News Fallout How Fallout Season 2 Avoided Making a New Vegas Ending Canon Fallout Season 2 avoided committing to one of New Vegas’ optional endings (at least for now) By Matthew Byrd | Published on February 4, 2026 Photo: Prime Video Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Prime Video Note: This article contains spoilers for Fallout Season 2. Fallout Season 2’s showrunners did indeed fulfill their promise of not canonizing one of Fallout: New Vegas’ optional endings, though the season’s final episode raises some new questions about how long they can keep dancing around the series’ canon.  As we’ve previously discussed, Prime Video’s Fallout series is considered to be a canonical entry in the greater Fallout video game franchise. The show is set about 10 years after the most recent Fallout game (Fallout 4), which theoretically affords the showrunners plenty of space to tell their own story without having to connect quite so many dots along the way.  In reality, the situation has never been quite so clean. The Fallout franchise is not only notorious for refusing to clearly answer certain questions about the events that transpired before and between its various entries, but some of the games allow players to essentially pick their own endings based on the choices they make along the way.  Because many of the Fallout games take place in different regions across a fairly long timeline, those optional endings are rarely an issue. However, Fallout Season 2 is set in and around the New Vegas area, which means that it seemingly had to address what actually happened in the 2010 game, Fallout: New Vegas. Specifically, the show seemingly had to commit to one of Fallout: New Vegas’ four major optional endings: Ending 1 – The player sides with the Caesar’s Legion faction. The Legion conquers the area and forces the New California Republic to retreat.  Ending 2 – The player sides with the New California Republic. The NCR reclaims New Vegas and the surrounding wasteland.  Ending 3 – The player goes their own way and essentially rules over New Vegas with the help of a Securitron robot known as Yes Man.  Ending 4 – The player helps Mr. House take control of New Vegas and drive both the NCR and Caesar’s Legion from the wasteland.  There are further optional variations between those endings, but ultimately, only one faction could rule over New Vegas at the end of the day. Because Fallout Season 2 is set about 15 years after the events of Fallout: New Vegas, surely the show would have to tell us what actually happened at the end of that game, right? Right? Well, not exactly. At first, it felt like Fallout Season 2 was going to canonize the Mr. House ending. After all, Robert House is one of the season’s biggest villains, and his continued existence (even if he’s only shown via a TV screen in the “present” timeline) suggests that he must have survived long enough to retain control over New Vegas. The fact that the Legion and NCR are a shadow of their former selves in that region also supports the idea that neither took control over the New Vegas area at the end of the game.  However, the final episode of Fallout Season 2 sees The Ghoul finally confront the digitized version of Mr. House in New Vegas. House informs The Ghoul that it’s “good to be alive again” and notes that “wandering travellers” have tried to assassinate him in various ways over the years. The Ghoul cuts House off before he can elaborate on that fascinating tidbit, but House’s point is made all the same. There is at least the suggestion that he did not survive and thrive following the events of New Vegas’ ending but rather rebooted himself as some kind of fail safe sometime after.  For their part, the Prime Video Fallout creative team not only refuses to commit to a clear answer but suggests that the ambiguity of that scenario is very much the point.  “Oftentimes, it’s intentional that things are up for interpretation, and we have our own view of things that, you know, this series is gonna go on for a while yet,” says Fallout producer Todd Howard in a recent interview. “But I think it’s good to open up those conversations, and you may get history, you may get conflicting reports on how some things went.” Ah, the old “Eh, who can say?” explanation that sometimes seems to have become increasingly popular since The Force Awakens suggested that people conveniently forgot about the events of the original Star Wars trilogy in a record amount of time. Though the suggetion that we’re simply only getting one (possibly inaccurate) side of the story is designed to be hard to dispute, it has already started arguments among fans about whether a non-answer is really an answer at all. Said arguments are fuelled by the ways the show otherwise seemingly alters other parts of the Fallout canon or teases answers to previously intentionally ambiguous questions. For instance, Fallout Season 2 introduces the former President of the United States as a character, and the season finale suggests that he and the Enclave may have been the ones who started the Great War. Showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet suggests she doesn’t see things “that way” and that they really only want to “open the question” about the Enclave and the President’s involvement. Such plot points are, perhaps, red herrings disguised as revelations. Continuously playing with fire regarding what did and did not happen prior to the events of the Fallout TV series is undoubtedly a dangerous game. Along with the risk of providing the “wrong” answers in the minds of some (which can sometimes mean providing any answers at all), there is the risk of continuously teasing reveals that can never really be delivered. But with Fallout Season 3 already in pre-production, it seems that the series will have plenty of time to see where it fits into the greater Fallout universe while telling its own (so far largely compelling) stories. Ultimately, perhaps there is no greater constant in the Fallout universe than ambiguity. [end-mark] The post How <i>Fallout</i> Season 2 Avoided Making a <i>New Vegas</i> Ending Canon appeared first on Reactor.

News The Exorcist Chiwetel Ejiofor Joins Mike Flanagan’s Exorcist Movie Perhaps he will be the one doing some exorcising? By Molly Templeton | Published on February 4, 2026 Screenshot: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Netflix The horrors are coming along nicely. In 2024, Mike Flanagan signed on for a new Exorcist film—one that was originally assumed to be the follow-up to David Gordon Green’s poorly received The Exorcist: Believer. But Flanagan is instead doing his own thing. In November, Scarlett Johansson signed on to star in a film that is reportedly a “radical new take” on the Exorcist franchise, set in the same universe as the 1973 original. It was previously announced that Johansson will be joined by Jacobi Jupe (Hamnet), who plays her child, and Diane Lane, whose role remains unknown. One is tempted, of course, to assume that young Jupe will wind up possessed, in keeping with the plot of the original film, but one actually knows nothing at all. Perhaps this time it’s a mother facing possession. Flanagan, who is writing and directing, is not exactly known for taking the most straightforward options. Now we’ve got one more star in a mysterious role: Chiwetel Ejiofor (The Old Guard, Children of Men) has also joined the cast, reuniting him with his Life of Chuck director. (Flanagan does love to reuse his ensemble!) According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Sources say the actor will be playing an ex-con turned priest.” The Exorcist is expected to begin production in New York City next month. It’s set to begin haunting theaters on March 12, 2027.[end-mark] The post Chiwetel Ejiofor Joins Mike Flanagan’s <i>Exorcist </i>Movie appeared first on Reactor.

Books Reading the Weird Plan B From Outer Space: Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster (Part 11) Mareva deals with the cosmic apocalypse in the conclusion of Sister, Maiden, Monster By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on February 4, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Chapters 29-30 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster. The book was first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead! Erin sprouts a new growth from her temple: “a shiny gray-headed protrusion about the size of a golf ball.” Mar worries. Erin may be a monster now, but she still sometimes reveals the old Erin. Erin summons Mar to a toolshed rendezvous. Savannah’s asleep with baby dodecapod Gregory curled around her. Mar feels guilty about her unmotherly repulsion. Surely the helpless creature deserves better than Savannah. Erin, she sees with horror, has clawed off her temple growth, exposing her brain. A gray umbilical cord trails from the wound to a jellylike blob cradled in her taloned hand. She growls that she can’t “ascend” with the “memories” this “cerebryo” holds, and she forces Mar to swallow it. Two images flash through Mar’s mind: a coffee can holding an antique key and a hidden keyhole in a basement wall. Erin instructs her to use the key when “the stars are right.” What’s behind the wall will enable Mar to choose her future, though neither choice will be “benign.” Next morning Mar wakes to Savannah cursing out “Michael” for not warning her that the “Cleaving” was imminent. Now she can’t get a proper supply of scalpels and sutures. What’s the Cleaving? Better Mar doesn’t know the details. Just stay inside today, especially after sundown. From her room, Mar watches Savannah haul cutlery and tarps into the barn. Her labors done, Savannah collapses with Gregory. From the barn come Archivist screams, “at once dreadful and thrilling.” Mar finds the monsters “rutting into each other… and slashing themselves open with knives.” Erin leads the “grisly congregation” in a litany about “existing in and with one another,” and rising to the “Mother of All” by escaping “the forms of this world.” As the Archivists staple and stitch each other together, Mar realizes what the Cleaving is. From Erin’s memories, she now knows Dr. Shapiro’s whereabouts, but also knows she can’t escape the manor yet. On the sixth morning after the Cleaving, tremors shake Mar awake. A gigantic sky-hole opens over the city, a portal to a huge ringed planet. A massive space ship emerges. With Erin screaming that it’s time to “join our masters in the star shadows,” the fused Archivists fly to the ship. Savannah sighs that one day she’ll get her own wings. Mar asks if all the humans are dead. Savannah doesn’t know. Regardless, it’s just Mar and Savannah and Gregory now—at least until Mar has more squiddos. * * * With the Archivists gone, Erin’s memories “blossom” in Mar’s mind. She sneaks into the manor basement, finds the antique key and a keyhole hidden behind a switchplate. The key triggers a wall to slide back, revealing a wood-paneled study like what “a wealthy, educated gentleman of yesteryear” would have built. From the LED lights in the gas fixtures and some modern books among the aged esoteric tomes, she figures Mayne updated the place. There’s also a vinyl record on top of a turntable. On its cover is a strange yellow symbol and the title Into the Hands of the Living God. A “dreadful urge” makes her play the record. Atonal music sounds from a solo violin, and Mar lapses into vision. She’s standing above a wave-swept lake. Overhead shine three moons, twin suns, and three black stars. The starlight drives her to “transcendent darkness.” Footsteps approach. Through tears she sees a figure dressed in yellow robes. His face is “blank, pale,” but he says he wears no mask. He’s come to show Mar her future. At his touch, she’s transported a millennium forward. The Mayne manor’s gone; in its place is a “shuddering amorphous mass of gray-white flesh,” over which crawl monsters that pull “squirming larvae” from its numberless birthing sacs. The blob’s only feature is a vast maw lined with humanish teeth, which the monsters constantly feed. It’s what Mar will become, the yellow-clad stranger says: Earth’s “new fertility deity. All powerful yet helpless. Wise yet mindless. Revered and yet an abomination.” Mar begs the stranger to kill her, but even he can’t overcome the immortality imposed by his “adversaries.” But he offers a choice. If she accepts the gift he’ll leave for her, she’ll have no more offspring. She’ll prevent the repopulation of Earth and be free to live out her immortality as she chooses, in a world “silent but for the wind in the trees and the waves crashing upon the empty shores, just as [he wishes] it to be.” Waking in the study, Mar finds a ring carved from human bone and inlaid with the Yellow Sign. When she puts it on, it sinks spikes into her bone, becoming immovable. At once she feels her embryo cysts subsiding. “Hallelujah,” she whispers. Savannah’s “scared and furious.” She can’t pull the ring off, but a meat cleaver should do the job. Mar punches Savannah unconscious, strength enhanced by the ring. But she can’t murder her jailer. Instead she hurries to pack. Leaving, she sees Gregory sleeping in his aquarium-crib. She has three choices. She can leave him with Savannah. She can euthanize him (but how?). Or— Mar steels herself to pick up Gregory. His red skin is covered with velvety silver fuzz. He’s warm and just slightly squishy. A little fishy-smelling. But his eyes are blue, like Leila’s. Though her “rat brain” tells her she knows nothing about babies, human or alien, her “superstitious mind” tells her to have faith—she’ll figure this out. She asks Gregory if he wants to come look for Dr. Shapiro. He yawns and garbles: “Agafa!” She’ll take that as a yes. What’s Cyclopean: “Cleaving” is an autoantonym: it means both cutting apart and binding together. Boy howdy, does it ever mean both of those things this week. Libronomicon: Mark Mayne’s secret office has been repurposed, but still contains High Performance Habits and High Growth Habits. Neither of those seems particularly useful at this stage of world history, unless you use very different definitions of “high,” “performance,” and “growth.” Of course, Mareva doesn’t open them, so maybe they are about reshaping your body to ascend into the stars, and/or to grow eldritch infants. Weirdbuilding: Wave hello to Erich Zann and the King in Yellow. Madness Takes Its Toll: “On drugs” is not really necessary at this point to explain Savannah’s mania. Or her suggestion to Mareva that “psychologically, ignorance is your friend”. Anne’s Commentary In the “Acknowledgements” for Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy Snyder thanks Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon for soliciting “Magdala Amygdala” for their Dark Faith: Invocations anthology. She adds a special thank you to Broaddus for sending her favorite editorial acceptance ever: “Lucy, what the fuck is wrong with you? Good grief that story was messed up. Thanks. I think.” About the novel that grew out of “Magdala Amygdala” and Savannah’s origin story, “My Knowing Glance,” I’d like to echo Broaddus’s sentiments. I’m sure that he doesn’t really assume dark fiction writers must be deranged. I’m sure he didn’t really think “Magdala Amygdala” was “messed up,” except in a good way. As Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre, messing around in the darkest recesses of one’s own—and one’s reader’s—mind is legitimate practice: “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.” Snyder does plenty of terrifying and horrifying in Sister, Maiden, Monster, but I’ve got to say it’s in the sheer volume, inventiveness and outright unabashedness of her body horror that the novel excels. “Body horror” is the polite term for “gross-out,” right? And it encompasses sexual horror as well as guts-and-gore and miscellaneous biological ickinesses? Or put sexual horror in its own category, if you prefer, in which case S, M, M excels in both categories, and also in the subcategory of reproductive horror. Gregory’s birth may outdo the C-section via vampire teeth in Breaking Dawn. But in a good way: it’s kind of neat that the Mother of Calamities can do her own c-sections. At least until she evolves into an amorphous gray mass without any limbs to wield scalpel-claws. Fortunately, by that time she’ll have birthed enough squiddos to serve as midwives, “pulling squirming larvae from fleshy sacs that rupture like boils.” No, nuh-uh, I cannot—this is Dr. Pimple Popper on a cosmic scale. In her final form, I just realized, Mar must look like a protoshoggoth in labor. Or even like Azathoth Itself, given the King in Yellow’s description of this final metamorphosis as a terrible deification in which Mar would become a “living god,” but also “All-powerful yet helpless. Wise yet mindless. Revered and yet an abomination.” Given the looseness of abomination nomenclature in the Cthulhu Mythos, it’s difficult to exactly categorize the entities using Snyder’s PVG virus to transform Earth into their latest breeding colony. Erin and Savannah refer to the deities they see in their visions as the “old gods” and describe them as “whispering to me from their thrones in the dark spaces between the stars.” My first impression is that their “old gods” are the primal and ultimate entities more “properly” referred to as the Outer Gods: Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath and Nyarlathotep are those best “known” to humans, though “unknowable.” In a letter to James F. Morton, Lovecraft wrote that “Great Old One” Cthulhu is the offspring of Nug, who is the offspring of Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath. The prominence of cephalopod-like creatures among Mar’s present and future offspring suggests that it may be Cthulhu and his minions who are taking over Earth. This makes Mythosian sense given Derleth’s claim that Cthulhu and Hastur are half-brothers embroiled in eternal rivalry. One of Hastur’s principal manifestations is the King in Yellow, whose sigil is the Yellow Sign. Erin first sees the Yellow Sign in the hospital where she’s recovering from her initial bout with PVG; it’s set into the pavement of a courtyard. Staring at the weird symbol, Erin’s transported in vision to the Mayne manor, which she senses is a “keep fit for a king. Or a living god.” As Erin’s transforming into a winged Archivist, she again hears the “old gods” whispering, but she also hears a “faint, insistent whisper in the castle manor.” Somehow she knows her new masters wouldn’t approve of her listening to the second whisperer, but she cherishes it as her “special secret.” What’s in the manor basement is a hidden study where Mar will find a vinyl album emblazoned with the Yellow Sign and titled Into the Hands of the Living God. Listening to the record delivers Mar to a lake under twin suns, triplet moons, and black stars: Carcosa and Hali, where the King in Yellow will offer her an alternative to eternal squiddo production. Mar only discovers the hidden study through the memories which Erin literally feeds her before the Cleaving. Erin has to get rid of these memories in order to ascend, because they are associated with her secret alliance to the King, aka Cthulhu’s fraternal enemy Hastur, and it’s to the Team Cthulhu spaceship that the Archivists will joyfully flock. So the King in Yellow must have been plotting all along to sabotage Cthulhu’s Earth takeover by luring Mar, Cthulhu’s Mater Calamitas, to Team Hastur! Whew. The tortuous plot makes sense at last, or at least this is the sense I make of it. It’s a narrative road it has been well-worth following despite (or sorta because of) the frequent gooey patches! Ruthanna’s Commentary This has been a wild book. I have to confess, “birth control provided by the King in Yellow” was not on my bingo card. I’m glad they have Plan B in lost Carcosa. Even if they have it mostly because they prefer lifeless orbs to elder god remodeling styles. Planetary cancer or lunar desert? You decide! It’s not actually as bad as lunar desert, though. Humans have gotten purged, but as far as I can tell there was no universal slaughter of cows, platypuses, or pine trees. And the ocean is already full of mutated dodecapods. So with things not being overrun by cancer babies (doo de doo dah doo doo de doo, dah doo), there’s a solid foundation for ecosystem preservation and regrowth. Unless the King in Yellow has further plans, always possible. Erin dreamed of a god-king palace in the hills. Mayne Mansion doesn’t quite measure up – no god-kings here, as of the book’s end. So is Savannah going to set herself up as a death goddess? Or will it become a Carcosan monument? Given the secret interdimensional musical passage in the basement, I’m betting the latter. The door is open. Things can pass through in both directions. I’m betting the next thing through, when she wakes up, will be Savannah—and if she doesn’t get swatted for threatening the King, what will her gift look like? Ohhhhhh. Were the Carcosans also guiding the feds, suggesting sigils and processes most unhelpful for the elder gods’ long-term plans? That would explain a lot. We originally picked this book because I wanted something with all the angry queer girl cooties ever. Snyder has delivered in spades. Coming down to the end, I’m fascinated by our trinity of angry queer girls: Erin: lesbian (her sexually unexciting “fiancé” turns out to be an unfortunately-repressed egg; her passion is for Betty), angry about the kyriarchy and how she’s been pushed into a generic story about what you’re supposed to want. Archivist, accepts her eldritch “gifts” but doesn’t let the gods entirely override her human values or desires. Ultimate fate: cuts out her human values and gives them to Mareva, “cleaves” with Betty, ascends to join the biblically accurate abomination. Savannah: bi, angry about the kyriarchy and abuse. Culler and bodyguard, accepts her destiny and gives up her pre-existing morals (which she did seem to have, briefly) in favor of homicidal hedonism. Ultimate fate: uncertain. Maybe Carcosan gifts, maybe punishment for failing her mission, maybe ascension and new worlds where she can play slasher. Or maybe she’ll wander the barren earth, looking for things to kill so she can get one more orgasm. Mareva: ace, angry about how kyriarchy and abuse have fucked over her family in particular, and about the expectation that women (she and her sister in particular) should reduce themselves to brood mares just because gods say so. Intended to be the mindless magna mater, but holds onto her morals. Refuses her shitty destiny with Erin’s help. Ultimate fate: Immortal and unkillable, wandering what remains of Earth with baby Gregory, looking for food and shelter and survivors. I’m rooting for Mareva, and maybe even Gregory, and against all the super-kyriarchical powers trying to remake Earth in their preferred images. And for more messed-up stories from Snyder. Next week, we travel under other dangerous skies, populated by other leather-winged monsters, in Caitlin Kiernan’s “A Travelogue for Oneironautics.” You can find it in her Bright Dead Star collection. Then in two weeks, join us for our new longread: Stephen Graham Jones’ Buffalo Hunter Hunter![end-mark] Buy the Book Buffalo Hunter Hunter Stephen Graham Jones Buy Book Buffalo Hunter Hunter Stephen Graham Jones Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The post Plan B From Outer Space: Lucy Snyder’s <i>Sister, Maiden, Monster</i> (Part 11) appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club Man Facing Southeast: An Alien Perspective on Humanity’s Madness A lovely Argentinian arthouse film from the ’80s that deserves to be better known. By Kali Wallace | Published on February 4, 2026 Credit: Cinequanon Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Cinequanon Pictures Man Facing Southeast (Spanish: Hombre mirando al sudeste) (1986) Written and directed by Eliseo Subiela. Starring Lorenzo Quinteros, Hugo Soto, and Inés Vernengo. Two men sit across from each other in an office. One of them, a younger man with a healing wound on his head, explains in great earnestness how a suicide pact with his girlfriend went wrong. They planned to die together, he insists. But it went wrong. They only had four bullets. He couldn’t die with her. A psychiatrist listens to the man’s rambling confession, but his mind is wandering. He thinks about playing the saxophone. He thinks about Rene Magritte’s painting The Lovers II and imagines blood seeping from beneath the white cloths. He thinks about how the man before him needs a priest, not a doctor, and he won’t be able to help. He’ll give the man medication, drug him into a stupor, and watch him fade like all the other patients. As the man keeps talking, telling his story over and over again, the doctor thinks, “Welcome to hell.” That’s the opening scene of Eliseo Subiela’s Man Facing Southeast (Hombre mirando al sudeste), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 1986. The film was released in theaters in Argentina in 1987 and became a modest but respectable success, and it went international with a VHS release later that year. Man Facing Southeast was Subiela’s second feature film and far from his last; he would go on making odd, slightly fantastical, very artsy films until his death in 2016. Here we run into a problem. I know I sometimes make mistakes in researching for these articles, but I do genuinely try to find decent sources for all the information I include within the time I have available (i.e., less than a week). Sometimes there is so much information it’s hard to take in everything. And sometimes there is so little that I feel silly claiming to know anything at all. This is definitely one of the latter times. It’s not that I was expecting to find an abundance of easily accessible information about Subiela and his film. We’re talking about an arthouse film from Argentina in the ’80s, and I don’t know Spanish, which greatly limits my research. And it’s not that there’s nothing out there. It’s just that most English-language articles that mention Man Facing Southeast aren’t about the movie at all; they are about the American movies accused of plagiarizing it. We’ll get to that in a bit. Many sources report that Man Facing Southeast won an award at TIFF in 1986, but different articles say it was the People’s Choice Award (it wasn’t), or the Audience Award (which doesn’t exist), or the Critic’s Award (which is closer but not quite right), and others don’t bother to specify. The film is not listed on the TIFF website, which made me wonder if everybody was just repeating incorrect information. That’s not the case—it turns out that’s because the listing of the award Man Facing Southeast actually did win is incomplete. The Los Angeles Times write-up of TIFF from September 21, 1986, says, “Every festival has a ‘buzz’ film, one you can hear about in the movie lines and in the press rooms. This one was ‘Hombre Mirando al Sudeste,’ a haunting evocative 1986 work by Eliseo Subiela, little known outside Argentina, which came out of the Latin American program to win the International Critics’ Award.” At this point in my research I was very proud of myself for verifying one (1) fact. Let’s go back to the beginning, by which I mean the beginning of Eliseo Subiela’s film career. I’ve only been able to find one in-depth interview with Subiela that has been translated into English, and that’s in a 2007 article in the academic journal Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche. That’s where I got a lot of information about his life, even though, like most film directors, he has a tendency to self-mythologize in how he describes his experiences. Here is another scene to imagine: It’s the early 1960s in Buenos Aires. A seventeen-year-old boy is walking through the city carrying a brand new Bell and Howell 8mm film camera, which his father gave to him when he developed an interest in movies. He has a particular destination in mind, but he isn’t quite sure where it’s located, so he loiters around Plaza Constitución, watching the people pass through the square. He’s looking for a particular kind of person, and he finally finds them in the form of a “little old lady carrying a bag.” She leads him to where he wants to go, which is up to the gates of El Borda, or Hospital Interdisciplinario Psicoasistencial José Tiburcio Borda, a large psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires. That’s where the boy wants to make his first movie. I looked it up: the square and the hospital are about a 15-minute walk apart, so Subiela’s story about how he embarked upon his first project is at least plausible. That first film is a 17-minute documentary called The Long Silence (Un largo silencio) (1963) about life in El Borda. Subiela spent several months visiting the hospital, writing the script, filming and editing. In 1965 The Long Silence won the top prize at the Viña Del Mar Film Festival in Chile. Subiela, then twenty years old, was pleased with his short film’s success: “After expenses, I cleared $200, which in Argentina was quite a bit. The cost of the movie had been $100.” Subiela grew up in a tremendously tumultuous time in Argentina (the rise and fall of Juan Perón as president, the multiple coups d’état that followed), and his father’s ill health meant life at home was also stressful. He spent his teen years escaping to the cinema as much as he could, and it was there he fell in love with the avant-garde films of the French New Wave, as well as the neorealist work of Polish director Andrzej Wajda. But it would be a couple of decades before Subiela would start making his own feature films. Through the rest of the ’60s and ’70s, he worked on a few other projects, made commercials, drank too much, suffered some mental health problems, and traveled the world. He contributed a chapter of the film Argentina, May 1969: The Roads to Liberation! (Argentina, mayo de 1969: Los caminos de la liberación) (1969), but eventually drifted away from the cadre of Argentinian filmmakers active in militant and revolutionary groups. His reason: “I grew apart from those militant groups when I found out a lot of it had to do with fighting and killing.” Subiela released his first feature film The Conquest of Paradise (La conquista del paraíso) in 1981, and only after that did he return to both the idea and the location of his very first film. He went back to Hospital Borda—which has been in operation since 1865 and still is today—specifically to revisit what had drawn him there when he was a teenager. He would later say that it took him twenty-two years to realize that A Long Silence was a rough cut of what would become Man Facing Southeast. That’s how we find ourselves in the opening scene described above. Dr. Julio Denis (Lorenzo Quinteros) is a psychiatrist at Hospital Borda, but he doesn’t believe in his work anymore. He’s burned out, depressed, and lonely; he spends his free time drinking and playing saxophone and listlessly entertaining his kids as a divorced weekend dad. He doesn’t worry too much when an extra, unidentified person appears in his hospital ward. He thinks the newcomer, Rantés (Hugo Soto), has come to the hospital to hide away from the world. His primary concern is that Rantés has no apparent identification or connections; he wants to find out who this patient is so he can treat him. Julio is amused but not overly worried when Rantés claims to be an alien from outer space, come to Earth to observe an advanced sort of hologram to study humans. Julio believes Rantés got the hologram idea from the novel The Invention of Morel by Argentinian author Adolfo Bioy Casares; from that and other details, the doctor concludes that Rantés is likely an intelligent, well-educated, but troubled and delusional man. That’s enough to get him curious, and he finds himself engaged in a patient’s care for the first time in a while. The two men become friends, in a way, or at least as much as they can when one is convinced the other has no grip on reality. Both actors are fantastic in their roles, and their fond chemistry, even when they are disagreeing, carries the movie all the way through. There’s a constant push and pull between them: Julio is trying to find cracks in Rantés’ delusions, and Rantés is trying to get Julio to help him understand the passionate, emotional nature of humanity. Rantés even gets some work studying human brains in a medical laboratory, which seems like maybe the sort of job that should not be given to unidentified psychiatric patients. He hasn’t come to Earth alone, he says, but other alien agents have succumbed to the lure of human emotions and gone astray from their mission. We’re later introduced to Beatriz (Inés Vernengo), who at first claims to be a friend Rantés made outside the hospital, but later claims to be one of those wayward alien visitors. (One film writer has suggested that Beatriz’s surname, Dick, is a reference to Philip K. Dick and particularly his 1982 novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which I have not read.) Even though the question of whether Rantés is an alien or a delusional human is the backbone of the entire film, the movie isn’t really interested in answering it. There are scenes where Rantés demonstrates telekinetic powers—using them to help feed a hungry family in a diner, for example—but these scenes are framed from his point of view, not from the perspective of Julio or another observer. The movie builds up, in its leisurely, meandering way, to an inevitable breaking point. Julio, Rantés, and Beatriz go to an orchestral performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. During “Ode to Joy,” Rantés and Beatriz get up to dance, motivating others in the audience to do the same. Then Rantés interrupts the performance to take over as conductor. At the same time, the patients at the hospital react as though they too are in the audience and feeling the same infectious joy. They run and dance through the hospital in a crowd far too exuberant to qualify as a riot. In the aftermath, the police are called, Rantés is arrested, and the head of the hospital demands that Julio finally start taking his patient’s treatment seriously. Rantés is given the antipsychotic haloperidol, and he becomes depressed, angry, agitated, and eventually catatonic before he finally dies. It’s a sad ending, but also an inevitable one, and it leaves Julio without any certain answers about his patient and friend. This is not a film that is much interested in explaining itself, and I like that about it. It does not try to explain the truth underlying the story, nor give us any wink-nudge hints as to what we’re supposed to think. When Julio contemplates a torn photo of Rantés and Beatriz, he thinks about how it could be proof they are human friends or siblings suffering from folie à deux, but the missing half of the photograph means there is always going to be part of the story that he can’t know. This is a movie that wants to pose questions, not provide answers, and that’s underlined in every conversation Rantés and Julio have and the way they are constantly dancing around thoughts that are hard to pin down. How do we define sane and insane? Where does human emotion come from? Why are humans so consistently our own worst enemies? What’s the difference between perception and reality? It’s not that we, as viewers, can’t answer these questions; it’s just that the movie is not giving us gold stars for being convinced we have the right answers. Is Rantés crazy? Or an alien? Or even a Christ allegory? Yes. No. All of the above and none of the above. The film is asking us to think about it, the same way Rantés is asking Julio to think about it. That brings us to the necessary Hollywood footnote, which is the question of whether Iain Softley’s 2001 film K-PAX, based on the 1995 novel of the same name by Gene Brewer, is a shameless rip-off of Man Facing Southeast. First, a note: K-PAX was, in fact, the second time people looked at an American movie and saw Man Facing Southeast. The first time was the film Mr. Jones (1993), directed by Mike Figgis, which features a scene in which a psychiatric patient played by Richard Gere jumps on stage to conduct a Beethoven concert. Some articles claim that this scene is an acknowledged homage, but Subiela was pretty clear that nobody asked his permission or offered credit for the inspiration. The comparison to K-PAX goes beyond a single scene, however, and it’s one both viewers and film critics were making before K-PAX was even released. In 2001, Roger Ebert noted in his column that he was receiving numerous letters about the similarities. Subiela did pursue legal action but eventually stopped due to lack of funds; the matter was unresolved before his death in 2016. Brewer and Softley have always denied they were aware of Man Facing Southeast. But it doesn’t seem to have mattered, as a lot of film critics and cinephiles seem to take it as fact that K-PAX was based on Man Facing Southeast. I haven’t seen K-PAX, I’ve only watched the trailer, which is the sort of schmaltzy early ’00s movie trailer that could be tailormade to put me, personally, off ever wanting to see the movie. So I do not have an informed contribution to this debate. I only bring it up to acknowledge that, yes, the question is out there, and it’s unresolved, and it’s likely to remain that way. What I will say is that it’s unfortunate that Man Facing Southeast is often remembered only as the movie that may or may not have inspired another movie, because it’s a lovely movie in itself. It’s charming, perceptive, sad, and just weird enough. It wasn’t the first film to frame parallels between how we conceive of mental illness and a larger disillusionment with society, and it certainly wasn’t the last, but it’s touching and thoughtful, and I very much enjoyed its deceptive simplicity. Like the best sci fi and the best arthouse cinema, it is all about giving us space to contemplate what it means to be human. What do you think of Man Facing Southeast? Or its legacy, however disputed, in films that followed? I don’t recall who it was who suggested this movie in comments many months ago, but thank you for bringing it to my attention, whoever you are. Next week: A decade earlier and across the ocean, another alien came for a visit in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Find streaming sources.[end-mark] The post <i>Man Facing Southeast</i>: An Alien Perspective on Humanity’s Madness appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations Ten(ish) of the Best African Speculative Short Fiction Stories of 2025 Here are some of the speculative fiction gems that may have flown under the radar in 2025… By Wole Talabi | Published on February 4, 2026 Art by Jacobi Myles Comment 0 Share New Share Art by Jacobi Myles Another year has come and gone and with it, lots of good stories, despite the increasingly strange madness of the world at large. I spent most of my literary year writing my forthcoming novel The Fist of Memory, and attending book conventions/festivals but I still managed to find time to read because it’s my way of filling up the well, of recharging my own mind. And honestly, I love stories. Especially short fiction—these little literary tapas of concept, character and style that nourish me when I’m not quite up for the full meal of a novel. And naturally, a significant chunk of my reading is by my fellow African authors. Which is why every year since 2015, I have published a list of the African speculative short fiction1 that I read and enjoyed most. I do this to spotlight the stories I found propulsive, fascinating, compelling, interesting and wanted to let others know about too since African speculative fiction gems can sometimes fly under the radar or appear in unexpected venues. Plus, it’s always fun making these lists (you can find all the lists for previous years here.)  So, without further ado, here are ten or so of the best2 African speculative short fiction stories from 2025, in no particular order. 1. “The Inheritance” by C.T. Muchemwa (Zimbabwe) — FIYAH Magazine Muchemwa had an interesting year with two stories in major venues that I found and enjoyed. “The Wanderer” about a man whose spirit goes seeking his son, and this one, “The Inheritance”—about a son named Taona, who inherits a money-making spiritual entity (a chikwambo) from his estranged father—which is my pick for this list. Stories about sinister magic-for-wealth schemes are common in many African (and global) cultures but what makes Muchemwa’s tale stand out are a) the vivid writing and b) precise control of tone. It manages to be a comedy, dark fantasy and as more is revealed, outright horror. The ending is also pitch perfect. An excellent story. [While you’re reading this issue of FIYAH check out “Slipcraft” by Jarune Ujuwaren (Nigeria/USA), which is also a great story in its own right and could have easily made this list.]  2. “Liberation” by Tade Thompson (Nigeria/UK) — Reactor Tade Thompson’s sharp, propulsive, compelling style works brilliantly in this science fictional novelette about the first African team and spacecraft sent to orbit the planet and the very Nigerian way (another military coup anyone?) the mission goes wrong. Through shifting PoVs and flashbacks we follow Udo Johnson, selected to be part crew, and Romeo “Bash” Bashorun who heads the mission, filling us in on how and why it was built, what exactly goes wrong and the mad scramble to survive when it does. It’s a brilliant story and I struggled between picking this and Tade’s other wonderful 2025 story in Uncanny magazine, “The Flaming Embusen” (check it out too, it’s great) but in the end, this is the one I personally enjoyed more (perhaps because some of its plot elements echo my novel The Fist of Memory). Highly recommended.  3. “If Memory Serves” by Kevin Rigathi (Kenya) — Will This Be A Problem? The Anthology: Issue V Having read and reviewed previous issues of Will This Be A Problem? The Anthology, it’s amazing to see just how much the anthology series continues to improve in quality and scope. There are many excellent stories in Issue V (there is another one on this list), but one of my favorites was Kevin Rigathi’s “If Memory Serves”. It’s set in a future where a corporation has perfected a mass-produced memory-wiping process, profiting by extracting memories from the poor and selling them to the rich and the privileged who want to experience the joys and hardships of others. Those who wipe are avoiding difficult memories but the more they wipe their memories, the more damage they do to themselves and the less human they become. We follow the man who invented the procedure as he slowly comes to realize that he too has become a victim of the system he helped create. It’s a chilling, twisty story with effective prose that challenges readers’ assumptions, something that fans of movies like Memento and Shutter Island will probably appreciate.  4. “We Begin Where Infinity Ends” by Somto Ihezue (Nigeria) — Clarkesworld Magazine In this slow-building novelette, Naeto, a young inventor and Gozi, his friend, are secretly changing their town’s streetlights, making them softer in an effort to bring back the fireflies that have migrated away because of the light pollution. They are found out by a girl named River who is also quite capable, and she joins their friend group, triggering a series of emotional and environmental reckonings which are both tragic and heartwarming. I loved a lot of the Clarkesworld stories I read this year (I also published a novella “Descent” with them!) and this story was one of my highlights. This novelette shines not so much for its speculative element but for its complicated, sweet, and engaging characters, the nuanced focus on their relationships and Somto’s characteristically exquisite prose.  5. “Sarah Ogoke And The Urban Legends” by Amanda Ilozumba (Nigeria) — Omenana And “When Two Sorcerers Collide” by T.L. Huchu (Zimbabwe) — Zamashort I usually enjoy urban/contemporary fantasy stories with an African twist (I mean, I even wrote a novel about one!), and 2025 gave us many excellent ones in all lengths from novels like Nkereuwem Albert’s The Bone River and TL Huchus’s Secrets Of The First School to short fiction like these the two I have decided to include as a tie in one entry here, because it was hard to choose just one out of all the options. Also, I always have at least one tie in every year’s list and consistency is important. “Sarah Ogoke And The Urban Legends” is a wild, fun ride with heart. Our protagonist is an “expurgist” who tries to steal a mythical artifact and ends up roped into a scheme to save a host of supernatural entities and characters from local urban legends from a greater evil. It’s witty, quippy, and briskly moves and features unexpected and cool mythical characters like Madam Koi Koi and a talking bush baby. It was the most memorable of all the Omenana magazine stories I read in 2025. “When Two Sorcerers Collide” is part of the Zamashort series brought to us by AfroSF legend Ivor Hartmann and it serves as a prequel to Huchu’s just concluded Edinburgh Nights series. It takes place on Halloween night in Harare and narrates the first meeting of two characters from the series. Safe to say if you enjoyed Edinburgh Nights, you’ll love this story of two very different sorcerers from different parts of the world and unique backgrounds facing down an ancient evil in a place with roots deep as magic itself.  6. “Shadow Jack” by CL Hellisen (South Africa) — Giganotosaurus How do I describe this story? Weird, dark, intense, beautiful, strange, surreal, unsettling, and vivid all come to mind. It’s a story about a group of boys called “Jacks” who serve in a strange religious order that may or may not be drifting in space. Their role is to clean up after priests who make regular animal and human sacrifices to their strange dark gods in an attempt to ascend (merge with the gods and become divine entities). Eventually the boys are sacrificed too. Our protagonist Shadow Jack is one of the oldest living boys and has resigned himself to this bleak life until: (a) a hole appeared in the wall through which one of gods beyond his (and our) understanding seems to communicate with him, and (b) he finds an unexpected love in that hopeless place. Where the story goes from there is bonkers and brilliant and you have to read it to get the full experience. It’s funny, gory, and beautiful. I loved Hellisen’s “Godskin” last year, and this story has quickly become another favorite. Highly recommended.  7. “Full, Empty Houses” by Plangdi Neple (Nigeria) — Kaleidotrope.  “Full, Empty Houses” opens with our protagonist Joseph visiting an old, dangerous and hungry entity to acquire power for revenge. Because Joseph, a gay man, has been targeted by violence since he was young and that trauma lingers. When he finally finds a lover, Nonso, who he thinks he can be with even though Nonso is married to a woman, Joseph’s happiness is cut short by politics, heartbreak and violence again. Which is what sends him on this mission of vengeance. Like all great revenge stories, it’s tragic, bloody and heartbreaking. An excellent story of queer vengeance that doesn’t shy away from examining anti-gay violence and attitudes in Nigeria and the patriarchal structures that uphold them.  8. “Black Friday” by Cheryl Ntumy (Ghana) — Black Friday: Speculative Stories From AfricaAnd “Kolumbo 1619: Choose Your Own Adventure” by KÁNYIN Olorunnisola (Nigeria/USA) — Khōréō Okay. Yes. Another tie. This time for two stories that take inspiration from specific US phenomena that have taken on global awareness thanks to the media. “Kolumbo 1619: Choose Your Own Adventure” is presented as a choose-your-own-adventure type virtual reality experience, where the reader is put in the shoes of Malik, a person playing a “techno-empathy simulation” designed to “eliminate racism, inequality, and injustice through highly immersive, story-driven roleplay experiences” where he is thrust into various Being-black-in-America scenarios and must try to navigate an encounter with the police where every choice leads to unfavorable outcomes. He takes on different personas—immigrant, jobseeker, clubber—and we follow as each scenario’s choices play out and the story resets. Structurally, it’s clever. Emotionally, it’s harrowing and painful, its humor dark in the shadow of reality. The second author to return to my list from last year, Cheryl Ntumy’s “Black Friday” takes inspiration from the shopping phenomenon and finds us with a group of rioters who reside in a dystopian Protectorate “fighting for Justice and Equitable Distribution and the Rights of the People and the Sanctity of the Land” on a day where, “the Wretched Righteous celebrate the rape of the land”.  It’s a sharp critique of hypercapitalism, religious mania and performative revolutionary politics that isn’t afraid to go to dark places. It ends with a banger of a revelation, setting the tone for the rest of the collection and is absolutely worth your time. As is Cheryl’s entire collection.  9. “Dust and Echoes” by Amani Mosi (Zambia) — Omenana  This story, like many other African speculative fiction pieces I read this year, plays with the deep anxiety of what it means when your stories themselves are stolen as well as your resources, when the mind itself is colonized. Journalist Simweko travels to a village where he encounters an ancient griot, an encounter that sets him on a mission to restore stolen African dreams and songs. It reads in part like a poem and in others like a declaration. Strange and dreamy and hard to grasp—it’s best to let it flow and to flow with it, to get swept up in the theme and beauty of the prose as the story asymptotically tends towards its central theme. 10. “The Language We Have Learned to Carry in Our Skin” by Shingai Njeri Kagunda (Kenya) — Will This Be A Problem? The Anthology: Issue V Shingai Njeri Kagunda is the third and final author that appeared on last year’s list to make a return appearance this year. “The Language We Have Learned To Carry In Our Skin” has a similar theme and approach to “Dust And Echoes”, literalizing its political critique into an afrosurreal horror tale, an African answer to They Live but perhaps more intellectually grounded. It’s a story about colonization and its aftereffects in Africa as African leaders are lured into backroom deals by corrupt foreign leaders and co-corrupted with vita—a parasite craving war and oppression and violence—that bends them to its will and that lives under their skin, driving them to revisit the colonizer’s violence upon their own people in a cycle of exploitation. It’s a hefty story that doesn’t let its parasite metaphor slip into didacticism or satire and is delivered in Kagunda’s evocative trademark style. I highly recommend it.  So… that’s the list. The wonderful stories that moved me, touched me, made me think. But there were many other stories I enjoyed which I just couldn’t add to the list because it would break the format (the internet just loves a good “top ten” eh?) and I’m committed to it now.  What were yours? Any other great African speculative fiction stories from 2025 you’d recommend?  As always, enjoy the stories! Till next year.[end-mark]  For the purpose of this list, defined as novelettes or shorter, i.e. works under 17500 words ︎This list, as always, represents my personal favorites, bias and all. Also, for those interested in sample size, I looked at 121 African speculative fiction stories in magazines, anthologies and collections from which I selected this list. ︎The post Ten(ish) of the Best African Speculative Short Fiction Stories of 2025 appeared first on Reactor.