News The Everlasting Netflix Is Adapting Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting The fantasy time-loop novel came out in 2025 By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 23, 2026 Alex E. Harrow photo by Elora Overbey Comment 0 Share New Share Alex E. Harrow photo by Elora Overbey A television adaptation of The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow is in development at Netflix. The fantasy time-travel novel centers on the knight Una Everlasting and the historian Owen Mallory, born in different centuries who find their lives intertwined through time as they loop through it, over and over again. According to Variety, Daphne Ferraro, who was head writer on the German series Maxton Hall and is set to showrun Lauren Roberts’ Powerless adaptation for Amazon MGM Studios, is on board to write The Everlasting adaptation. Variety also shared the official logline for the project, which hews closely to the book: Sir Una Everlasting was Dominion’s greatest hero: the orphaned girl who became a knight, who died for Queen and country. Her legend lives on in songs and stories, in children’s books and recruiting posters—but her life as it truly happened has been forgotten. Centuries later, Owen Mallory—failed soldier, struggling scholar—falls in love with the tale of Una Everlasting. Her story takes him to war, to the archives—and then into the past itself. Una and Owen are tangled together in time, bound to retell the same story over and over again, no matter what it costs. But that story always ends the same way. If they want to rewrite Una’s legend—if they want to tell a different story—they’ll have to rewrite history itself. The project is still in its early days—Netflix hasn’t picked it up for a series order yet—so no news on casting or if/when we’ll see the adaptation on the streamer. [end-mark] The post Netflix Is Adapting Alix E. Harrow’s <i>The Everlasting</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews Life Continues On: Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth Unferth plays with scope and scale in her new novel. By Matthew Keeley | Published on June 23, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Deb Oli Unferth’s novel Earth 7 promises multiplicity in its title: an abundance of Earths. But this oddly paced, darkly beautiful, and wryly comic novel serves as a reminder that, as environmentalists remind us, “there Is No Planet B.” Even if the planet is beyond saving, the author seems to suggest, we still have a duty to see it and to love it. Unferth is a restless writer; whatever philosophical, political, or thematic concerns may unite her various publications, she seems in no danger of writing the same book twice. Her previous novel, Barn 8, was a vegan’s heist story about stealing a million chickens from a factory farm; Taika Waititi hopes to direct a film adaptation. Other books include two story collections, an illustrated fable, and a memoir of her youthful attempt to join the Revolution in Latin America. As the novel begins at some unspecified future date, our poor Earth 1 is in bad shape. Two waves of “depop” have killed much of the population. Many species are extinct; there are no fish in the sea and few birds in the air. Trees are vanishingly rare, and most of the planet seems to be irradiated desert. There doesn’t seem to be much government beyond a sinister and unnamed “company.” Protagonist Dylan Stein gets off to an unusual start in life: She spends most of her childhood with her mother in an underwater pod. Though the cluster of pods are intended to form a new kind of community and offer a chance for residents to watch the ocean’s rebirth, the community falters and the fish fail to return. Dylan’s mother, Rosemary, isn’t much given to human interaction, spending most of her time on inscrutable scientific work while Dylan gazes out at the empty sea and dreams of the surface. She falls into correspondence with a Martian, a descendant of humans who colonized the red planet. Although her dreams of being lofted away to Mars come to naught, she does eventually leave the pod and finds herself utterly unsuited for what remains of the world above. Once a resident of the ocean, Dylan becomes a groundskeeper at a research institute where scientists attempt to preserve Earth’s dwindling genetic heritage through cryopreservation and DNA splicing. This scientific archive is dubbed Earth 6; Earths 2 through 5, have, Dylan knows, already been lost. Dylan spends much of her time sweeping sand away from doors and windows; sand represents a continuity between her old and new lives, and, being her mother’s daughter, she begins a haphazard but productive scientific study of sand and its microscopic inhabitants. Eventually, she devises an unusual way to create an Earth 7. Buy the Book Earth 7 Deb Olin Unferth Buy Book Earth 7 Deb Olin Unferth Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget On an otherwise ill-advised vacation, a birthday gift from her institute colleagues, Dylan meets the love of her life. Melanie works at Vacationland for Singles, a post-apocalyptic Club Med with VR-augmented skies “terraformed” to look like pre-disaster Earth. Every other guest at Vacationland is convinced that Melanie, with her too-beautiful body, her too-shiny skin, her over-symmetrical face, is a robot. In childhood, Melanie had been plucked from orphaned obscurity to appear on a television show, Celebrity Plastics, “the most frequently recurring guest on the show.” Yes, even in the midst of the apocalypse, there is bad reality television. The unnamed “celebrity surgeon” left Melanie beautiful and artificial, “vulnerable to spontaneous combustion” and with “permanent alloys, acrylics, nanomaterials-filler implants that were almost as old as she was and that anchored onto disintegrating bone.” She ages at a glacial pace and, thanks to a more than usually experimental procedure and a device called the Regenerator, her individual molecules may become conscious.  If Earth 7 is science fiction, it’s science fiction so “soft” that it edges into fable or magical realism. Our planet’s sad fate is never much in doubt; what suspense there is comes from seeing whether Melanie and Dylan might build a life together on their dying world. Then, in the book’s last forty-odd pages, Unferth widens the scope and scale of her novel. She attempts the sublime and may in fact achieve it. First decades pass in sentences, then millennia go by in paragraphs. The Mars colony fails, modest new life arises on Earth, Earth vanishes in some galactic conflagration. As humans leave Earth, in rockets and as digitized minds, the narrator reflects: They left because they could see Earth wasn’t much more than a piece of burned coal anymore. They’d used her up. Well, they’d used each other up, really, Earth and humans. Earth had gotten the best the universe had to offer, in all categories, and the achievement had nearly killed her, and humans had gotten the best that Earth had to give, and that had nearly killed them too. Unferth closes Earth 7 with a series of leaps through time. Though Dylan’s “Earth 7” ultimately proves as futile as she expects it to be, it permits the Martians to re-create one of our planet’s ephemeral glories. The Martians, starved for sensation on their dusty red rock, appreciate this transient beauty in a way most of their Earthling ancestors did not. Exhausted critics will, more often than they should, reach for jewels when they praise a book. A book is “gemlike,” it “sparkles” with a sensibility “hard as diamond,” its precision brings to mind a stone cut, sanded, and polished to perfection. Earth 7 calls to mind a humbler mineral. It is not a ruby, an emerald, a sapphire, or a diamond. Rather, it is a grain of sand, improbable and unique, in which the reader can see the whole world.[end-mark] Earth 7 is published by Graywolf Press. The post Life Continues On: <i>Earth 7</i> by Deb Olin Unferth appeared first on Reactor.

Books Front Lines and Frontiers Further Adventures in Classic, Quirky Anthologies — Galactic Empires: Volume Two A second round of stories exploring power, politics, and survival… in space!!! By Alan Brown | Published on June 23, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share In this bi-weekly series reviewing classic science fiction and fantasy books, Alan Brown looks at the front lines and frontiers of the field; books about soldiers and spacers, scientists and engineers, explorers and adventurers. Stories full of what Shakespeare used to refer to as “alarums and excursions”: battles, chases, clashes, and the stuff of excitement. A few weeks ago, I reviewed a themed anthology, Galactic Empires: Volume One, edited by Brian Aldiss. It was a quirky anthology of interesting tales, and I found them so compelling that I immediately looked on the internet, found Volume Two, and ordered it. I acquired a copy in fair condition at a very reasonable price, only to find it lacked a dust jacket, and the copyright page had been torn out. I could live without the dust jacket, but the lack of copyright information means I have no insight into the original publication, which is frustrating. This new volume is very much a companion to the first, featuring a diverse mix of tales that range from fantasy to science fiction, and from thought-provoking to more visceral. About the Author Brian Aldiss (1925-2017) was a noted British author of science fiction and fantasy, who was also an editor, critic, and artist. You can find more on his career here, in my review of the first volume of this anthology. The Rise and Fall of Great Powers Humanity has long watched the flood and ebb of empires, as rulers have pushed to expand their control over wider territories, only to see those efforts inevitably come to naught as new empires supplanted the old. And as long as they have watched this process, scholars have argued how and why it takes place. Over three decades ago, while I was doing graduate work in International Relations, I encountered The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, a book by Yale professor Paul Kennedy. Having spent my youth reading science fiction tales that examined the grand sweep of history, and witnessing the static bi-polar stalemate of the Cold War teetering on the brink of change, I found his work fascinating. Before that, my scholarly reference point for the rise and fall of political systems were books like Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History. Kennedy’s work looked at history from a perspective that differed from those earlier scholars, who looked at rulers, treaties, and battles as determining national power. His thesis was that logistics and economic power decided wars, with the coalitions that developed the strongest economies generally prevailing. This showed the importance of nations building and maintaining strong and healthy economies, and also the importance of strong alliances. Kennedy warned that nations with waning influence were prone to something called “imperial overstretch,” as changes in relative economic strength were generally not the result of their economies shrinking, but the economies of their rivals growing more quickly. Moreover, nations with waning influence had a tendency to ignore the importance of alliances, or take their allies for granted. As the Soviet Union fell, and as the United States has seen its relative strength diminishing after a series of inconclusive clashes in the Middle East, I have thought about Kennedy’s theories from time to time. And lately, the idea that the United States is in a state of imperial overstretch has become nearly impossible to ignore. While reading fiction, I love tales where bravery and strife change the balance of history, but I have a feeling that the much more mundane world of commerce has greater power to shape our future. Galactic Empires: Volume Two I’m not going to give background information on every author in this anthology, but for those who might want more biographical information, where I have reviewed an author in this column before, I have tagged their name with a link to the latest of those reviews. The “Introduction” to this volume discusses how editor John Campbell’s ideas contrasted with those of other magazine editors, who were often willing to have more fun with concepts like galactic empires. After the “Introduction,” the volume starts with a continuation of a section that carries over from Volume One, “Maturity or Bust.” The four tales that follow come under the heading “You Can’t Impose Civilization by Force,” which Aldiss introduces with an essay looking at the difficulties posed by building a civilization that spans stars. The first story that follows, “Escape to Chaos,” by John D. MacDonald, is a showstopper, and one of the best in the collection. I had not realized MacDonald had written science fiction, having always associated him with mystery books, such as his series about the detective Travis McGee. This story gives us a battle between a decadent emperor, Shain, and his son, Andro, which reminded me of the biblical tale of King David and his son Absalom (although in this case, we are led to sympathize with the son rather than the father). Andro is headstrong, and starts his rebellion before his forces are fully prepared. He is trapped and dying from numerous wounds when he mysteriously disappears. At this point, the setting turns from fairly stock space opera into something more. It turns out that Andro’s universe is one of twenty-six parallel realities that are tended by Field Teams from a Bureau of Socionetics, an organization based in the City of Transition, which has discovered how to travel between realities, and whose goal is to knit these realities into a single polity. The rescue of Andro was effected by Calna, a field agent who was expected to use him as a pawn in moving his reality toward other realities, but who has become romantically attached to him. Her boss wants Andro kept in suspended animation, as his resurrection could cause his reality to diverge from the other realities, but Calna rescues him and brings him back to his home. And then MacDonald takes things to yet another level, implying that there might be yet another reality that is manipulating the reality of the Field Teams, and by bringing Calna home in a way that makes her think her time with Andro might have been a dream. MacDonald, after building a fascinating setting and furnishing us with some sympathetic characters, ends the story with a rush of ideas that leave the reader wondering what in the story was real, and invoking the chaos mentioned in the title. I was a bit frustrated by the ideas overwhelming the characters in the end, but had to admire MacDonald’s audacity and vision. In the next story, “Concealment,” by A.E. van Vogt, an Earth exploration ship finds a mysterious space station staffed by a single man, called the Watcher. They kill him, but the captain of the ship (who, surprisingly for tales in this era, is a woman) has his body reconstitutes in order to question him, to find out who he represents. I often find van Vogt’s work a bit on the strange side, and this story is built around a twist that didn’t quite work for me. “To Civilize” by Algis Budrys follows colonists from Earth as they are sent home from the planet where they had been living among another culture. There doesn’t seem to be a reason why they were invited, and are now being evicted, but all becomes clear in the end. In his notes, Aldiss makes it clear that “Beep,” by James Blish, is one of his favorite stories in the collection. The Security Service of an interstellar human civilization strangely expends quite a bit of effort making sure certain people meet and fall in love. The story then flashes back, and shows how the civilization uses something called Dirac transmitters to communicate over interstellar distances, and how the speed of these transmissions gives the Security Service an edge in anticipating threats. But then someone comes along who can predict the future even more accurately, and the Security Service needs to know why. It all comes down to a previously undiscovered aspect of those Dirac transmitters. This is a scientific puzzle story, and once you get past the fact that much of the science is either outdated or implausible, is actually quite clever. Blish presents a strange, new technology, and then looks at what the implications of such a technology might be. The next three short tales in this section come under the heading “The Other End of the Stick,” looking at those who suffer under imperial rule. The first and best of these is “Down the River,” by Mack Reynolds. Humanity discovers they are part of a vast interstellar empire that has transferred ownership of the planet. They had been treating the planet as a kind of nature preserve, but the new owners will be aggressively exploiting its population and resources. When the humans complain, the ambassador, who has been watching the Earth, gives a litany of the many occasions human empires did the same thing. “The Bounty Hunter” by Avram Davidson is the story of an old trapper who does his best to hunt ethically and preserve the animals he hunts. There is a quick, and somewhat predicable, twist at the end, but because of the quality of the writing, the story stands out. Alien slavers find the Earth in “Not Yet the End” by Fredric Brown and humanity is only saved by an improbable and fortunate coincidence. The next section of the book is entitled “Decline and Free Fall,” where the first two stories come under the heading “All Things are Cyclic.” What follows is my favorite tale in the collection, a swashbuckler, “Tonight the Stars Revolt!” by Gardner F. Fox (an author more widely known for his contributions in the early days of DC Comics than his science fiction stories). It is a lurid tale that wears the vivid colors of purple prose like a badge of honor. If you replaced the veneer of spaceships and technology with magic, it could easily have been a story starring Conan the Barbarian… Angus the Red is a space pirate, hired by the Heirarch, the leader of a group of imprisoned scientists, to assassinate an evil ruler, the Diktor of Karr. Angus fails and is captured, but a beautiful slave, Moana, whose family he had once helped, frees him and takes him to Stasor, a god-like creature who turns out to be an avatar of an ancient and powerful race. Stasor tasks Angus to travel across the Car Carolan Sea and through the Land of Living Flame to the City of the Ancients, where he will find the Book of Nard, which contains ancient scientific secrets that can help bring down the Diktor. But Angus discovers that the Heirarch is just as corrupt and power-hungry as the Diktor, and builds a rebellion to free the people from both leaders. He is betrayed, but just as his rebellion is on the brink of disaster, he remembers scientific secrets from the Book of Nard, uses them to prevail, and rescues Moana, who falls into his happy embrace. The story is a delight from beginning to end. In “Final Encounter” by Harry Harrison, after years of searching, humanity finds a beacon that allows them to make contact with an intelligent alien race, only to find they are not so alien after all. And the crew that meets the aliens is quite unique themselves, with the ship’s crew being from the race of Man, an all-male species, while the scientists are from a bisexual human race made up of both males and females. The final heading of the collection is “Big Ancestors and Descendants,” which starts with “Lord of a Thousand Suns,” by Poul Anderson, the one author to have a story in both volumes of Galactic Empires—a fitting choice since so much of Anderson’s work dealt with empires and star-spanning civilizations. The story takes the form of a tale recounted over drinks in an Explorer’s Club, told by a man who claims he encountered and was possessed by an alien from an ancient race, was captured by enemy forces, and then had to fight for control of his own body. And now he and the alien, who share a body, have big plans to influence the future of humanity. It is a fascinating tale, and well told, a nice example of Anderson at his best. “Big Ancestor,” by F.L. Wallace, is the story of an expedition made up of people from a wide range of different human species, who are exploring a planet full of ruins. They have taken on an alien “ribboneer” to replace their pilot at the last minute, and his delightfully different personality gives the story a unique perspective. But in the end, there is a twist that is unfortunately a bit too predictable. Human colonists finally encounter the most powerful alien race in the galaxy in “The Interlopers,” by Roger Dee. They have heard that the race judges all they encounter, and are terrified, but persevere in traveling to the world they want to make their new home. Like many stories in the anthology, this one has a twist at the end, but it is a twist that works well, and ends the volume on a satisfying note. Final Thoughts Galactic Empires: Volume Two, like Volume One, contains a loosely connected group of tales, although the stories did seem to be more cohesively related to the topic of the rise and fall of empires. “Tonight the Stars Revolt!” by Gardner F. Fox was my favorite, an excellent tale of rebellion and planetary romance. John D. MacDonald’s “Escape to Chaos” was a close second because of its richly imagined setting, which could easily have supported an entire novel. And now I turn the floor over to you, so you can share your thoughts on Galactic Empires: Volume Two, (or either volume of the collection, for that matter). And also your impressions on the tales they contain if you’ve read them elsewhere, or your thoughts on compelling stories of galactic empires in general.[end-mark] The post Further Adventures in Classic, Quirky Anthologies — <i>Galactic Empires: Volume Two</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books Sword and Sorcery Bored of the Swords: The Rebirth of Sword & Sorcery and the Death of the Weird S&S is making a comeback in a very narrow way — we need to restore the genre’s essential weirdness. By Cynthia Ward | Published on June 23, 2026 Stormbringer cover art by Michael Whelan (S&S/Saga Press, 2022) Comment 0 Share New Share Stormbringer cover art by Michael Whelan (S&S/Saga Press, 2022) Recently, I sent my best friend a text stating “SiriusXM is reminding me how boring I find grunge.” Do I find grunge boring? No, in fact, I do not. That wasn’t, per se, my point. My point, which I knew the BFF would understand, is that the grunge sound completely dominates what is now labeled alternative rock. One can spend hours on the SXM app listening to their contemporary alternative channels and never realize that synthesizers were once an important element of modern rock, or that New Wave, punk, ska, goth, jangle pop, neo-swing, EDM, and a couple of dozen other subgenres used to appear regularly on Rock of the ‘80s/’90s radio stations. The term “alternative rock” was coined for DIY/indie rock music in the ‘90s, when grunge was exploding. In response to the boom, major labels signed grunge acts and put the squeeze on established acts to sound grunge, even as performers inspired by the nascent genre formed or became grunge bands. Of course, the more the grunge sound dominates alternative music, the more alternative fans lose access to other sounds, in a feedback loop which can sometimes turn listening to Lithium and the contemporary altSXM channels into a chore. So, in a world throttled by algorithmic manipulation and trend simulation, you can imagine this old-school sword & sorcery fan’s pleasure at discovering the 21st century revival of S&S, which had almost disappeared during the epic fantasy boom of the ‘80s and was now returning from the edges. I am thrilled to discover there is so much great new sword & sorcery out there. Excellent new work from 21st-century authors like Milton Davis and Bryn Hammond and Dariel R.A. Quiogue and many others. Excellent new work from Second Wave veterans like Glen Cook and Michael Moorcock and David C. Smith and others. And, as the late skald of speculative fiction, Poul Anderson, hoped in his classic essay “On Thud and Blunder” (Swords Against Darkness III, 1978), the new S&S is “drawing [more] inspiration from other [i.e., non-European] milieus—Oriental, Near Eastern, North and Black African, Amerindian, Polynesian, an entire world.” I’m pleased to see S&S has gotten more diverse since the mid-twentieth century. I’m less pleased to see that it’s also gotten less diverse since the mid-twentieth century. By “less diverse,” I mean that the definition of S&S has considerably narrowed. I began reading and writing S&S mid-century because, damn, was it weird! S&S prose and comics had barbarians and Amazons and nomads. Sorcerers and witches and priests. Mercenaries and pirates and thieves. Demons and gods and dinosaurs. Peasants and princesses and kings. Elves and dwarves and mer-folk. Bards and spear-women and serial killers. The disabled and the maimed and the accursed. And any of these characters could have a starring role, and many of the stars occupied more than one category (most famously, Elric of Melniboné, the disabled nonhuman prince granted strength by a demonic sword, and Conan of Cimmeria, barbarian, thief, mercenary, pirate, king, and more). The star might even be a cat (Mark E. Rogers’s Samurai Cat) or an aardvark (Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark). Visions of a space-faring future might be glimpsed, as in Marvel Comics’ Conan the Barbarian #1 (1970), or a character might pass back and forth between our modern world and a mystic realm—and between different ages of her own body—as DC Comics’ Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld does. An alien might fall to earth, as in Robert E. Howard’s Conan story “The Tower of the Elephant” (1933; adapted by Marvel Comics twice in the 1970s), or in Clark Ashton Smith’s tale “The Beast of Averoigne” (1933). A romance might transcend time, as does that of Conan and 1970s cab driver Danette in What If? issue #13 (1978). Eldritch Lovecraftian horrors might intrude (or worse), as when John Jakes’ Brak the Barbarian faces Yob-Haggoth, or Richard L. Tierney’s gladiator/mage Simon of Gitta (a.k.a. Simon Magus) deals in matters both Mythic and Gnostic. An elf’s quest might meet with another elf hatching from an egg (“Weirdworld,” Marvel Super Action #1, 1976). And the visuals could get distinctly trippy, as evidenced by Eerie Magazine’s recurring adult comic El Cid. No wonder S&S in the ’70s and early ’80s—like fantasy and science fiction more generally in that era—was read predominantly, if not exclusively, by freaks and geeks. No wonder I loved it. And, given that the modern S&S revival is arising from the margins and is still largely an underground scene, I expected a return of that old-school unpredictability. But it turns out that with S&S, as with alternative rock, things have grown distinctly less loosey-goosey. Now, I very much doubt the operating logic of the modern S&S reader, viewer, or creator is “let’s be more formulaic!” But I do have to wonder what’s going on when I encounter increasingly narrow definitions of S&S being increasingly prescribed or enforced. When I see so many arguing in online fora that “real” S&S just simply cannot have epic scale, or nonhuman sentient races, or a quest, or too much magic, or any element that might suggest science fiction instead of fantasy. When it seems like almost every new character is a warrior. Who is almost inevitably whole and able-bodied. Who is frequently a barbarian. Who typically wields a sword. And who usually has a straight white cisgender male identity. At this point, what is weird? Nothing. And I haven’t even touched on the latter-day arguments I’ve seen—rare but there—that S&S is a man’s literature; nor touched on the new-zine editorial which describes S&S in “chest-thumping” warrior terms and tells fans we “follow in the footsteps of great men” (Battleborn #1, ARC, forthcoming May 2026); nor touched on a recent how-to-write-S&S handbook (Arcane Arts and Cold Steel: Writing Sword-and-Sorcery Fiction by David C. Smith, 2025) which explicitly dismisses the entirety of the female-writer-dominated Sword & Sorceress anthology series (34 volumes) as “only ostensibly sword-and-sorcery fiction”… …Even though women have been writing S&S since 1934, when C.L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore introduced Jirel of Joiry, medieval ruler and woman warrior, in “The Black God’s Kiss” (Weird Tales, 1934). Moore’s Jirel adventures were, according to Wikipedia, “among the first sword and sorcery stories of any kind [and] introduced a female protagonist to the genre.” You can get some information on the series’ and the author’s original reception, often warm, and not only from men, at the critic Bobby Derie’s blog, On an Underwood No. 5. Women have been involved with S&S ever since—and we did yeoman work to keep it alive, particularly in the droughts between pre-war pulp and the 1960s, and between the 1980s and the modern revival. Discussing every woman involved would require a far longer article (or, more accurately, a book), but I’ll mention four. In the mid-twentieth century, Cele Goldsmith (later Cele Lalli), editor of Fantastic, took the uncommercial gamble of commissioning Fritz Leiber to resume his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series and “in so doing she improved the climate and conditions that allowed sword-and-sorcery to reach full flower later in the decade [1960s]” (“The Fantastic S&S contributions of Cele Goldsmith,” The Silver Key, 2021). The writer and editor Jessica Amanda Salmonson not only turned the historical woman samurai Tomoe Gozen into a classic S&S character and trilogy, but edited Amazons! (1979), which received the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology in 1980, and Amazons II (1982), the first heroic fantasy anthologies to focus on female protagonists, which were also unusual in having a female majority of contributors; one contribution to Amazons!, Elizabeth A. Lynn’s “The Woman Who Loved the Moon,” tied for the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction in 1980, in the same year that Lynn’s heroic fantasy novel Watchtower won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. Reprehensible as she has turned out to be, the late writer/editor Marion Zimmer Bradley wielded enormous influence on S&S in the second half of the twentieth century. She created the once immensely popular Darkover planetary romance series, which influenced many later S&S writers. She also created Lythande, the cross-dressing bladeswoman/magician who originated in the first volume of the first modern shared-world series, Thieves’ World (launched in 1979), and is arguably S&S’s first major lesbian character. In addition, she edited the first twenty books of the female-centric Sword & Sorceress anthology series, with fourteen postmortem volumes appearing from other female editors; as well, she edited Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, which also published S&S works. Given that it was mostly women who contributed to MZBfm, Sword & Sorceress, and Amazons; given that the evidence indicates their audiences were female-majority; and given that many women writers were publishing S&S novels and series in the 1970s-1990s, I think it is fair to state that S&S was kept alive through the decades of the millennium-spanning drought predominantly by women and girls. Yet in the current quest for “true” S&S, we see increasing efforts to exclude this entire population of practitioners and fans. It’s ironic. When I first encountered S&S, the fan base was so tiny, newcomers were welcomed into the fold that helped us nonconformists survive and even thrive in a dominant culture which bluntly labeled us a deviant subculture…when, that is, the outsiders were being polite (this is not to say that every individual in the S&S world then was welcoming, but the overall vibe was). Now, in some quarters, S&S is quite ready to exclude some of its own in order to police an intensifying conformity. These days, I find myself speculating about the iconic S&S character Elric of Melniboné, who was created by Michael Moorcock and who made his first appearance in the novella “The Dreaming City” (1961). An inhuman, antiheroic, multiverse-tripping, doomed albino princeling who is weak and effete, Elric is also a druggie, a fuck-up, and a demon-master and demon’s slave. Had he been introduced in the 2020s, I am convinced many would reject him out of hand as sword & sorcery. From the available evidence, Joanna Russ’ pivotal S&S character, the assassin/thief/time traveler Alyx the Adventurer, was excised from S&S decades ago, despite a dalliance with Fritz Leiber’s beloved barbarian character, Fafhrd, in one of Russ’s stories and one of Leiber’s. Manifestly, purity is overrated. The fewer ideas and perceptions and influences you allow into the gene pool, the smaller it gets. And the smaller the gene pool, the weaker the population. For the arts, homogenization leads not only to stagnation and retrogression, but boredom. And if you think the pool’s not going to get any smaller, I’ve already witnessed an exclusion from S&S of the preeminent 21st-century S&S series, the Chronicles of Hanuvar, written by the late and much-lamented Howard Andrew Jones—who, as writer, editor, and critic, was the most important figure in modern S&S until his untimely passing. To be clear, I’m fine with a definition of S&S that doesn’t want a lot of SF elements or a lot of grand fantasy quests or a lot of world-saving or multiverse-traveling. That’s reasonable. We want people to understand what we mean when we recommend something as S&S. And I’m fine reading about white cisgender barbarian swordsmen. I’m currently reading Battlepug: The Compugdium, an omnibus graphic novel featuring exactly such a character. It’s a lot of fun—fun that respects and subverts and sends up the trope—and it embeds its lead, the Warrior, in a lot of weirdness. What I’m not fine with is having one character type or one identity increasingly foreclose other possibilities. I’m not fine with Jirel of Joiry and Cugel the Clever and Imaro of the Ilyassai and Tomoe Gozen and Corum Jhaelen Irsei and Alyx the Adventurer and Stalker and Jaisel and Tyndall of Klarn and Frostflower and Cutter Kinseeker and Dossouye and Paksenarrion Dorthansdottir and Sorren and Luc de Chaudronnier and Kerowyn and entire identities being excluded from the definition, practice, and history of S&S. That’s even more boring than song after song grunging up my app feed. With mass media now the dominant means of introduction to speculative fiction, I suspect many (if not most) S&S fans are introduced to S&S by the Conan and Red Sonja comics, movies, cartoons, and games. These have made Conan an archetype as well-known and influential as Tarzan, James Bond, and Sherlock Holmes. Which is wonderful! But it’s lost to later generations, just how weird a barbarian hero used to be. And it’s no surprise the newcomer to S&S would not only expect, but would in many cases demand, more barbarian swordsmen. Barbarian swordsmen are a good starting place, to be sure; but they shouldn’t also be the ending place. Sword & sorcery was, can be, and should be way weirder than that. In the David Lynch movie Wild at Heart (1990), Lula Fortune observes, “This whole world’s wild at heart and weird on top.” S&S was, and surely can again be, wilder and weirder yet. If we restore S&S’s heirloom strangeness to the globally aware 21st-century S&S renaissance, we’re in for one hell of a time.[end-mark] The post Bored of the Swords: The Rebirth of Sword & Sorcery and the Death of the Weird appeared first on Reactor.

Column 80s Fantasy Film Club The Black Cauldron: The Dark Fantasy Disney Tried to Bury Intrepid young adventurers, a bard, some witches, and a bit of necromancy — how did this adaptation go so wrong? By Tyler Dean | Published on June 23, 2026 Credit: Walt Disney Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Walt Disney Studios In this column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the Eighties are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since. For a more in-depth introduction to this series of articles, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. Last time we looked at Terry Gilliam’s beloved flop The Adventures of Baron Munchausen; this time we’re delving into a flop the studio tried to memory-hole out of existence with 1985’s surprisingly dark (at least for Disney) adaptation of The Black Cauldron.  I first saw The Black Cauldron in my late twenties on a friend’s burned DVD that also contained its fellow Disney lost-media film, Song of the South (1946). Seeing them in a double-feature was a fascinating exploration of the varied reasons Disney might try to erase the existence of one of its movies (more on that later). Despite obvious differences in the time these films were made, the propriety of its content, and the quality of the filmmaking, the pairing made intuitive sense precisely because of Disney’s infamous aversion to acknowledging and distributing either film. We’ll get into some of that minutiae further down in the article as we discuss its legacy, but that first viewing was, for me and likely for many millennials, accompanied by the added thrill of seeing something the world’s most powerful children’s entertainment company didn’t want you to see…  The film was adapted from the first two of Lloyd Alexander’s beloved Chronicles of Prydain novels (1964’s The Book of Three and 1965’s The Black Cauldron) which follow the adventures of a young swineherd, Taran, in a fantasy kingdom that draws heavily on Welsh mythology. The film begins with the pig-keeper who, despite his desire to become a storied warrior, is saddled with the care of Hen Wen, a pig with the ability to impart visions of the future and secret information to those who beseech her. After learning that the Horned Lord, a vicious despot, seeks Hen Wen in order to discover the location of the Black Cauldron—a lost artifact of terrifying necromantic power—Taran is sent away to find the Cauldron before the Horned Lord can.  He is almost immediately captured by the Horned Lord but is freed from captivity by the intervention of Princess Eilonwy and the aging bard, Fflewddur Fflam. They search for Hen Wen while the Horned Lord and his comic-relief goblin lieutenant, Creeper, pursue our heroes in the hope that they will lead them to the location of the Cauldron. Along the way, Taran and company befriend Gurgi, a cowardly, thieving were-terrier with a penchant for obvious and amusing lies, and Doli, a grumpy, long-suffering faerie. Hen Wen is found and kept hidden and safe by the Fair Folk while our heroes follow her prophetic advice and confront the three witches who hold the Cauldron in their swampy cottage. After Taran trades away his magic sword, our heroes obtain the Cauldron but are told by the witches that it cannot be used unless it receives a willing blood sacrifice. The Horned Lord’s men show up and bring the Cauldron back to his castle where they proceed to use it to raise an army of the dead. Gurgi sacrifices himself to stop the Cauldron and the Horned Lord is dragged into the Cauldron and consumed, as his castle collapses around them. Taran bargains with the witches, demanding that Gurgi be returned to life in exchange for the Cauldron and everyone journeys home, happier and wiser. The film was, as previously stated, a massive flop, grossing $21 million against a budget that the film’s production manager cited as being more than twice that amount. It’s often referred to as “the film that almost killed Disney” and was considered to have permanently marred the reputation of the media empire’s animation department—a legacy only reversed by the storied success of The Little Mermaid four years later, ushering in the Disney Renaissance. It is for this reason that The Black Cauldron gained its reputation as a lost-media phantom (even if that wasn’t really the case). I was shocked to discover that it had, in fact, been released on home video a few different times in Disney’s history. The catch is that it took thirteen years for it to be released the first time—it wasn’t released on VHS in the UK until 1997, and in the US the following year. But has absence made the heart grow fonder? Is The Black Cauldron a misunderstood masterpiece or does it live up to its reputation as Disney’s worst animated film? The short answer is that it’s neither of those things. It’s pretty bad, but it’s not necessarily worse than other Disney fare from the era—The Fox and the Hound and The Rescuers may be your personal favorites but from an objective standpoint they are equally uneven and, box office take aside, I don’t see much of a difference in overall quality. What The Black Cauldron is, above all else, is boring. Its scenes are long and often dialogue heavy, committing that cardinal sin of telling rather than showing. Had it been a musical, some of these scenes of exposition might have been replaced by songs (and, in a movie that has a bard as a central character, they had a built-in device for including musical elements). As it stands, Taran spends a lot of time declaring what he wants and relatively little time taking actions that reflect or further those desires. It’s also worth noting that Taran kind of sucks. He’s venal, whiny, and conflicted about his duty in a way that makes him seem profoundly selfish. In my article on Labyrinth, I discussed how great it is that Sarah is allowed to be a snotty teenager, warts and all. That might have been the aim here but the writing and performance really don’t sell it. When Taran gives up his magic sword to obtain the Cauldron and uses his only wish to bring Gurgi back, it should seem like growth but it feels jarringly out of character instead.  There are better characters. Stalwart British stage actor Nigel Hawthorne is charming and warm as the bumbling bard, Fflewddur Fflam and John Byner’s Gurgi brings some much-needed humor to the otherwise dull proceedings. Towering over this is John Hurt’s performance as the Horned Lord. The design of the character is somewhat darker and more intense than you’d expect from typical Disney fare, but without Hurt’s raspy growl bringing him to life the villain could be dismissed as a slightly more menacing Skeletor. Hurt imbues the character with a sense of real dread and a slightly effete, wry quality that is perfect when he’s called upon to deliver lines like “I presume my boy, that you are the keeper of this oracular pig.” The film works at all because Hurt makes the Horned Lord scary enough to carry most of it. That’s more than can be said for a trio of fairies voiced by children who were so unintelligible that I had to turn on the subtitles to follow the scene.  The animation remains beautiful as always. There is a gritty depth of detail that makes Prydain feel lived in, impoverished, and frightening in a way that few Disney films manage to achieve. There are no shortcuts taken with its (mostly) hand-drawn animation, and the film is notable for being one of the first Disney features to incorporate computer-generated imagery to create certain effects. When Eilonwy first shows up, she brings her glowing “bauble”—a will-o’-the-wisp-esque glowing sphere that the film never explains—and the complicated shadows it casts around the room are subtle, spectacular, and realistic in a way that speaks to the level of the animators’ artistic talents.  But, as with Eilonwy’s bauble, a lot of helpful context and basic information seems to have been left out of the film, despite being so diligently animated. Fflewddur Fflam has a magic harp whose strings break whenever he tells a lie, but the film never explains this, and so it just seems like his harp malfunctions often. The titular Cauldron is powered by corpses being brought into the Horned Lord’s castle from the sites of recent battles, but that has to be learned through inference. Much of this might be attributable to then-studio chairman (and future Dreamworks co-founder) Jeffrey Katzenberg personally excising twelve minutes out of the final film. Some of those cut minutes contained scenes from the climax deemed too scary for children, but others were reported to be extended dialogue. I know that I complained about there being too much exposition earlier, but having zero explanation for certain elements makes the film feel unfinished. Lloyd Alexander stated, in one of the most withering backhanded compliments ever, that “there is no resemblance between the movie and the book. Having said that, the movie in itself, purely as a movie, I found to be very enjoyable. I had fun watching it. What I would hope is that anyone who sees the movie would certainly enjoy it, but I’d also hope that they’d actually read the book. The book is quite different. It’s a very powerful, very moving story, and I think people would find a lot more depth in the book.” Respectfully, however, I disagree. This movie is not very enjoyable. So did this film leave behind a legacy at all? Given how consciously it was memory-holed for the majority of my childhood it seems unlikely. This brings us back to my experience of the double feature that paired it with Song of the South. Despite being the clearly less palatable (and, obviously, far more racist) of the two films, Song of the South became part of the indelible fabric of the Disney brand. Removed from its original context, “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” became a beloved tune used across tons of Disney media. Up until 2023, Disneyland’s iconic log flume ride, Splash Mountain, was themed around the adventures of Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear long after the film had been removed from distribution. By contrast, The Black Cauldron was all but ripped from the Disney brand, root and stem. Tokyo Disney had a Black Cauldron-themed walkthrough attraction that was open from 1986 through 2006, but that was the only direct evidence of its existence in Disney parks or merchandising until its home video release in 1998. But, even if it did not receive the sort of support from the Disney Empire that most of their other films receive, it did continue to influence some of their later movies. I’m fairly certain that some of the animation for Creeper was recycled for Fidget, the similarly unctuous bat sidekick of the villainous Ratigan in The Great Mouse Detective (1986). More notably, the designs of the Horned Lord’s bandits and mercenaries were mined for the far more comical ruffians in Disney’s 2010 retelling of Rapunzel, Tangled.  Outside of the Disney canon, Andy Serkis’ performance of Sméagol in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films often feels directly inspired by John Byner’s portrayal of Gurgi—both sound like a more intelligible, slyer, and less wrathful take on Donald Duck. Serkis maintains that Sméagol’s voice was based on the sound of his cat coughing up a hairball but it seems impossible that a little bit of Gurgi wasn’t lurking in the back of the mo-cap maestro’s throat. And hey, The Black Cauldron hired John Huston as the narrator for its opening prologue, in what seems like a direct reference to the Rankin/Bass Hobbit film, so it all comes full circle anyway….  But what do you think? Did you see The Black Cauldron in theaters? Did you, like me, grow up during through its long penance, locked away in the Disney Vault? Or was this part of your childhood rotation? Let me know your thoughts on this (or anything else about the film) in the comments! And be sure to join us next time when we move from a lackluster take on Welsh mythology to a much more coked-out adaptation of Welsh myth and legend with John Boorman’s glittery, glamorous Excalibur (1981)![end-mark] The post <i>The Black Cauldron</i>: The Dark Fantasy Disney Tried to Bury appeared first on Reactor.