Movies & TV Star Trek: Starfleet Academy R’uustai — Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s “300th Night” By Keith R.A. DeCandido | Published on March 5, 2026 Credit: Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Paramount+ This episode of Starfleet Academy (and the next one, as this one ends on a cliffhanger leading to next week’s season finale) is exactly the kind of episode I didn’t want to see in a show about the Academy, so imagine my surprise to have completely and unreservedly loved the episode all to pieces. Kudos to scripter (and, full disclosure, friend of your humble reviewer) Kirsten Beyer and director Jonathan Frakes for pulling it off. Of course, it shouldn’t be a surprise that these two were primarily responsible for creating such a good episode. Frakes has starred as William Riker in six different Trek series and prior to this had directed anywhere between two and eight episodes of six different Trek series over the course of the past 35 years. Before becoming a producer/writer on each of the live-action Trek series that have been produced since 2017 (as well as the Khan audio drama), Beyer was a veteran Trek novelist, with eleven Trek novels to her credit. The episode has major consequences for the thirty-second-century Federation, and puts our cadets at the heart of having to save everyone’s life—which, on the face of it, is ridiculous. But dammit if “300th Night” doesn’t make it work, because it builds very skillfully on what’s already been established about the characters in general and about Caleb and Ake in particular. The title comes from it being the end of the semester, the 300th day of classes, and that night is a time of celebration. (The commentary from Stephen Colbert’s digital dean is particularly hilarious.) In addition, the Athena, along with a mess of other ships, is en route to Betazed for the installation of the seat of the Federation government on that world. One of the celebrations that night is Jay-Den making R’uustai with SAM, Genesis, Darem, and Caleb. (But not Kyle, which is a choice that stands out, and not in a good way.) The R’uustai was established in the TNG episode “The Bonding,” which was the inaugural Trek script by the great Ronald D. Moore. It’s a Klingon ritual by which you bring someone into your family who is not part of it by blood. Jay-Den sees his Academy classmates as his found family, and wants to formalize that. Everyone participates—though SAM can’t actually drink the chech’tluth (a Klingon drink that was established in TNG’s “Up the Long Ladder”)—except for Caleb, who gets up and leaves the room when the check’tluth is passed on to him. Caleb flashes on his mother before he gets up and leaves the room, and it’s obvious he views becoming part of Jay-Den’s family as a betrayal of the only family he has left: his mother, whom he still hasn’t found. This is followed by an absolutely magnificent scene between Caleb and SAM. Kerrice Brooks beautifully plays SAM 2.0, as she’s the same person but also completely different. Now that she’s had a childhood added to her history, she finds herself being annoyed by her old self. She and Caleb discuss the situation with his mother, and how he’s tried every possible encryption to find any messages she might have put out there for him. It takes SAM, with her freshly installed childhood and perfect recall of everything, to remind him that the last time his mother saw him, he was six years old. A precocious six-year-old, but nonetheless, a wee tot. The encryption key might be something simple that would occur to a six-year-old. So he tries using the moon that they agreed would be “their” moon back in the opening scene of “Kids These Days,” and sure enough, it works—and there are a ton of messages from Anisha Mir going back two years. The good news is, she’s currently on the planet Ukeck. The bad news is that that planet is about to be taken over by the Venari Ral. The worse news comes from Vance: they now know what Nus Braka was after when he raided the starbase in “Come, Let’s Away”: the Omega-47, a weapon that harnesses the omega particle. Established in Voyager’s “The Omega Directive,” omega particles can do damage to both regular space and subspace, making warp drive impossible. (Obviously the Omega Directive that forbids any research into the omega particle—and obligates Starfleet to prevent any research into it—is no longer in effect, which is fine, as that was a particularly stupid regulation.) The Venari Ral have detonated an Omega-47 in an uninhabited star system to show that they have it. The Federation’s response is to circle the proverbial wagons, sending all their ships to protect various Federation worlds. (There’s an amusing bit where Ake and Kelrec are looking at the tactical situation, and Kelrec is momentarily confused as to why there are ships in the Eridani system, as he forgot that Ni’Var is part of the Federation now. It’s a nice touch, showing how fast the Federation is expanding and rebuilding after the Burn ended. For her part, the centuries-old Ake is still struggling to remember that Ni’Var isn’t called Vulcan anymore.) Upon learning of this, Caleb reverses course, as it were. Ukeck is outside the Federation, obviously, and it’s now very dangerous for anyone to venture outside the Federation, especially to a world the Venari Ral has targeted. If he tells Ake that he’s found Anisha on Ukeck, she’ll be duty-bound to report it—or she’ll not report it to help him, and either way, he won’t put her in that position. So he steals a shuttle. Because that’s what Star Trek characters do. SAM forces herself aboard, pointing out that she’s the only one who can do the calculations fast enough to get past security. (Nice to finally see the writer of a Trek episode acknowledge that it should be difficult to steal a shuttle…) Genesis and Darem discover what they’re doing because they’ve been tasked with making sure the shuttles are locked down. (Darem is still drunk from the chech’tluth. Khionians don’t have the enzyme to break down alcohol. When Genesis mentions that they also don’t have the enzyme to break down bananas, Darem shouts, “We don’t have a lot of enzymes!” I have to admit to laughing my ass off at that, as George Hawkins delivers it perfectly.) Caleb and SAM wind up pretty much kidnapping Genesis and Darem for their journey to Ukeck, which Genesis is not happy about, but by the time they arrive—and Darem sobers up—they’re on board with reuniting Caleb with Anisha, because they know that’s what he wants more than anything. Back on Athena, Jay-Den sees the padd that has all of Caleb’s messages from Anisha, and he and Tarima—who is still psychically linked to Caleb and knows something’s up—quickly figure out what happened and report to Ake. I love what happens next because we know from the prior eight episodes that Ake takes her caretaking of Caleb very seriously. Showing an impressive knowledge of what franchise he’s in, Vance knows damn well that if he orders Ake to stay put, she won’t, so he doesn’t give her that order. Lura has offloaded the cadets to Betazed, and the only ones still on board are Ake, Reno, and the EMH. The three of them take Athena to Ukeck to effect a rescue. Well, actually, five of them, because Jay-Den and Tarima stow away on board, because of course they do. Meantime, Caleb’s group have mixed success in their mission. The good news is that Caleb does find his mother. The reunion scene is magnificently played by the always-brilliant Tatiana Maslany and director Frakes. Both Anisha and Caleb are wearing masks over the bottoms of their faces, as well as hoods. So we only see Anisha’s eyes, but that’s more than enough for Maslany to show Anisha going from anger at the person she thinks is stalking her to the slow realization that this is her son—all with just her eyes. Maslany proved on Orphan Black that she is one of the best actors in the history of humanity, and scenes like this serve as additional reminders. At Caleb’s silent urging, the other cadets don’t identify themselves as Starfleet to Anisha. After she leaves to set up transit for her and Caleb, the other cadets call Caleb on his behavior—they thought he’d be reunited, but then come back to the Academy. Because Caleb is a complete asshole, he doesn’t just say that he’s leaving with his mother, he decides to say incredibly mean things to both Darem and Genesis. He is about to say something mean to SAM as well, but she doesn’t give him a chance, as she hugs him fiercely before he can say anything. Which is so very SAM. Unfortunately, the Venari Ral were able to detect their transport down, and so the cadets are captured. To their credit, the cadets resist interrogation, despite the fact that Darem is repeatedly punched in the face. Darem’s response is to just smile at the guy punching him, which is exactly the right way to deal with that. Anisha and Caleb also try to rescue the cadets, with Anisha obviously only doing so because these people matter to her son. But eventually, it turns into a fight, during which Anisha is shot. Athena is forced to go into the atmosphere to get close enough to get a transporter lock through the interference the Venari Ral has put up, which is a beautiful visual. However, a whole mess of Venari Ral ships show up and slap tractor beams on them. Ake therefore separates the saucer and flies off—which, sadly, leaves the atrium behind. I love this particular strategy because it’s exactly the kind of maneuver that was envisioned way back in 1966 for starships—saucer separation was part of the original series bible—but it wasn’t feasible with the effects tech available at the time. It was an explicit feature of the Enterprise-D in 1987, but the expense of doing the separation with the tech available at that time was sufficiently high that it was only used three times. In 2026, however, the tech can do it with the greatest of ease, and it’s a perfect strategy to use here. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with Nus Braka, his plans are a little more complex. He deliberately detonated the one Omega-47 so that the Federation would circle the proverbial wagons. And then a whole bunch of Omega-47 mines show up surrounding Federation space. Braka has, in essence, put a wall around the Federation, and the entirety of Starfleet is trapped behind it. This is the sort of storyline that would never have worked in the twenty-third or twenty-fourth centuries, but does work in the thirty-second. The Federation of the 2200s and 2300s is big and powerful and sprawling. The Federation of the 3100s is none of those things, and they’re still crawling their way back to being a super-power. The thirty-second-century Federation is small enough and weak enough for this power play by Braka to succeed. And so Athena—or, rather, Athena’s saucer section—is the only ship that’s outside that wall, staffed only by three Starfleet officers, a half-dozen cadets, and an injured civilian. This is where they leave us at the end of the episode on a macro scale, which is a rather nasty cliffhanger for the season finale. But the micro-cliffhanger is even more effective. Recall that the last time Anisha saw Ake was in a courtroom where the latter sentenced the former to prison, which separated her from Caleb. The final scene is a masterpiece, with Anisha waking up to see herself on a Starfleet ship, being treated by a Starfleet doctor, and then to be confronted by the person who condemned her twenty years ago. Maslany magnificently plays the combination of panic and anger Anisha is feeling, while Holly Hunter perfectly plays Ake’s tentative approach to this person who she knows she has hurt so badly. I’m on tenterhooks waiting for next week. How will the confrontation between Anisha and Ake go? How will Athena save the day? Will Discovery make an appearance? (The Omega-47 mines prevent ships from getting through via traditional means, but Discovery has the spore drive, which should be able to bypass that.) And you know we’ll be seeing Paul Giamatti again, and that should mean lots more great scenes between him and Hunter. Can’t wait…[end-mark] The post R’uustai — Star Trek: <i>Starfleet Academy</i>’s “300th Night” appeared first on Reactor.

Books Teen Horror Time Machine Cliff Zone: Beware of Falling Teens In ’90s teen horror, even the topography can be a murder weapon. By Alissa Burger | Published on March 5, 2026 Photo by Stephen Andrews [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Stephen Andrews [via Unsplash] In ‘90s teen horror, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a cliff. Seriously, cliffs are EVERYWHERE. The characters can live anywhere in the country, in a city or a small town or the middle of nowhere, and somewhere nearby, there is going to be a cliff. And when there’s a cliff, somebody’s bound to fall over the edge, get pushed off, or hear some mysterious story about something that happened there and go to check it out for themselves (with terrifying consequences). Forget about falling rocks: in a ‘90s teen horror world, it’s the falling bodies that you’ve got to watch out for.  These cliffs build on the established foundation of the Gothic wilderness. They’re almost always isolated, far from any populated areas or potential help. Characters frequently hike (or bike or walk) through the woods to get there. In the Gothic tradition, this wilderness is an inherent threat, representing a lack of civilization, an untamed place where anything can happen. For the most part, these modern teens don’t spend a lot of time in the wilderness, preferring their high school hallways and the mall, but every now and then, an outdoorsy adventure is just too good to pass up. Once characters venture out of their comfort zones and into this wilderness, the danger is omnipresent.  In R.L. Stine’s Fear Street book The Overnight (1989) and Carol Ellis’ Camp Fear (1993), characters go camping—Stine’s on their own and Ellis’ at an organized summer camp—and they find themselves surrounded by all kinds of threats that could potentially hurt or kill them, including bears, venomous snakes, murderers, and (of course) cliffs. There’s no such thing as safety in the wilderness, as far as the Gothic and horror traditions are concerned.  In many of these books, cliffs are the site and source of mysteries: something terrible happened there, but no one’s quite sure what. In Stine’s The Dead Girlfriend (1993), Jonathan’s previous girlfriend Louisa died when she fell from a cliff just outside of town. As far as anyone knows, Jonathan was the only person there with her, so speculation runs rampant about whether or not he killed her. There’s similar uncertainty in A. Bates’s Mother’s Helper (1991): Becky has a summer job working as a nanny on an isolated island, where she meets Cleve, a seemingly nice young man… who might or might not have pushed the local sheriff off a cliff. Notably, in both of these cases, the possibility that Jonathan and Cleve might be capable of this kind of violence does very little to deter the female protagonists’ romantic interest in them. Jonathan and Cleve are mysterious and the girls are willing to follow that mystery, even if it may end in them taking a long fall off a cliff edge too. The mystery in Ellis’ The Body (1996) is a bit more tragic: Lisa was found at the bottom of a cliff, alive but paralyzed and unable to speak, so she can’t tell anyone what happened to her. When Melanie is hired to read to Lisa, she sets her mind to solving this mystery, and finding out what happened to Lisa becomes essential to her own survival.  Sometimes that mystery is nothing more than a really horrible “oops.” There are LOTS of accidents that happen on the edges of cliffs in these books. This is the case in The Body, where Melanie eventually discovers that, after witnessing a murder, Lisa got disoriented and accidentally went over the cliff while running away from someone in the dark. Something similar happens in Richie Tankersley Cusick’s Starstruck (1996)— Miranda is running from someone who is trying to kill her and nearly plunges headlong over the side of a cliff. (Miranda has a happier ending to her cliff encounter: she catches herself and is rescued by her love interest Nick, avoiding both murder and cliff plummet, while her pursuer is the one who goes over the edge). In Stine’s The Boyfriend (1990), Dex is roughhousing near the edge of a cliff with his friend Pete when he topples over the edge.  Horrors build up when characters follow an accident with an attempt to cover up the truth and bury their dark secrets. In Stine’s Fear Street book The Sleepwalker (1990), Mayra’s sleepwalking stems from a repressed memory of the time her boyfriend Walker stole a car and they accidentally ran another car off the road and over the edge of a cliff (Walker hypnotized Mayra to forget the whole thing when she wanted to confess). The post-accident cover up in Christopher Pike’s novella-length “Collect Call” (featured in the 1991 Point Horror anthology Thirteen) is gruesome: Janice and Caroline head home from a party with Janice at the wheel, even though she’s had too much to drink and knows this is a bad idea. The car goes over a cliff, Caroline appears to have been killed, and Janice moves her friend’s body behind the steering wheel, staging the accident, clearing herself, and preparing to walk away … until the car catches on fire and Janice realizes Caroline wasn’t killed in the crash, but  is now trapped and burning alive. In Stine’s Fear Street book The New Year’s Eve Party (1995), cover up and cliff swap places: Beth and Jeremy are driving too fast on icy roads and hit a boy with their car. When Jeremy attempts to flee the scene, they hit another patch of ice and go over the side of a cliff.  While some of these cliff encounters are accidental, cliffs are also remarkably convenient spots for murder. After all, deep in the Gothic wilderness, there’s no one to see what really happens— and as long as the one doing the murdering is the sole survivor, they can tell whatever story they choose. But most of the time, things don’t go quite according to plan, and while there’s a successful cliff-pushing murder in Stine’s Fear Street book One Evil Summer (1994), there are a whole lot more attempted murders than actual, completed ones. Characters nearly get pushed off of cliffs to their deaths in Cusick’s The Lifeguard (1988) and Help Wanted (1993), Stine’s The Babysitter (1989), Ellis’s My Secret Admirer (1989), A. Bates’s Final Exam (1990), and Diane Hoh’s The Train (1992) and Truth or Die (Nightmare Hall series, 1994).  Cliffs seem to be a convenient one size fits all solution to pesky problems. Want revenge? Push them off a cliff. Need to make sure no one tells your secret? Push them off a cliff. Need to eliminate a romantic rival? Push them off a cliff. No matter what the question is, the cliff is always the answer. But since these are all attempted murders, pushing people off of cliffs doesn’t turn out to be nearly as effective as the pushers hoped.  Pike’s Fall Into Darkness (1990) deserves special consideration here, because the goings-on at this cliff are particularly complicated. Ann and Paul have an intricately plotted plan to fake Ann’s death and frame their friend Sharon by making it look like Sharon pushed Ann off of a cliff. (Ann’s brother Jerry took his own life and Ann blames Sharon because of her romantic history with Jerry). The plan is for Ann to plunge over the side of the cliff, tethered by a rope; Paul will make sure the rope is secured until Ann can untie herself and get to safety, and then they’ll meet up later and start a new life together. But Ann crashes into the cliff face a bit harder than expected, suffering a broken arm and a concussion. Paul unties the rope in what could be an attempt to finish Ann off—he doesn’t really like her all that much and she just wrote him into her will to inherit a bunch of money if she dies—but Ann gets herself untied and survives. Sharon is found not guilty, heads back to the SAME cliff with her “nice guy” friend Chad, who turns out to be not such a nice guy after all, and Sharon almost gets pushed over the cliff herself.  While, elementally speaking, all of these cliffs have air and earth (in the fall and the hard landing), Stine’s cliffs often have water as well. In his Fear Street books, characters frequently head to high places to look down over the valley and the Cononoka River and in Cheerleaders: The New Evil (1994), Corky sends a whole school bus full of basketball players and cheerleaders over a cliff to a frozen lake below in an attempt to drown them and drive out the evil that has inhabited her friends. And the cliff drama in Stine’s The Hitchhiker (1993) is much less convoluted, but it’s one of my all-time favorite attempted murder cliff scenes. In The Hitchhiker, Christina and Terri are on their way back from spring break and pick up a hitchhiker. There’s a whole lot of bait-and-switching going on as characters’ try to figure out one another’s true intentions and dark secrets, but the final showdown ends on a low cliff (which to be honest, is really more of a slightly rocky outcropping, but high enough to push someone off of to their doom) in the Florida swamp where they’re all about to be pushed over the edge into a pond below, which is FULL OF PIRANHAS.  While Christina and Terri just happened to be roadtripping when they found themselves at the piranha cliff, there are several other ‘90s teen horror books where cliff and car are two pieces of the same puzzle. This is the case in Pike’s “Collect Call” and Stine’s Fear Street books The Sleepwalker and One Evil Summer, where Chrissy pushes both her rival and his car off a cliff with her telekinetic powers. In Cusick’s April Fools (1990), Frank, Hildy, and Belinda nearly meet their end trapped in a car and pushed over the edge of a cliff, a redux of a murder earlier in the book. In Bad Moonlight (1995), another of Stine’s Fear Street books, Danielle’s emerging lycanthropy is complicated by invasive thoughts of her parents’ deaths, who she is told went over a cliff in their car three years ago, as well as a hallucination of her rock band’s van following in those same doomed tire tracks. In Stine’s The Boyfriend, Joanna is fleeing from the scene after her boyfriend Dex falls over the edge of a cliff when she gets into a head-on collision with a truck, while in Bates’s Final Exam, Jeff plans to push both Kelly and her car over the side of a cliff, in a misbegotten attempt to gain his father’s approval through murder.  When Jeff’s attempted murder in Final Exam doesn’t pan out, he tries to take his own life by throwing himself over the edge of the cliff, though he survives and is taken into custody, with intensive psychiatric treatment in his future, as his psychiatrist points out that “now no one can fool themselves into thinking his problem isn’t so bad” (198). Ideally, it shouldn’t take jumping off a cliff to get mental health support, but this ending at least provides a possible future for Jeff. Other characters who take this same leap aren’t quite so lucky. In both Help Wanted and Fall Into Darkness, when characters’ machinations are thwarted, they decide that death is their best option, jumping from cliffs themselves when they no longer have the option of pushing someone else.  Characters in these books find themselves on cliffs way more often than would seem likely, both in terms of geography and “where should we go now?” narrative reasoning, but they sure are dramatic. The stakes are (literally) high and the confrontations that take place at the edges of these cliffs are frequently life or death ones. Coming upon cliff after cliff in these books, I’m reminded of John Mulaney’s observation that, based on television and pop culture representations, he “always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be.” Same here, but with cliffs. Whether accident, murder, or suicide, cliffs are dangerous places to be in ‘90s teen horror books. The view might be great, but the fall is a killer.[end-mark] The post Cliff Zone: Beware of Falling Teens appeared first on Reactor.

News The Testaments Because Real Life Isn’t Misogynistic and Infuriating Enough, Here’s the First Trailer for The Testaments The Handmaid’s Tale sequel comes complete with the requisite hanging bodies scene! By Molly Templeton | Published on March 5, 2026 Screenshot: Hulu Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Hulu Hulu has released the first trailer for The Testaments, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood. The book is a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which showrunner Bruce Miller expanded into a six-season, award-winning, nigh-unwatchably brutal series starring Elisabeth Moss as June Osborne. At the start of that story, June’s daughter was taken from her, sent to be raised by the elite of Gilead. Not that being raised among the elite will protect you. The Testaments takes place 15 years after that fateful moment, following that stolen child as she begins to understand the horrors of her world. Here’s the synopsis: An evolution of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments is a dramatic coming-of-age story set in Gilead. The series follows young teens Agnes, dutiful and pious, and Daisy, a new arrival and convert from beyond Gilead’s borders. As they navigate the gilded halls of Aunt Lydia’s elite preparatory school for future wives, a place where obedience is instilled brutally and always with divine justification, their bond becomes the catalyst that will upend their past, their present, and their future. The Testaments was created by Handmaid’s Tale showrunner Miller; Handmaid’s star Elisabeth Moss is a producer, though it remains to be seen if she will appear on screen. The adaptation stars Chase Infiniti (One Battle After Another) as Agnes, with Ann Dowd returning to the role of Aunt Lydia. The bulk of the cast is made up of fairly new faces, including Lucy Halliday as Daisy. Miller has said the series should stand alone: “You should be able to turn on the first episode and enjoy it like a drama,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. If you have the stomach for a return to Gilead, The Testaments premieres April 8 on Hulu.[end-mark] The post Because Real Life Isn’t Misogynistic and Infuriating Enough, Here’s the First Trailer for <i>The Testaments</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books Mark as Read Unfortunately I Am Wrestling With Genre Again Can you ever really draw a line between genres? And does it matter? By Molly Templeton | Published on March 5, 2026 Illustration by Andrew Kay Womrath (1896) Comment 0 Share New Share Illustration by Andrew Kay Womrath (1896) When Orbital won the Booker Prize in 2024, arguments cropped up like weeds: Was it science fiction? Was it most definitely not science fiction? If not, why not; if so, why? I’m still thinking about those discussions. I’m hung up on the recurring discourse about what literary fiction is and what it isn’t in relation to SFF.  I still want to know if you can draw a line between “romantasy” and “fantasy with romance.” Is which genre term comes first indicative of where a book falls on the spectrum? I dunno. I don’t know anything. But while going in these loops of is/is not, knowing/not knowing, I stopped and asked myself: Does it matter? Does it matter what genre something is? Does it matter to you when you’re reading? When you’re looking for a new book? When you’re reading about books? Do you think about the genre or subgenre or handy-dandy tropes-turned-tags when you’re reading or shopping?  I am genre-indifferent at many of these times. But the world at large seems to feel otherwise. There are newspapers that put their SFF coverage into occasional columns, if they have it at all; there are outlets that publish “All this week’s new books!” lists that never include SFF books. There are, still, somehow, people who act as if genre writing is not “real” writing, and reading it not “real” reading. (SFF books that have gotten so big they’ve become mainstream are the allowed exceptions, of course.) All these things demonstrate the fact that genre-specific spaces are necessary. We need Locus and Strange Horizons (and this very site!) and blogs and social media lists made up of all the people who read SFF.  Genres need their own awards because general literary awards are not going to recognize genre. Genres need their own readers and reviewers because too often, general literary critics don’t recognize what they’re looking at when they read genre fiction.  I don’t particularly like any of these terms, and I don’t even really like the way I’m using them. I was trying out “mainstream” instead of “general literary,” but that didn’t work either. What “mainstream” means in books changes all the time. When I was a kid, everyone read Dean Koontz and Stephen King. Now they still read Stephen King, but they also read Rebecca Yarros and George R.R. Martin. Or James Patterson and Sarah J. Maas and Suzanne Collins. We’re mainstream! Except when we’re not.  Here is what frustrates me about genre conversations: the way they so quickly become us vs. them. What might begin as a discussion of topics or tropes or themes or approaches to fiction so often becomes a hierarchy or a series of sweeping generalizations. These are right, and these are wrong, or at best less right. Literary fiction is about midwestern professors trying to sleep with their students, and fantasy is about feisty princesses who can do their rescuing themselves, thank you very much. Neither of these things is true (except when they are).  At Strange Horizons, Ada Palmer has a very interesting argument that SFF writers are historians. There is so much to like in this piece, which cleverly manages to be very smart about worldbuilding while only using the word “worldbuilding” twice. She has intriguing thoughts about power and changing the world, and if I do not particularly like the phrase “advance claims”—as in, stories advance claims about how the world might change—she does step back and say that she could use the word “teaches” there instead. I would go a little further and say that books about the world changing explore possibilities about change, or ask questions about who might manifest it, and why or why not. I like my SFF to ask more questions than it answers. But my pushback really came in here: [O]ne nearly-universal characteristic of contemporary mainstream literary fiction (as nearly-universal as technology is in SF or magic in fantasy) is a focus on a powerless character making an internal journey to come to terms with the world. Do I love a book in which a “powerless” character goes on an internal journey to come to terms with the world? Sure do. But is this a universal trait of literary fiction? Well. How do you define “powerless,” and what constitutes “the world”?  (I also don’t think SFF is only about changing the world, and in fact I’d love to see more SFF that wasn’t operating with such large stakes, but that is a topic for another column.) But I suppose it could look like a litfic trait if you’re setting litfic up in opposition to SFF. Us versus them. What our books do versus what their books do. I bristled here because of how it creates an either/or situation. As Roseanna Pendlebury noted on Bluesky, “But if litfic is universally characterised by the ‘coming-to-terms’ definition, and SFF by ‘the world usually changes’, as Palmer focuses on, they can never cohabit. The definitions /are/ mutually exclusive.” This is hard for me to argue with, in a way, because of how I read, which is across this line and around it. I am especially interested in books that defy the idea that SFF and literary fiction are mutually exclusive—books like Confessions of the Fox, and Cloud Atlas, and The Ministry of Time, and North Continent Ribbon, and a whole lot of YA books that will only muddle this discussion of genres further. I don’t read any genre all that differently from any other genre. I read books about people dealing with situations and feelings and other people; sometimes they change the world, and sometimes they change a small corner of it, and sometimes they themselves are changed. Sometimes all of that happens at once. Sometimes the books’ authors are clearly, intentionally wedding their work to a lineage of other works, and sometimes the lines of influence are less clear. But Palmer’s definitions did make me wonder: Is this why SFF readers can seem reluctant to read books that appear to be “literary” even when they’re using the same devices as SFF? Why general readers are sometimes resistant to accept that SFF that has reached the mainstream—The Handmaid’s Tale is a classic example here—is, in fact, SFF? Are expectations actually the defining factor between the genres, if there is one? Is that the real deciding line between which climate-fiction novels get published by SFF imprints and which come out on the literary side, with minimalist covers? I can’t define literary fiction. At swordpoint I might say it is made up of the books taken seriously by award committees and higher-brow press; that it might be said to depend more heavily on the writer’s prose style than genres that are more plot-centric; that it frequently takes place in the real world and considers real-life concerns and the hows and whys of a person moving through their world. But if you asked me again in a week, I might argue with myself. I have a faint memory that bookstore sections were once sometimes labeled “general fiction.” This, one might argue, is too broad. Too general! Anything could go in there. And yes, it could. But readers are sophisticated now. We know how covers are designed to get genre across in a single glance. Blobby colors: highbrow, has a blurb that calls it “important,” ambitious in some way, destined to be reviewed by the New York Times. Mostly black background with an elaborate serif font, ornate florals/daggers/vines, faintly William Morris-inspired background: romantasy or dark academia, depending on how much black is used. Cartoon-like illustrations in bright colors and simple lines: contemporary romance. I won’t go on. (But I want to.) If you put a regular reader in front of a shelf of books, without looking at the backs she will probably be able to pick out which ones are of interest to her. We are all so well trained. Still, “general” may be more useful than “literary,” given that the implied superiority of “literary”—anything not “literary fiction” is clearly less literary, no?—is doing no one any good.  I can’t define science fiction, or fantasy, and I don’t really want to. But I do want us—whatever “us” my fellow genre readers feel we are a part of—to consider not being in opposition to “them.” To use genre terms as descriptors rather than buckets with the lids tightly glued on. These things should be tools, not dividers. Fantasy, romantasy, cozy, thriller, cyberpunk, dark academia, the rest—they’re nebulous clouds, overlapping, shifting, moving across the sky of public opinion.  We can, and maybe we should, read the same books differently. Orbital can be science fiction and not be science fiction—be a story about humans in space, doing science, and also a story in which humans are small and the Earth is large and they are absolutely not changing it, only watching it. Their tech is realistic, as I understand it; they do not appear to be from the future. But Earth is a planet, and observing a planet is a science fictional activity. All of these things can be true.  None of this is to say that genres shouldn’t or don’t exist, or that we should stop categorizing things; we would do that anyway. If genres didn’t exist, we would invent them (see also: the ever expanding lists of sub- and micro-genres!). But there is a long history of us vs. them when it comes to SFF and litfic, and the more I read, the more I think we are policing those boundaries too closely. I understand why SFF readers want to claim some things as ours and reject some things as not-ours, especially when we have long been looked down on by people who think they don’t read genre. (I believe that literary fiction is a genre, even if I can’t define it.) But I also think that defensive streak does us little good.  And yet, I find I get most invested in the idea of genre in defense of it. I resent the beloved outlets that seem to only cover SFF as an afterthoughts; the lists that simply don’t bother to include it; the people who act as if it can never live up to some specific literary measure and refuse to be shown examples of things that do, in fact, live up to all kinds of literary measures. I resent the people who will take the worst example of an SFF cliche and pretend it is a definitive example of anything. As if there are not terrible books in every genre. With any given genre, you have highbrow, you have lowbrow, you have every brow in between. SFF has pulp, and we have poetry. It’s what I love about this nebulous cloud of a genre. But I want to reject that defensiveness. I want to reach out instead of closing off, to extend a welcome to the readers who think that genre, any genre, is only one thing, to show them how it contains multitudes. Is it so difficult to think that a literary fiction reader could love Ancillary Justice or Rakesfall or The Spear Cuts Through Water? Are SFF readers ignoring Interior Chinatown or The Bone Clocks or Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind because they might be in a different part of the bookstore? Are we not going to claim Station Eleven as SFF? What do we do with Annihilation? Who gets to call dibs on Zone One? As the meme asks, why don’t we have both? If we must define genre, though, I think I will go with Ted Chiang, who said in The Believer that genre is “an ongoing conversation. Genre is a conversation between authors, between books, that extends over decades.” Some people will reject that conversation (looking at you, Ian McEwan); some will bound enthusiastically into it; some will be wallflowers, or think they’re at a different party. Some will stumble into a conversation they might not be aware has been going on for decades. But the conversation continues, the guests change, readers start new offshoot conversations. Genre means everything; genre means nothing. Reading SFF means holding the possible and the impossible in your head at the same time. Can we do that with genre, too?[end-mark] The post Unfortunately I Am Wrestling With Genre Again appeared first on Reactor.

News Sarah J. Maas New Court of Thorns and Roses Books Get Release Dates as Sarah J. Maas Shares Adaptation Update The wait is almost over By Molly Templeton | Published on March 5, 2026 Screenshot: Call Her Daddy/YouTube Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Call Her Daddy/YouTube Bestselling author Sarah J. Maas’s appearance on the podcast Call Her Daddy begins with a lovefest—Maas and host Alex Cooper trading compliments and gushing—but their conversation eventually gets down to details. And those details include adaptations, which have yet to come to pass for Maas’s work. A Throne of Glass series adaptation never came to pass, and the announced adaptation of the Thorns and Roses books was such a big deal, potentially, that it made news when the series was “officially scrapped” last year. But Maas is in control now. “I have the rights back to everything now,” she told Cooper. And if an adaptation happens, Maas wants to do it her way: And it’s something that I want to be in charge of, I want to be figuring out, I want to be learning everything that I can. I’m a Type A control freak a little bit, but I want to know everything about how it gets made, not because of that control, but just because I love movies. I love TV. I want to be a part of that, and I want to see everything adapted the way I envision it and the way I know fans want it. It is very uncommon for authors to have the level of adaptation control that Maas seeks. “So when I do it,” she says, “it’s gonna be me, and I will dedicate everything that I have to making it right. But I’ll be in there, looking at all the design. But also like, ‘What does it sound like?’ because music plays such a big part.” The most recent installment in the ACOTAR series, A Court of Silver Flames, was published in 2021, meaning fans have had a fairly long wait for the next book (though Maas published two novels in her Crescent City series in the meantime). Maas had good news on that front, though: the next book will arrive later this year. The sixth ACOTAR volume has a pub date of October 27, 2026, and the seventh will follow hot on its heels, arriving January 12, 2027. Perhaps more adaptation news will come along before then. Or perhaps not.[end-mark] The post New Court of Thorns and Roses Books Get Release Dates as Sarah J. Maas Shares Adaptation Update appeared first on Reactor.