News Hexed Hexed Trailer: Hailee Steinfeld Voices a Girl Discovering Magical Powers in a Magical World The feature premieres in theaters this Thanksgiving By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 16, 2026 Photo courtesy of Disney. © 2026 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Comment 0 Share New Share Photo courtesy of Disney. © 2026 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved. We have our first trailer for Hexed, Disney Animation’s next feature that centers on a goth girl named Billie (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) who ends up expelled after she unexpectedly manifests magical powers that cause her to accidentally throw a bunch of trash at a teacher. The trailer released today gives us more of the story, including how she’s arguing with her mother (voiced by Rashida Jones) and inadvertently gets sucked into a magical world where she comes to realize that there’s nothing wrong with her. Just the opposite, in fact. Here’s the official synopsis: When Billie accidentally unleashes secret magical abilities, she’s hurtled out of suburbia and into a magical realm called Hexe, where she’s greeted by Ms. Quill (voiced by Tracey Ullman) and Elias Quire (voiced by Stephen Fry). As Billie’s spectacle-filled journey unfolds, she discovers family mysteries that could change the magical world of witches forever. The film is directed by Fawn Veerasunthorn and Jason Hand. “A wonderfully strange phenomenon is happening all around Billie, something she can’t explain,” said Veerasunthorn, whose previous credits include Raya and the Last Dragon, Moana, Moana 2, Frozen, and Frozen II. “She’s someone who has felt miscast in her own life, and it takes leaving her normal world behind and entering a hidden world of wild, unhinged magic to begin to understand herself.” Hand, who previously directed Moana 2 and wrote for Encanto, Big Hero 6, and Zootopia, had this to add: “Hexe is a place where Billie begins to feel seen for the first time in her life. She embarks on a journey of self-discovery that reveals a powerful connection to magic, and in the process uncovers long-held secrets about her family.” Hexed is set to premiere in theaters on November 25, 2026 (aka Thanksgiving weekend). Check out the first trailer below. [end-mark] The post <i>Hexed</i> Trailer: Hailee Steinfeld Voices a Girl Discovering Magical Powers in a Magical World appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews Eternal Sidequests For The Spotless Mind: Thomas Elrod’s The Franchise Sasha Bonkowsky reviews a pastiche of doorstopper fantasy and creatively incestuous IP that’s also a vessel to talk about memory and identity. By Sasha Bonkowsky | Published on June 16, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share With a crackle of electricity and a flicker in the LED display, you are no longer yourself. You are now Jack Vassal, a.k.a. “Peasant Extra #3” in the world of Malicarn. Your memories and personality are sequestered in an unused portion of your brain, papered over by a background NPC from an underfunded writers’ room; you’re handed a scythe and allotted twenty acres without knowing the first thing about farming. Congratulations! Welcome to The Franchise. In Thomas Elrod’s new book, Malicarn was created in the 60s by French writer Jean-Danton Souard. Picked up on a whim by the editor of World Science Fiction & Fantasy (during the Cuban Missile Crisis; the fatalistic atmosphere made the publisher willing to take a chance), the lyrical prose, vibrant world, and story of a society thrown into upheaval by the re-emergence of magic was a best-seller. During his lifetime, Souard kept an iron grip on his property, beating back the Hollywood and Mattel vultures. but once he died his son Daniel proved more pliable. Malicarn became a big-budget movie series, a cinematic universe, video games and T-shirts and foam swords—and, starting in 2040, something bigger and stranger. Malicarn became real. The sets are already permanent constructions, used year-round for tourists and ongoing filming; half the Portuguese island of Madeira is leased out to the film studio. The creative team’s plan—led by the charismatic Jules Walker and the laconic scientist Lilly Kaminsky—is to make the characters permanent, too. Using proprietary neuroscanners, personalities can be uploaded to actors, keeping them in character for months at a time; all their emotions, from love to hope to terror and guilt, will be completely genuine. The grandest and most immersive form of storytelling, Jules calls it. Anyway, this new technology all works out great! Right up until the Malicarn, and all its visionary dreams, begins to fall apart. Elrod tells the story across a dozen different characters, jumping around in time and the fiction of the Malicarn. There’s Buck Douglas, a struggling mason flirting with revolutionary ideals, and Queen Hannah I, seventeen years old and stifled by her overbearing regents; by The Franchise’s present of 2060, they’re the first generation of children born into the Malicarn and knowing no other world. There’s Glenn Mackey and Brian Doyle, also known as the wizard Gregorian and Captain of the Guard Kreek, professional actors whose brains remain their own, recruited to help “guide” the Malicarn towards the most entertaining storylines. On the technical side, readers can watch Lilly Kaminsky and Jules Walker pry people’s brains apart, sprinkle in a dash of trauma or grief to round out a character, then stand back for the fallout; and more distant still from the story are the fans and directors and MI6 agents watching the Malicarn unfold. A running theme throughout The Franchise is that none of these characters have ever read the original Souard books. They offer up various excuses—too long, wasn’t interested, ADHD made it impossible—but it all works out to the same thing. The sets Jules builds, the mythology he passes onto the characters; the personalities Lilly grafts onto actors and extras; the gravitas Glenn exudes in his portrayal of Gregorian; all that is based on nothing more than a half-remembered dream. It’s a curious dynamic: As the Malicarn becomes more real (physical, a larger scope), it also becomes less real (true to itself). Maybe that’s inevitable. We’re living in an era of sequels and bigger-than-ever IP; according to box-office data, sequels are taking up more of the money in film than ever before. Data via Stephen Follows and The-Numbers. Total dataset (including both sequels and non-sequels, covers 58,900 feature films released in the US between 1974 and 2023, inclusive. Box office refers to US/Canada box office. One common criticism of these late entries into an IP—Marvel’s Thunderbolts follows thirty-five other films and fourteen television shows in its shared universe, for example—is that they cease to be anything but self-referential. The first Star Wars films were inspired by Seven Samurai, Flash Gordon, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and more; how much does The Mandalorian and Grogu, fifty years later, draw on anything but other Star Wars media? But at least we choose if and how we want to experience these sort of overly self-referential media properties; the poor saps of The Franchise are stuck living it! It’s an experience I hadn’t thought about until reading this book: What is the rich inner life of a character who wasn’t written to have one? How do a person’s mind and memories develop when all they’re seeded with is a single sentence of background (“farmer’s son”, “bricklayer’s daughter,” “apprentice alchemist washout”, “fought in the Great Wizarding War”) and a single specific memory for flavor? Elrod does a wonderful job playing with his Malicarnian characters’ interiority, then showing us how they’re constructed piece by piece. Buy the Book The Franchise Thomas Elrod Buy Book The Franchise Thomas Elrod Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Frank Douglas, Buck’s father, is introduced (and killed off) in the first chapter as a bitter, alcoholic war veteran, whose most vivid memory is searching a village for rogue mages when a child, hiding in a storage closet, shot his commander with an arrow. Later we meet “Frank” at Comic-Con, before he ever entered the Malicarn: a broke, aimless fan named Terry whose eyes light up at the prospect of a) getting paid to b) join his favorite show; later still Lilly, grumbling at a silly request from the writers’ room, uploads one of her father’s stories from the Iraq War—finding a child in a storage closet who shot his captain with a gun—into the extras. Last, and the one that sticks with me, is the chapter from Frank’s perspective. Ten pages of second-person perspective, an overwhelming feeling of being trapped in the wrong body, the wrong role, a sort of childlike despair: You thought you’d be a different person. I loved The Franchise. It’s clever and intricate, it’s a pastiche of doorstopper fantasy and creatively incestuous IP that’s also a vessel to talk about memory and identity—and I hope you, Reactor Magazine reader, will love it too. If not? Well, I’ve got this lovely neuroscanner here that might change your outlook…[end-mark] The Franchise is published by Tor Books.Read an excerpt. The post Eternal Sidequests For The Spotless Mind: Thomas Elrod’s <i>The Franchise</i> appeared first on Reactor.

News Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Trailer Reminds Us We’ve Seen a Lot of Strange New Worlds I feel like this Kirk guy might have a future in Starfleet By Molly Templeton | Published on June 16, 2026 Photo: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Jan Thijs/Paramount+ The fourth season of Strange New Worlds is coming less than a year after the third, and yet it still can’t get here fast enough. Like the previous teaser, this one has dinosaurs and epic (and vague) threats. It also has a lot of James T. Kirk (Paul Wesley) and a tagline that reads “Boldly go one step closer to where it all began,” as if this entire show is just one long prequel for the Original Series. Sure, it fills that space, but it’s also a delightful show all on its own—one whose highs and lows are both on display in this trailer. And Una Chin-Riley (Rebecca Romijn) gets both the best and the worst lines. “We’ve seen a lot of strange new worlds,” she says at one point, which is an absolute groaner. But earlier in the trailer, she sums up one of the key themes of this show with grace: “There is never any reason to do something alone when you need help.” It’s so optimistic (what if there’s no one around to help?), so generous, and so true to the spirit of this captain and crew: No one ever single-handedly saves the day. The team effort is what gets them through all the wild and dangerous times. And clearly there are more wild and dangerous times to come. Dinosaurs! Cowboys! Getting off the ship! Saving friends! Spock (Ethan Peck) wanting to talk about his feelings! Also, there will be a puppet episode. Here’s the synopsis: In season four of the Paramount+ Original Series, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise – led by Captain Christopher Pike – embark on a series of thrilling and emotional adventures across the stars. As they journey to strange new worlds, they will battle inner demons and external threats, encounter colorful new characters, reunite with familiar faces and confront terrifying aliens. Through it all, they strive to embrace a bright, hopeful future. Strange New Worlds stars Anson Mount, Rebecca Romijn, Ethan Peck, Jess Bush, Christina Chong, Celia Rose Gooding, Melissa Navia, Babs Olusanmokun, and Martin Quinn; Wesley and the great Carol Kane are guest stars. The 10-episode fourth season premieres on July 23rd, with episodes arriving weekly.[end-mark] The post <i>Star Trek: Strange New Worlds</i> Season 4 Trailer Reminds Us We’ve Seen a Lot of Strange New Worlds appeared first on Reactor.

Books Seeds of Story Touching Grass and Listening to Renaissance Gossip: Inspiration Beyond Books What inspiration for speculative stories can we find while enjoying travel, art, music, philosophy, and history? By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on June 16, 2026 Photo by Valentina Ivanova [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Valentina Ivanova [via Unsplash] Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. Normally, Seeds of Story is a book column. But I’ve had a couple of weeks of fascinating travel, full of museums and conferences and Scottish mountains, and I want to talk about ways that non-fiction trickles into science fiction other than books. Sometimes when you’re looking for inspiration, you’ve got to go out and touch grass. Or listen to a neolithic flute melody, or hang out in a pub with philosophers of technology. So this week, I’m taking a reading break to discuss some recent highlights from Belgium and Scotland, and share some of the inspiration I found there. Internet ecologies, weird musical instruments, and a mountain that probably wasn’t Camelot, ahead! Beauty, Ugliness, and Petty Artistic Revenge in the Renaissance “Calumny” by Federico Zuccaro, c. 1569-72 My wife and I went to Brussels (two hours away by train, living in Europe feels like cheating sometimes) for a Bozar exhibit on “Beauty and Ugliness in the Renaissance.” We did this because they advertised Botticellis (note the plural); we saw a lot of his work in the Uffizi a couple of years ago, and were hoping for more lore on his personality-filled angels. His paintings make you wonder what the characters are thinking, and what gossip the angels are sharing after they’re done holding up halos—science fiction of a piece with Dante’s infernal gravity. The Bozar exhibit, alas, had one small Botticelli, a portrait of his beloved Simonetta, no angels involved. What it did have, though, were two intensely snarky pieces by Federico Zuccari. Allegorical “calumny” pieces date back to a lost classical painting by Apelles, and lots of Renaissance painters (including Botticelli) tried their hand. Zuccari’s is notable for the back story, which gossip the docent was delighted to share: he was late on a commission, and his client hired someone else—who took the job. Such horror! Such betrayal! He couldn’t be arsed to meet deadlines, but he absolutely could be arsed to paint his ex-client with donkey ears, his replacement with truly fabulous tentacle legs, and Truth snuggling a lop-eared ermine. Then there’s another painting in which Minerva herself shows up to tell his client (the Pope) not to criticize his commissioned work-in-progress. No word on whether the commission itself ever got finished. Please enjoy the dubiously-accurate serpents on the floor, and the thing that I’m pretty sure is not a dingo. Zuccari is an inspiration to us all: self-indulgent spite can produce a masterpiece. Snake-Headed Trumpets and Two-Necked Guitars Our second pick for the Brussels trip was the Musical Instrument Museum. We expected this to be a relatively brief expedition, maybe a couple of hours, the gallery equivalent of a microhistory. Except that they have the best audio tour I’ve ever encountered: you can enter a code and hear most of their instruments played as part of a full piece. This is terrific, and also means that we spent three hours on the European Musical History floor alone. For me, half the story-prod of a place like this is the reminder of just how deep any given expertise goes. All the common instruments of the modern orchestra have long histories of experimentation, new production techniques, side-experiments that excited people for a few years in the 13th century and then vanished. Instruments are designed for contexts: open-air religious parades, campfire melodies, parlor demonstrations, military direction. They show off wealth via ornate design, or can be carved in a single night. People put whole careers into playing or constructing a single type. There’s telling detail to be had in any given one (give your evil overlord a snake-trumpet chorus)—and a reminder not to default to the equivalent of a modern guitar without considering the possibility of extra necks, the sounds made possible by different string materials, and the possibility that a much-needed clue might be hidden in the lining of your lute. Rewilding Online Ecosystems Next stop: a solo trip to Edinburgh for a workshop on Rewilding the Web, a concept proposed by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon. The general idea is that the reduction of the internet to a small set of corporate walled gardens parallels the destruction and regularization of ecosystems, and some of the solutions might be similar as well. We need more, smaller sites. We need more models for how people can interact, find information, and share their own information. Fewer monocultures, more healthy complexity. In a week where we learned that Google will soon stop sharing search results and just keep users on-site talking to Gemini, it all felt very close to home. Some people gave extremely practical talks, presenting on bioregional governance in rural Scotland or new tools for moderating neighborhood networks. Others were philosophical: Berjon asked what computers should be for, and urged a push toward enhancing user agency. That doesn’t mean replacing choice with external control (as many “personalization” functions do), and it also doesn’t mean offloading responsibility for avoiding surveillance onto individual users clicking through opt-out menus on every site. Others used art as a route into thinking about technological ecology. Sonia Sobrino Ralston talked about a concept for “sensor gardens” on Superfund sites, where mechanical sensors and indicator plants combined to make both pollution and recovery visible. I talked about how science fiction portrays networks—only partly an excuse to quote Diane Duane’s Spock’s World on a Powerpoint slide. I used bison rewilding on Dutch dunes as an example, and Farrell asked “What are the bison that will do the necessary tearing up soil for the internet?” Definitely a provoking question! Obscure Cameras, Underground Bookshops, and Underemployed Warriors Edinburgh is rich in history, culture, geology, and tourist traps. Around the conference, I explored all four—though it would have taken many weeks to get into all the museums or follow half of the themed walking tours. But living in the Netherlands, I’ve missed proper hills, and I spent a lot of time just walking around, ducking into whatever seemed interesting. (Good for my head and heart, iffy for my ankles.) I found a museum on optical illusions—the first building in Edinburgh to be erected specifically as a tourist activity, with a 19th-century camera obscura at the top. “You see how that building has normal windows on the side, but narrow ones facing us?” asked the guide. “That’s because it belonged to the first owner of the camera obscura, and he didn’t want anyone peeping in!” On High Street, apparently-underemployed woad-streaked warriors posed for tourist selfies. The time travel economy strikes again! Then there was the Edinburgh City Museum, a small gallery of the sort we’d expected from the Musical Instrument Museum. They had up a temporary exhibit on the history of queer book stores in the city, with a focus on one that, in the ’70s, was located down a particularly terrifying set of stairs. I was delighted to find a shelf of early slash zines, alongside IDIC pins and a discussion of the connections between Trekkies and gay liberation in Scotland. We have always been here. Alas, the gift shop didn’t include anything related, because I desperately wanted a reproduction zine, a reproduction “Lesbian Vegetarian Vampire SF Fans Against the Bombs” pin, or both. “What’s King Arthur Doing in Scotland?” Photo: David Monniaux (CC BY-SA 3.0) Out past the castle in Holyrood Park is what Robert Louis Stevenson called “a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design.” Arthur’s Seat is a gorgeous crag and a popular hiking spot, and did I mention that I’ve missed hills? The path is well-tended and full of locals and tourists, ranging from fit students to stragglers loudly expressing their skepticism. It’s full enough to be a great opportunity for people-watching and people-overhearing, especially if you’re a bit of a straggler yourself and taking frequent rest breaks. It was a good place to touch grass, watch seagull vs. raven drama, gaze out over the city, and consider taking up a career as a nature writer. It was formed by a 340-million-year-old volcano, now extremely extinct—one of the students at the conference explained, deadpan, that it’s “where geology was invented.” I assumed this was a joke, but no. An explanation of the old flow is also carved beside Parliament along with literary quotes. It isn’t quite on the International Appalachian Trail, but it’s at least an older cousin to the Pangaean range. The connection to King Arthur is even more tenuous than these things usually are. It’s suggested as a possible location for Camelot, but so are many places in and around the UK. My best answer to my householdmate’s question—“What’s King Arthur doing in Scotland?”—was “Sitting.” Which, indeed, anyone would want to do after making it to the top of the peak. New Growth: What Else to Read You didn’t think I’d skip this section, did you? Traveling and talking inevitably add to my reading list (as well as putting me behind on the already-existing pile). At the Bozar gift shop, I picked up 140 Artists’ Ideas for Planet Earth, edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Kostas Stasinopoulos. It’s full of short artistic pieces about ecology and the Anthropocene, mostly in the form of instructions. Both Cosmo and Merlin Sheldrake are in there. So is Kim Stanley Robinson. I’ve been picking through it like a box of truffles, reading a handful of the entries when I need to get my brain moving. The Musical Instrument Museum has a podcast, with each episode focusing on a specific instrument. At Rewilding the Web, Elena Rovenskaya recommended Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei’s The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune With Nature and Community. The Scottish love their poets, and Parliament was studded with quotes from Kathleen Jamie, Norman MacCaig, and George MacDonald (Lewis Carroll’s mentor!). I spent much of the Edinburgh trip reading Ada Hoffman’s Ignore All Previous Instructions. I finished it too late to include in my conference presentation, but it’s a great celebration of queer artistic weirdness and a great cynical critique of LLM companies. It reminds me in some ways of Alexis Hall’s recent Hell’s Heart on account of both the queer joy and the Jovian corporate dystopia. Highly recommended! Where are you going this summer to find inspiration? Share in the comments![end-mark] The post Touching Grass and Listening to Renaissance Gossip: Inspiration Beyond Books appeared first on Reactor.

News The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum Anya Taylor-Joy Will Play Seren, a Sindar Elf, in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum This better not be another Tauriel situation By Molly Templeton | Published on June 16, 2026 Screenshot: Warner Bros. Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Warner Bros. There’s a new elf in Mirkwood. The latest star to sign on for Andy Serkis’ The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum is none other than Furiosa herself: Anya Taylor-Joy has joined the cast. According to Variety, she will play Seren, one of the Sindar elves, who is “a trusted and lethal agent of King Thranduil.” This character should clearly not be confused with Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a character invented for Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies whose primary purpose was not to be lethal (despite being a military leader) but to have an awkward and ill-considered romance with Aidan Turner’s Kili. Surely this movie will not repeat Jackson’s poor choices. Lilly is not returning for The Hunt for Gollum, but King Thranduil himself is; Lee Pace will step back into the epic robes and crowns (and elk saddles, one hopes) of that role. Presumably the film will spend some time in his Woodland Realm, which was a more lovely place before Sauron (going by a different name, of course) set himself up in a corner of it and filled it with nasties. Taylor-Joy joins a cast that includes returning stars Ian McKellen as Gandalf and Elijah Wood as Frodo, and new-to-Middle-earth stars Kate Winslet as Marigol, Leo Woodall as the elf Halvard, and Jamie Dornan as Strider. Serkis himself will, of course, play Gollum. The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum premieres on December 17, 2027.[end-mark] The post Anya Taylor-Joy Will Play Seren, a Sindar Elf, in <i>The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum</i> appeared first on Reactor.