opposite of Nicked, where the premise was great and the execution didn’t work for me—this had a premise I disliked but it was well enough written to pull me through anyway. Sunward — William Alexander (2025)Bath book. Now this is a very, very good book. It’s SF, set in a settled solar system without Earth, and it’s about families and robots and what it means to be a person. It’s as if Will imprinted on John Varley’s Eight Worlds stories and decided to reimagine the setting with modern sensibilities. It’s also a brilliant example of how you can write better about human nature when you have something to contrast it with. I raced through this short book and thoroughly enjoyed it. Highly recommended. The Sea Wolf’s Mate — Zoe Chant (2019)Second in this series of shape-shifter romance novels, very definitely genre romance, with fairly well-done worldbuilding of the shape-shifters. On reading this second one, I really don’t like the magical “this is your mate” recognition thing, it takes all the fun out of it. But I did like the seal-kid rescue part. Amongst Our Weapons — Ben Aaronovitch (2022)That’s more like it: a novel in the main sequence that feels like it has some plot progression. Though there was a thing where a previous character was mentioned/reintroduced in such a way that it made it clear to me that she’d be appearing in the book, which was a bit clunky, but I was so glad to be seeing her again I didn’t mind. I think I may give up on the novellas, they feel like trivial side quests and I don’t really enjoy them, but the full-length books are still fun. Lots of good things in this episode. But don’t start here, this is book 9, for goodness’ sake—start with book 1. Mad Tuscans and Their Families — Elizabeth W. Mellyn (2014) Really excellent non-fiction book about the treatment of the mentally ill and mentally handicapped in Renaissance Tuscany, largely drawn from legal records, and absolutely fascinating. Sometimes people are claiming someone is mad to get out of contracts. Sometimes someone is raving and attacking people in the streets. The solutions are patched together and sometimes work and sometimes don’t, and sometimes we don’t know what happened, only what all the participants in the trial said—and sometimes we don’t have the outcome either. A really great read, and thought-provoking too. Very readable as well as thoughtful and kind. Recommended if you’re at all interested. Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief — Maurice Leblanc (1907), translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos Absolutely delightful series of stories about a French thief who’s impossibly good at his job, and how he gets away with things. Not quite heist stories, but part of what carved out the genre space for heist stories to exist later. These are ridiculously fun, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them. I was suitably surprised by the surprise appearance of Sherlock Holmes—apparently this was unauthorised fanfic and Leblanc got into trouble for it. It’s interesting to see Holmes as he was seen in 1907. But the real joy here is Lupin on the train, Lupin on the boat, Lupin in prison… tons of fun. In Italy for Love — Leonie Mack (2024) Romance novel set in Italy, and a surprisingly good one. A young Australian woman who has come to Italy for love and had a terrible time and is ready to leave goes to a different part of Italy to wait for things she needs to wait for, and finds actual love there. Well written, very good Italy, surprisingly plausible romance. It’s so great when one of these turns out to be actually good. Must read more Mack. Thieves’ Dozen —Donald Westlake (2004) Re-read. Collection of short stories about Dortmunder, and therefore also heist stories—I enjoyed the Lupin so much I felt like reading something else in the same general space. These are light and fun, and some of them are much better than others. I don’t know who I’d recommend these to—if you’ve read Dortmunder already you probably know about them, and if you haven’t they’re not where to start. (What’s the Worst That Could Happen? is where to start.) Fun to revisit. Teacup Magic: The First Collection — Tansy Rayner Roberts (2021)Oh, these were such fun. Finally, romantasy that I like! Beautifully silly worldbuilding, taken seriously. There’s a romance, there are mystery plots, the whole thing is fluffy but interesting and fun. I don’t know why I like this and have found other books in the genre that are very similar boring—maybe it’s that Tansy Rayner Roberts is a very good writer with the right kind of light hand? Or that she knows what worldbuilding is so she gives just enough to hold together? I don’t think it was just that I was in the mood for it, because I was in the mood for the others when I tried them. Anyway, these are Heyer-with-magic in the same vein as Sorcery & Cecelia and I commend them to your attention. There are more, and I’ll be reading them. Spring Magic — D.E. Stevenson (1942)No actual magic, sadly. A girl who has never asserted herself goes for a holiday in Scotland in 1941 and everything turns out for the best. Good Scotland, good Blitz, good portrayal of children, as always in Stevenson. Surprisingly good portrayals of different kinds of marriages. Not top tier Stevenson, but engaging. And I am endlessly fascinated by the fiction set in WWII and written while it was going on, as opposed to written historically. There are a whole lot of things that have become part of our canon of Blitz, evacuation, etc, which had not yet solidified, and also we know the shape of the war and what happened, and a German landing in northern Scotland in 1942 didn’t happen, so nobody writing now would have a regiment there to prevent one. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Vol 1 (1845) Re-read. How I love these letters, how I love RB and EBB, how they love each other and work hard on understanding that. You probably know the plot—her father was very possessive, she was an invalid, and spoiler: They run away to Italy at the end of volume 2, which I haven’t read since 1988, because there wasn’t an ebook of volume 2 the last time I read volume 1. But now there is! If you like the letters in A.S. Byatt’s Possession you will like this book, in which two Victorian poets go from strangers to friends to being in love. I was in the middle of this (it’s very long) when I read the sonnets last month and got them in full context. He was sending her all his work and she was critiquing it, but she didn’t show him those sonnets, which most people think are her best work, until they were in Italy. From the sonnets and the letters I could tell you which days she wrote them, but she didn’t show anyone. Reading these letters I keep thinking of the thing in Possession where Roland considers how letters are written with a recipient in mind but just that recipient, not posterity. These letters were not written for us, but for each other, but now they’re not here and the letters remain, we may as well enjoy them. I love them so much and I want them to be happy even though I know things about love they do not know. On to volume 2! Strange Bedpersons (1994), The Cinderella Deal (1996) — Jennifer Crusie Both re-reads and bath books. Crusie has written about how these books both have the same plot, and they do, and that makes it fascinating to read them as a pair and see how different they are… how the same writer can take the same plot and make it something completely different. Cinderella Deal was the version she wanted to write, Strange Bedpersons is the version her editor insisted on. They both have good, different things going on. They both have the plot of a cold man inviting a warm woman to pretend to be his fiancée for a weekend, which turns into something real. Both the women grow, even if they don’t grow up. Comparing them, the detail, the beats and the rhythms, is a very good exercise in how books work. They’re also a lot of fun. Crusie is too compelling to read as a bath book, a chapter at a time. Lots of times the water got cold as I read just a bit more. Heart of the Matter — Emily Giffin (2010) Re-read. Very odd book, with its sympathies in an odd place. There are two women and one man, a doctor. The women are his wife and the mother of one of his patients. And Giffin isn’t good at knowing when she’s made a character seem selfish and unsympathetic to me. Mainly she does it by writing about people with so much privilege I just roll my eyes at their problems, and that is very much the case here. Elfin Music: An Anthology of English Fairy Poetry — Arthur Edward Waite (2005) Actually Victorian, not originally published in 2005, a collection of poems on “elfin” themes. Some of them are great, some of them are the kind of awful Tolkien talks about in “On Fairy-Stories.” Really interesting to read them all together, especially as Waite includes centuries’ worth of poetry in English, without the work that has come after and become our genre. Some of them are seminal, some very much are not. Free online, and an illuminating if not exactly fun read. I Think I’m in Love With an Alien — Ann Aguirre (2025)This was great. A chat group for people who are into alien abduction and aliens and Roswell nonsense where it turns out that… I mean you can guess, right? But Aguirre does it very well, and this was a delight. Making History — K.J. Parker (2025)A new novella from Parker, what a treat! While his novels are usually military history in made up worlds, his shorter work is often metaphysically interesting. This concerns an attempt to make up some fake history to justify a war that backfires spectacularly. Like most Parker, it’s a fast, absorbing read. The Eights — Joanna Miller (2025) Much-lauded first novel about women at Oxford in the immediate aftermath of the Great War which was just a notch shallower than I wanted it to be. The women had mysterious pasts, which all turned out to be very unsatisfying—revelation is a hard problem. When the author keeps something back from the reader there should be a reason for it, and when it is revealed it shouldn’t be the obvious guess. This was good enough to keep me reading but there was never quite enough to get my teeth into. [end-mark] The post Jo Walton’s Reading List: November 2025 appeared first on Reactor.

Books Memory The Most Surprising Book Trend Right Now: Memory-Sharing New works exploring crucial questions of identity, and the way memory can be politicized and repressed… By Charlie Jane Anders | Published on January 12, 2026 Photo: Bret Kavanaugh [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Bret Kavanaugh [via Unsplash] If you asked someone to name the main trends in genre book publishing from the past year or two, they’d probably mention romantasy, cozy fiction, horror and a few other things. But I’ve been blown away by a sleeper trend lately: novels about people storing their memories remotely, gaining access to someone else’s memories, or sharing a memory with another person. In general, memory seems to be on a lot of people’s minds lately. Just recently, I’ve loved a ton of books on this theme. The notion of copying, storing, and sharing memories isn’t exactly new—in fact, I played with it quite a bit in my novel The City in the Middle of the Night. (Yoko Ogawa’s influential The Memory Police also deals with the ways our memories are controlled and overseen.) But this new wave of novels is using the concept to explore deep questions about personal identity, as well as the ways that our memories can be politicized and policed by repressive regimes.  To find out more about this topic, I talked to four authors of recent books that deal with this concept in various fascinating ways. (I also reviewed some books on this theme a while back for The Washington Post.)  One of my favorite books of 2025 was The Antidote, the long-awaited new novel by Karen Russell. The Antidote is the sobriquet of a prairie witch in dustbowl-era Nebraska, who acts as a sort of bank vault for people to store their unpleasant memories—with the promise that you can retrieve the memory later when you need it. But after a catastrophic dust storm, the Antidote and other prairie witches find their vaults cleaned out, all the stored memories gone forever.  The Antidote turns into an examination of buried historical trauma, especially the attempted genocide of Native Americans—thanks in part to a New Deal photographer’s magical camera that takes pictures of the past and future. In writing The Antidote, Russell says, “I was interested in what happens when people are unable or unwilling to reckon with the past, in the exiling of memories from our waking consciousness and from our public histories, those things that many of us must continuously forget or suppress in order to go on living as we do, and how that ‘collapse of memory’ harms us individually and collectively.” Russell adds, “I do think that whatever else a memory might be, it’s never the fullness of what happened. It’s always a (re)creation, never static or inert.” And that “these secrets that can feel so private and so personal, can become, in aggregate, something like a mass denial. Who and what we exclude from our family stories and collective histories has tremendous consequences, for all of us.” Russell says that while she was researching the novel that became The Antidote, she learned about an astonishing act of curatorial violence. Everyone has seen the iconic Dust Bowl photographs taken by New Deal photographers like Dorothea Lange—but the architect of this program, Roy Stryker, used a hole-punch to destroy the photographic negatives he didn’t want to include, in what Russell calls “an act of artistic curation and in some cases political calculation.” Russell says there’s a “shadow archive of unpublished and hole-punched negatives,” suppressed for decades, which you can now view online at the Library of Congress. Russell kept returning to one particular image of “a student with a hole-punched ear,” and “that hole-punched negative came to feel like the heart of this novel.” Another book I loved in 2025, Mia Tsai’s The Memory Hunters, takes place in a world where some special people, like Key, can harvest memories from other people. Key can also unearth memories from people who lived long ago, using a complex process involving mushrooms. When Key finds an old forbidden memory that contradicts the official record and threatens the political order, she’s forced to hide it—but the memory is taking over her personality and she’s in danger of losing herself. Her bodyguard and lover, Vale, is forced to take drastic measures to save her. Tsai says she’s always been fascinated by the concept of memory. “Memory is magic!” she says. “How can something so crucial and something we stake our lives and personalities on be so easily tampered with?” Tsai points out that a lot of books that came out in the past year were probably acquired in 2023, and written in 2020-2022, if not earlier. And there’s one thing about the early 2020s that seems especially relevant to her.  Says Tsai: I think the wave of memory-related books has a lot to do with how we’ve been gaslit as a nation over how devastating Covid has been and continues to be (plus the global gaslighting over the genocides to which we’re daily witnesses). What we experienced and what we remember does not match up with what we’re being told. And invalidating a memory is so deeply personal. It’s hurtful and provocative to say, “No, that’s not how it went.” The gaslighting began before Covid, of course, and the first Trump administration was already bombarding us with lies and trying to erase the very existence (and accomplishments) of marginalized communities. All this, while “burying our ability to process beneath continual outrage,” says Tsai. “In a way, sharing memories to verify their realness became a way to bond with someone else, a way to confirm that what we experienced was real, unbelievable as it was.” Tsai sums it up perfectly: “Memory-recording lets us know we were there and it happened; memory-sharing proves we were alive and not alone.” Recently, Tsai visited some Civil War battlegrounds, and saw a monument to Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. Nearby, there was a sign entitled, “The War Over Memory,” which detailed “one of America’s first great delusions,” or one of our earliest propaganda campaigns, “the effects of which we’re still feeling 160 years later.” It’s not just that we’re being lied to about events that we personally witnessed, says author Seth Haddon—it’s that we have more ability to witness those events than at any other time in history, because we’re all connected. We can share the experiences of people around the world who are “enduring violence, displacement, [and] oppression.” And at the same time, mainstream and official narratives present a very different picture of reality. “This gap between lived (or viewed?) experience and official stories has made the question of memory feel newly urgent,” says Haddon. In Haddon’s great space-opera novella Volatile Memory, a trans scavenger named Wylla finds a mask that gives her enhanced abilities—but when she wears the mask, she also experiences the memories and consciousness of the dead person who wore it before, a woman named Sable. Haddon uses the sharing of Sable’s memories to ask some deep questions about how our memories make us who we are, but also how our embodiment shapes our experience of being alive. Haddon says that the notion of “preserving the self” is even more important when we’re under so much pressure to deny what we’re witnessing. The main way we can preserve the self is by holding on to memory, “even if it can’t be free from personal/contextual bias.” Our memories end up “feeling more intimate and trustworthy than the flood of information we receive from elsewhere, especially in a time when so many sources feel compromised.” We feel as though an individual person’s memories are “purer and more authentic” than the narrative shared by a lot of people, even if the notion of authenticity is inherently messy. Yiming Ma’s fascinating These Memories Do Not Belong to Us takes the theme of censorship and repression to a further extent, taking place in a future dominated by a new Qin Empire, in which everybody has a Mindbank that records their memories. Some past memories are contraband, either because they have subversive themes that the government disapproves of or because they contain historical events that the government wants to cover up. Ma’s novel in stories contains a narrative assortment of forbidden memories, which the main character has inherited after the death of his mother. Ma says that he was interested in resilience when he wrote These Memories, because it’s by having a shared narrative that we can “stay resilient and resist” during times of political turbulence. This shared narrative can come from writing that explores “both individual and collective memory.”  Ma also was inspired by the fact that researchers have continued to make a lot of new discoveries about how memories are made and stored. For example, scientists have new evidence that memories can be stored outside the brain, and that our memories are dynamic rather than static, meaning that we are constantly revising them every time we revisit them. And that long-term memories can form independently from short-term memories. Ma was also inspired by research that reveals that some people cannot form mental images, which shows “how differently we all experience our memories and dreams.” I was also struck by a moment in the recent novel Slow Gods by Claire North. An artificial intelligence explains that artificial minds store memories the same way humans do: by compressing them into narratives with most of the details stripped out, because the raw sensory data is too huge to store in the long term. I also found it fitting that the last book I read in 2025 was There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm, in which monsters go around devouring people’s memories, and one particularly terrifying monster kills anyone who can remember that it exists.  What I’ve personally gotten from this recent flood of books (and what I tried to explore in The City in the Middle of the Night) is that even though we fixate on individuality—the notion that one person’s experience is totally unique—the more we can share our experiences, the more we can realize that we are one. That our fates, and our pasts, are bound together, and memory is always, on some level, collective as well as personal.  I also increasingly think that being able to experience another person’s memories is a higher form of empathy—and empathy is something we are all longing for right now, in the midst of so much performative cruelty. Not to mention community, which can only be formed by the feeling of shared heritage. (And heritage is in many ways just another word for memory.) Says Tsai, “I don’t feel this every day, but I certainly do now: What a glory it is to continue surviving and making memories with others.”[end-mark] This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown. Buy the Book The City in the Middle of the Night Charlie Jane Anders Buy Book The City in the Middle of the Night Charlie Jane Anders Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The post The Most Surprising Book Trend Right Now: Memory-Sharing appeared first on Reactor.