Column Anime Spotlight Aria: The Glorious Mundanity of a Terraformed Planet We all deserve a chance to pursue our dreams in a place like Neo-Venezia. By Leah Thomas | Published on March 12, 2026 Credit: Hal Film Maker Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Hal Film Maker My friend Bridget and I have been talking about the weird cats of Aria. “This woman cannot draw cats.” “Look, I don’t disagree. There’s something very fucky about the way she draws cats.” Maybe it’s a strange hang-up to have while watching an anime. Mascot characters are par for the course, and sometimes it’s impossible to even determine which species they are. I mean, what are Totoro’s little forest buddies, actually? And people say Totoro is a tanuki, but my guys, that is not what a tanuki looks like. Do we love him any less? Hell no. And then there’s Kyubey of Madoka Magica, who reveals itself not to be a cute cuddly rabbit-thing, but a soul-sucking alien whose placid face belies its apathy toward mankind. Back to the fucky cats of Aria: The Animation. Cats are already perfectly designed for being lovable plush toys that can be fed to the public. They need no redesign, even though a little signature creativity doesn’t hurt. Hello Kitty has never needed a mouth, and her nose is usually yellow. Jiji (of Kiki’s Delivery Service) is the quintessential dream familiar for a burgeoning witch. Sailor Moon‘s Artemis and Luna? Those are cats with moons on their heads, and maybe some mascara, but inarguably still cats. Nyanko-sensei of Natsume Yuujinchou is a ball of mochi with a pompom for a tail—and also transforms into a flying yokai wolf god, but damnit, he is still entirely cat-coded. Recently, Turbo-Baba of Dandadan is trapped in the form of a lucky cat statue, cartoonish as hell, but CAT. But just look at this abomination: Credit: Hal Film Maker I have been devouring this classic slice-of-life science fiction anime about Venice being recreated on Mars and should probably stop fixating on the fact that this darned cat, the eponymous Aria of Aria: The Animation, looks more like the Michelin Man than any feline I know. It bothers me, but not enough to distract from the fact that this show—which is Bridget’s favorite series of all time, a show she has told everyone she knows and loves to watch for years, like preaching the gospel—is a genuine work of great optimism and beauty. Welcome to Neo-Venezia Credit: Hal Film Maker I have never been to Venice, despite all my longing. Yes, I have heard stories about overtourism, and stinky canals, and sinking buildings, and how disappointing it was to actually see the famed city in person. I have heard all of that, and I do not care. I want to go to Venice and take in its history and novelty and pasta. Because goddamn it, decrepit or not, a floating city is an amazing dream brought, however fragilely, to life. I harbor massive, inexpressible respect for all cities built by humans who know better and do it anyway. When I lived in Las Vegas, the last place I thought I would ever want to live, I came to love the city’s sheer, stubborn existence. Some fed-up, possibly felonious Americans wanted to gamble and get divorces, so they looked at a desolate, waterless patch of desert that no one else wanted and said, “Let’s put an oasis here!” Then they conjured a metropolis from their asses. And though much of that was built on mob violence and vice, beyond the Strip, Vegas is full of wonders: The Neon Museum where old signs go to die, an antique row and singular immersive exhibits informed by alien sightings and atomic nostalgia, beige strip malls that hide elaborate tiki bars and sumptuous cafes, chocolate factories accompanied by botanical gardens, a tiny local mountain in the suburbs people circle during morning jogs, and one of the best library systems I have ever encountered—beyond the infamy and filth, Vegas has real charm. (Controversial, I know, but I lived there and learned it.) It should be no surprise, then, that I loved the world of Aria immediately. The series and its sequels, written by Kozue Amano, are set on a version of Mars that has been successfully terraformed and inhabited for 150 years. Its protagonists are Undines, the gondolier girls of Neo-Venezia, who guide visitors through the canals of a reconstructed Venice—IN SPAAAACE! The implication is that Venice no longer exists on Earth, and that Earth (called Manhome) is not a great place to be, in general, but visitors to Neo-Venezia can experience human ingenuity in this saved copy of the iconic city. Our lead, Akari, is training hard to work in transportation, trying to get her Undine license so that she can take on passengers unattended. Born and raised on Manhome, Akari is especially appreciative of every aspect of her new life on Neo-Venezia. She essentially fled a wasteland to live in a beautiful place that exists only because people are stubborn bastards. Clearly, Kozue Amano has been to Italy. The palazzos, arches, bridges, statues, and markets of the floating city have been painstakingly illustrated as the anime’s romantic backdrop. Seabirds soar overhead, and fish swim below. People eat gelato at crowded cafes.  But an otherness is there, too, seamlessly integrated. A floating island, reachable by terrifying cable car, hovers overhead; here, scientists known as Salamanders monitor the artificial weather of the terraformed planet. Deliverymen known as Sylphs ride sky-vespas back and forth. The ruins of flooded pioneer bases occupy the seafloor. And then there are those misshapen, odd-looking cats. “But I really don’t get it. Clearly, the creator loves cats.” “There are so many cats in the series, yes,” Bridget says, with a hint of foreboding. “And they are important.” As the series progresses, the only sentiment I express quite as often as my confusion about the fucky cats is my frustration that I cannot visit this city. It feels cruel, giving me the travel bug for a place so utterly unvisitable. I’m accustomed to being unable to travel due to my financial situation, and I’ve certainly longed to visit fictional cities and imagined places before (say, Lothlorien)… but the longing Neo-Venezia inspires feels sharper. It isn’t simply that stubborn people have built a beautiful city in space. It is also that the small references we get to life on Manhome are so bleak. Bridget tells me that we never actually see Manhome in the series, but only ever hear about the planet. And what we hear is dystopian levels of bad: Back on Manhome, you can’t see the sky from your apartment windows. Back on Manhome, you can’t grow potatoes in the soil. Akari abandoned Manhome, her birthplace, to work for the service industry in space, and has not mentioned wanting to return or visit her family.  “On Neo-Venezia, normal people all work normal jobs and get to live good lives,” I observe to Bridget. “…I know, right?”  I mean, we talk a lot more about that, but what else really needs to be said? As the world decays around us down here on our Manhome currently being run by the worst sort of nasty men, we can only long for the fantasy of a world in which work is valued only as much as it provides a decent life for everyone.  I am furious that Neo-Venezia does not exist. Drama? In My Anime? Credit: Hal Film Maker You’d be surprised. Really, you would be.  It isn’t that Aria lacks any conflict. Akari works for the smallest Undine company in town—Aria Company; the cat of the same name is the company’s mascot—alongside her mentor Alicia, and there are rival companies to worry about. But those rival companies are also where they find their greatest friends. Bickering and posturing aside, there’s no real strife between the gondolier factions. There’s enough business to go around. In an early episode, Akari and Aika, heiress of the rival Himeya Company, encounter a lone Undine named Alice, a prodigy working for the Orange Planet company. Alice is socially awkward, younger than her peers in training, and terrible at communication. Akari repeatedly invites Alice to accompany her on little adventures around the city. Akari is almost always smiling. Initially, Alice does not trust this kindness and assumes the smile is forced. But Akari, mellow as she is, is the perfect protagonist for this series because she is genuine. We don’t know how bad her life was on Manhome, but we know how much she relishes her life on Aqua. Her enthusiasm for her adopted city, her respect for her work, and her belief in her friends is infectious. You get the sense, watching this character grow, that she appreciates every aspect of daily routine and how she wants everyone else to feel just as good about theirs.  This is a slice-of-life anime. We get to know these characters without having to watch them be traumatized. We get to know them by watching them interact plainly with others and their environment. Akari grows on viewers almost effortlessly, always straightforward and patient.  Eventually, Alice accepts Akari’s invitations to spend time together, because who wouldn’t want to befriend the sun? Other conflicts in Aria: The Animation include: Alice hiding a cat in her dorm; Aria the cat getting his not-cat-shaped head stuck in a curvy metal staircase; Aika having a temper tantrum and running away to an impromptu sleepover at Akari’s place; learning a beach vacation is actually training in disguise; mild seasonal flooding at the Aria Company HQ; Akari fearing the future loss of friendship when the girls all graduate from training, only to be reassured by her elders than relationships change but love persists. Through them, she learns to be grateful for the time they have now rather than feeling regret over the future when it hasn’t even come to pass yet (and which will probably bring great things and new relationships to cherish with it too). Oh yeah—and then there’s the time travel stuff, which actually has a lot to do with… wait for it… The fucky cats! Wibbly Wobbly Credit: Hal Film Maker You can’t do a show set in outer space properly without addressing the intangibility of time as a construct. Wormholes and space travel aside, Aqua (Mars) is further from the sun than Earth is, and its years run twice as long as a result. It takes the equivalent of almost two Earth years for Akari to celebrate her moving anniversary in the final episode of the season. It isn’t entirely clear to me whether people age at the same pace or not, and it doesn’t really seem to matter. Aqua exists in its own time, and out of it, too.  In episode four, this sense of displacement is made more concrete when Akari, guided by her Stay Puft eyesore of a cat, takes an unusual turn down a narrow alley that leads her to a courtyard smothered in glowing cats. There she meets a small, blue-eyed child wearing rags and a collar with a bell. The child asks Akari to deliver a letter for her, but of course, the address does not seem to exist. Akari enlists the help of an airborne deliveryman, Woody, and he takes her to an island devoid of inhabitants. Akari learns that it was once home to a settlement of colonists who helped mine water from the depths of Aqua. Now the mine and the base are deep under the sea, and all that remains on the island is a cemetery. Aria and Alicia deliver the message to the tombstone than bears the letter recipient’s name. It is a video message recorded more than a hundred years prior, from a colonist to her husband. In the video she holds a blue-eyed, bell-collared cat in her arms. Egads! The cats, it seems, are not only weird-looking. They are also time-travellers who bend the perceivable universe to their whims. In a later episode, Akari walks across a snowy bridge and finds herself in Aqua of the past, celebrating with the original colonists when water finally flows into town. She is told, “Cats link the past and future.” Indeed, in the season finale, Akari and her not-cat revisit a place where she met the spooky child, and this time? The decrepit buildings are full of all sorts of spooky, staring cats… Murakami, much? Could it be that Kozue Amano’s poor cat illustrations are deliberate deformations of a perfect creature? I could go on and on about depictions of cats as supernatural across cultures and genres. Bakeneko, witches’ familiars, Freyja’s good luck for Vikings. Black cats are seen as protectors in Mexico, and bad luck in Europe. Subconsciously, perhaps cats came to Aqua as they always have, as entities that have so often reflected the fears and hopes of the places they come from.  Aria is not from Manhome, but was born and raised on Aqua. He is a Martian cat, and perhaps that explains the eyebrows. Perhaps Aria is more a reflection of a cat’s essence rather than its appearance. Or it could be that cats born on Aqua are not so restricted to the limitations Manhome puts on a species. On Aqua, a cat can evolve rapidly. “This is a story about how people shape a new world, but also how it shapes people,” Bridget says, sage as ever. Has Neo-Venezia altered these cats, or is it simply that living in a place that is so functional, so peaceful, and where existence is so hard-won allows time to unspool freely? Does terraforming also mess with the very notion of time? Does it matter what shape a cat is, so long as the cat is happy and fed? Does it matter how long it takes for Akari to train to be an Undine, so long as Mars continues to orbit the sun slowly and she gets there in the end? In a sense, the lack of urgency threaded throughout the anime reshapes the viewers’ perception of time, too. There’s no need to hustle, or fret, or fear the past or future. Mundanity is a gift that has been earned.  This sentiment is also reflected in Amano’s choice of viewpoint. The characters we come to know in the series are all in the business of serving others. They represent the four elements: the Undine gondoliers are water; the Salamanders, weather-monitoring scientists, are fire; the deliverymen, Sylphs, fly through the air; and Gnomes, the underground workers who monitor the planet’s gravity, are earth. These workers, so often unnoticed, are the lifeblood of the new planet. They keep it functioning so that others may visit and find joy. Kozua Amano did not focus on a single hero, but on the network of workers who keep a world afloat. Credit: Hal Film Maker And so I have to say, one more time and always: It is a tragedy it is that Neo-Venezia, fucky cats and all, does not exist.  I would give almost anything for my friends and me to live a life with inherent stability. If life could allow the pursuit of dreams and fancies that, while still difficult to achieve, are truly achievable with effort. A life set to a soothing bossa nova soundtrack that, here in the real world, will lull me to sleep during my future episodes of dread-filled insomnia. Because we do not live on a comfortable planet. But if people can create one in anime, and certainly have done similar daring things in reality, maybe we don’t need to give up quite yet. We have good cats already, after all. Maybe we can keep ahold of humble dreams of finding mundane joy after a good day’s work, resting beside a safe blue sea that did not exist until people made it so.[end-mark] The post <i>Aria</i>: The Glorious Mundanity of a Terraformed Planet appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club Destination Moon: Both a Small Step and a Giant Leap for Sci Fi Cinema Robert Heinlein, George Pal, and Chesley Bonestell bring their vision of space to the silver screen… By Kali Wallace | Published on March 11, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Destination Moon (1950). Directed by Irving Pichel. Written by Rip Van Ronkel, Robert A. Heinlein, and James O’Hanlon. Starring John Archer, Warner Anderson, Tom Powers, and Dick Wesson. Nobody asked, but I’m going to start with a brief history of the untethered spacewalk. The first time an astronaut planned to do an untethered extravehicular activity (EVA) in space was in 1966. Eugene Cernan, a member of the Gemini 9A mission, was supposed to test a self-contained rocket pack, but the test was canceled when he became fatigued and overheated during the spacewalk. The first actual untethered EVAs didn’t happen in 1984, performed first by Bruce McCandless, then Robert Stewart, during a mission aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. They both used a device called a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) to move about in space outside the shuttle. That wonderful, famous photograph of an astronaut floating free with the Earth in the background is McCandless. (The picture was taken by the shuttle’s pilot, Captain Robert “Hoot” Gibson.) The MMU was used a couple more times during 1984 for untethered spacewalks, but after that it was retired. It would be a decade before its replacement, the smaller Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue (SAFER) device, was tested by astronauts Mark Lee and Carl Meade on a Space Shuttle Discovery flight in 1994. That device has been used a couple of times since then, but overall, in the real world, there have been a very small number of untethered spacewalks, and all of them have been planned and executed while making use of equipment specifically designed to allow the astronauts to maneuver in space. In movies, on the other hand, astronauts are constantly just randomly detaching themselves from their spaceships willy-nilly during spacewalks and going all shockedpikachu.gif when they find themselves at the center of a dramatic set-piece in need of rescue, or doomed to float away forever. And it drives me crazy. Every time! I haven’t been keeping count of how many movies have such a scene, but it’s too many. We all have our sci fi nitpicking bugbears, and this is mine. Detached in space because of catastrophic accident or malevolent force: okay, good drama, keep ’em coming. Detached in space because the characters needlessly unhook themselves to create narrative tension: please stop. When it happened in Destination Moon I literally said out loud, “Oh, come on!” even though there was nobody nearby to hear my frustration except my cats, who do not care, and kept right on not caring as I explained that the space travelers could have just used their second rope instead of engaging in a bit of melodramatic free fallin’. That moment and my reaction to it is a pretty good encapsulation of my experience watching Destination Moon, a movie that tries very hard and gets a lot of things right, but also constantly sabotages its own efforts. Destination Moon was produced by puppeteer-turned-filmmaker George Pal, whose work we have seen before with War of the Worlds (1953)and The Time Machine (1960), the latter of which he also directed. It was his experience with fun, quirky animation that started Pal’s career as a producer. On the strength of his career making animated shorts, Pal convinced the independent studio Eagle-Lion Films to finance two feature films. The first feature was The Great Rupert (1950), which according to Wikipedia is a heartwarming family film about “a little animated squirrel who, with much charm, accidentally helps two economically distressed families overcome their obstacles.” The second feature was Destination Moon, which does not feature a dancing squirrel. Pal was new to feature-length, live-action films, but both movies were directed by Hollywood veteran Irving Pichel, a prolific actor and director. Pichel was one of those classic Hollywood men of the studio era. He started out acting in theater, then switch to film with the advent of sound movies. His first film as director was RKO Pictures’ The Most Dangerous Game (1932), which he co-directed with King Kong (1933) co-director Ernest B. Schoedsack. The Most Dangerous Game was King Kong’s slightly older sibling, as it also starred Fay Wray and was filmed on the same sound stage with the same jungle sets. Pichel, who was Jewish, would spend the next twenty years both acting and directing in dozens of movies in just about every genre, including a number of explicitly anti-Nazi films. In 1947, he was named as one of the so-called Hollywood Nineteen suspected of being a Communist by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He wasn’t one of the ten called to testify, but the ordeal still impacted his career. The blacklist and associated turmoil eventually led to him leaving the United States for the last few years of his life (he died in 1954), but not before filming a few more movies, including both films he made with Pal. There are some mildly conflicting accounts out there about how Destination Moon came about. I can’t prove that the differing accounts depend on whether a person has read a George Pal biography or a Robert Heinlein biography, but those articles that do cite sources lead me to suspect that is behind at least some of the lack of clarity. So I’m not going to try to figure out the precise timeline of who did what and why. At some point in the late 1940s, Heinlein and screenwriter Rip Van Ronkel put together a script for a film about a trip to the Moon, and at some point in that process the story included aspects of Heinlein’s novels Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) and The Man Who Sold the Moon (1949), and at some point Pal got involved and spent a lot of time trying to find a studio to take on the project before finally forming his own production company to get started in feature films. Here is where I shamelessly cheat at my job. You know I love talking about how films are made, but there are some times when somebody else has already done it, and they’ve done it so well, from first-person experience, that it feels downright silly for me to rehash everything they’ve said. In the July 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, Heinlein published a long, detailed, and enjoyable piece all about the movie’s production. All about it: the funding, the choice of filming locations and styles, the consultation of countless scientific and technological experts, the spacesuits, the zero-gravity special effects, the debates they had over what a believable control panel would look like, how to represent the vast surface of the Moon within the confines of a sound stage, and so much more. It’s a great piece. I highly recommend it, especially for a look at how much problem solving, trial and error, and scientific extrapolation was involved in making the film. One bit I find particularly interesting is this: “The greatest single difficulty we encountered in trying to fake realistically the conditions of space flight was in producing the brilliant starry sky of empty space. In the first place nobody knows what stars look like out in space; it is not even known for sure whether twinkling takes place in the eye or in the atmosphere. There is plausible theory each way.” This was 1950, eleven years before the first successful human spaceflight. There had been cameras launched into space, but mostly for the purpose of looking at Earth; the first photo taken in space was taken by a camera mounted on an American V-2 rocket in 1946. At the time, we really didn’t know what space looked like from, well, space, and an important aspect of telling a sci fi story is knowing what you don’t know. Another important aspect is knowing the limitations of your chosen medium. How do you film scenes set in space and on the Moon when you can’t go to the Moon, you don’t know what space looks like, and you can’t use CGI because it’s 1950 and computers are still pretty much only useful for calculating and code-breaking? For example, in order to film the zero-gravity scenes where the crew move about the spaceship at different angles, special effects engineer Lee Zavitz built the entire set into a mechanical contraption that allowed it to be rotated in different directions. This is the same solution 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) would use, and with it came the same additional problem of being so loud the sound inevitably had to be dubbed over the scenes. Heinlein was just one of the many experts brought on to assure Destination Moon’s scientific accuracy. Another expert whose fingerprints are over the film is Chesley Bonestell, the artist whose iconic paintings are universally acknowledged to have helped inspire American interest in and love for space. Even if you don’t know his name, you’ve almost certainly seen Bonestell’s work. Bonestell had been interested in space—and in painting images of space—from a very young age, but he spent several years as an architect first, as is the way of many artists trying to please parents who want them to have practical careers. During that time he helped design the art deco façade of the Chrysler Building; those amazing eagle gargoyles are his work. He eventually moved to Hollywood to work as a matte painter in the film industry. Among other things, he painted the background images of the cathedral in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and the Welsh countryside in John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley (1941), and he worked on Xanadu in Citizen Kane (1941) alongside lead matte painter Mario Larrinaga, whose work we’ve seen previously in King Kong. But Bonestell never lost his love of space, however, and in the May 1944 issue of LIFE Magazine, he published a series of paintings of Saturn, including one of the most famous space paintings ever: Saturn as Seen From Titan. Those paintings, published when our best images of Saturn were fuzzy observatory photos, captured the public imagination immediately. Bonestell went on to collaborate with science writer Willy Ley (the same man who worked with Fritz Lang on Woman in the Moon [1929]) on a book called The Conquest of Space (1949), which paired Bonestell’s paintings of space with speculation about how we might travel there someday. The book caught George Pal’s attention and led to him ask Bonestell to consult on Destination Moon. A few years later, Pal would also make a movie called Conquest of Space (1955), which is about traveling to Mars, and once again Bonestell would create the matte paintings. Bonestell was a traditional painter; he painted oil on board, landscape realism with a bit of the aesthetic of the 19th century American Romanticists. But he also often adapted techniques from his architecture career and his time in Hollywood to imagine worlds nobody had ever visited. He would often build models or miniatures to use as references, and that was part of his process for creating the lunar landscape in Destination Moon. According to Heinlein in his Amazing Stories article, Bonestell vetoed his first choice for the film’s landing location. Heinlein suggested the crater Aristarchus, but Bonestell wanted a crater that fit a very particular set of parameters: wall height, distance to horizon, and a lunar location that would allow Earth to be visible fairly low in the sky. Bonestell searched the Moon’s geography until he found a location that worked. Destination Moon’s lunar scenes take place in the crater Harpalus, which is located in the Moon’s northern hemisphere. Heinlein explains, “Having selected it, Mr. Bonestell made a model of it on his dining room table, using beaver board, plasticine, tissue paper, paint, anything at hand.” (I had to look it up: beaverboard is a specific type of engineered wood made out of pulp, an early 20th century predecessor to MDF.) Bonestell then used a pinhole camera to photograph a panorama of the model from the correct angle, magnified that image, and painted a twenty-foot-wide and two-foot-tall painting of the scene. That painting was then photographed, blown up again, and repainted from a lower angle, so that the movie would be able to show the lunar landscape from atop the rocket and from on the ground. For the record: Bonestell objected quite strongly to the addition of mudcracks to the lunar surface. He knew, and told Pal and Pichel, that there could not be mud on the Moon, because there was no water on the Moon. But the filmmakers wanted to show the perspective, so they wanted the ground to have visible texture receding into the distance. There are so many anecdotes like that from the production. A tremendous amount of creativity, ingenuity, and craftsmanship, from a lot of very smart people, went into making Destination Moon as scientifically plausible as it could be, in a time where most of the science involved quite a lot of speculation. So it’s unfortunate that the movie as a whole is rather boring. Alas. But it really is often quite boring. Yes, it has some moments of excitement. The silly unhook-the-tether-outside-the-spaceship scene is nicely tense, and I genuinely didn’t know if all the astronauts were going to make it off the Moon’s surface at the end. But the movie suffers from a lack of appealing characters and flounders when it swings too far into the didactic. Every scene where Barnes (John Archer), Cargraves (Warner Anderson), and Thayer (Tom Powers) explain the basics of space travel to Sweeney (Dick Wesson, in his first film role) strain credulity, and there is only so much strain one can handle before it becomes a bit tiresome. Heinlein wrote about the pressure to make the movie more palatable to general audiences, so that may have been part of it. But some of it is Heinlein just being Heinlein and using uninteresting characters as avatars for solving interesting problems. There is also a problem of expectation, as so many of the articles that talk about this film in conjunction with Rocketship X-M (1950)—the film that was filmed and released specifically to capitalize on the hype for Destination Moon—state without elaboration that Destination Moon is the serious, high-budget film and Rocketship X-M is the silly, low-budget film. But Rocketship X-M is a movie about nuclear annihilation in which the main cast all tragically die by the end, whereas Destination Moon has a lengthy scene in which Woody Woodpecker explains rocket science to a roomful of rich industrialists who think that prohibitions against nuclear testing are mere bureaucratic red tape stifling their profitable innovation. I agree that one of those is very serious and one is unserious. I just don’t agree that the distinction has anything to do with the accuracy of the science in the films. I appreciate that part of the film’s intended purpose was to spark interest in space travel by proving that it was both realistic and possible, and I am also aware that I can’t fully appreciate just what that meant in 1950, as somebody born nearly a decade after the first Moon landing. Contemporary reviews of the movie don’t really provide much clarity, as many, such as the one from The New York Times, seem to offer the same ambivalence. I think, in the end, I am more fascinated by the existence of Destination Moon than by the film itself. I like that it showcases a rare post-WWII optimism about science and exploration, but I don’t like that it thinks rich men operating outside governmental oversight are the way to achieve that. I love how much craftsmanship and ingenuity went into the production, but I wish the same care had extended to the storytelling and the characters. What do you think of Destination Moon? How do you think it fits into the crowd of post-WWII sci fi movies about space travel? [One final note: There is actually an explanation for the Woody Woodpecker scene, it’s just not a very interesting one. Pal was friends with Woody’s creator, Walter Lantz.] Next week: We’re going both forward and backward in time with First Men in the Moon (1964), an adaptation of the 1901 H.G. Wells novel. You can watch it several places online, including an authorized free version on YouTube.[end-mark] The post <i>Destination Moon</i>: Both a Small Step and a Giant Leap for Sci Fi Cinema appeared first on Reactor.

Books Horror Highlights Demon Descendants and Deadly Diet Culture: Horror Highlights for March 2026 This month’s essential horror titles include malicious hauntings, family scandals, and deadly diet culture… By Emily C. Hughes | Published on March 12, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Everybody already knows about September and October, but honestly, March kind of crept up on me as a Big Month for horror releases. I’m not mad about it, of course, but when I was compiling this month’s list, I kept expecting to hit the end and it just… kept going. There are over fifty new horror books publishing in March—here are just a few I’m really excited about. Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World by Daniel Kraus (Mar 10, Counterpoint) I became fully Kraus-pilled after reading Angel Down last year, and I’m beginning to suspect there isn’t much the man can’t do. He hopscotches between genres and modes without any apparent effort—horror, fantasy, sci-fi, kids’ books, adult books, comics, prose, novelizations, and more. Now he’s entered the nonfiction world with Partially Devoured, equal parts a love letter to George A. Romero’s genre-defining masterpiece and intimate memoir about Kraus’s childhood, grief, and the evolution and erosion of American life over the past sixty-plus years. This one’s a must for any horror movie lover. Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran (Mar 10, Doubleday) For my money, there is nothing more terrifying than a girls’ boarding school, let alone a girls’ boarding school where the girls in question are performing seances to find out what happened to their dead friend. And a girls’ boarding school where a malicious haunting is causing rotten food, sinister events, and an ever-increasing body count? Brother, I am already out the door and down the road. Curran’s buzzy debut also features repressed queer longing and an enemies-to-lovers storyline, in case you somehow needed more reasons to buy it.  You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom by Vincent Tirado (Mar 10, William Morrow) When the patriarch of a wealthy family dies, he leaves a message for his descendants: one of you is a demon. Everyone takes this about as seriously as you might expect, until a violent storm traps the entire family together in their ancestral home. Before long, scandals are uncovered, secrets come to light, and skeletons are practically falling out of closets, and that’s before the murders start. It’s down to Xiomara to act on Papi Ramon’s final message—as long as she can survive the night. (Plus ten points for the title, which is fantastic.) The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson (Mar 31, Erewhon) There are a lot of variations on the haunted house story out there, and I’m always delighted to see a fresh angle cross my desk. Thompson’s debut novel takes place in a public housing project in Michigan and follows Nona, a woman doing her best to make ends meet while mourning the violent, senseless death of her eldest son and trying desperately to keep her two younger sons safe. Thompson does a beautiful job exploring the community of Hester Gardens: the competing influences of faith and crime, the complicated interpersonal network of resentments, secrets, and expectations, and the way the residents pick each other up when they fall. And the emotional storytelling is exquisitely done—parts of this novel hit me like a physical blow. Pick it up as soon as you can.  Nothing Tastes as Good by Luke Dumas (Mar 31, Atria) I don’t know about you, but if I have to see one more GLP-1 ad while I’m minding my own business trying to watch my shows, I am going to lose my entire mind. Luckily, Luke Dumas is back with his third novel, ready to take direct aim at fatphobia, diet culture, and the weight loss industry. Emmett has struggled with his weight his whole life, and has suffered the social and professional consequences of living while fat. When he’s offered a place in a trial for a miraculous new weight loss drug, he jumps at the chance. But the drug comes at a cost (of course it does—this is a horror novel!), and before long, Emmett is craving something much bloodier than mere acceptance. This is one’s about as timely as it gets. (And if you’re in New England, come see Luke and I talk about this book in April!) It never gets easier choosing just a few books to highlight from the many released each month—to see the full list of March’s new horror books and beyond, head over to my website.[end-mark] News and Notes The Bram Stoker Awards final ballot: This year’s Stoker Award nominees have been announced! You can check out the full list here—highlights include Wendy N. Wagner’s Girl in the Creek on the Novel ballot, Bitter Karella’s Moonflow on the First Novel ballot, and Clay McLeod Chapman’s Acquired Taste on the Fiction Collection ballot. Awards will be announced at StokerCon in early June. (NB to HWA members: you can vote through March 15th!) Zando launches Evil Twin: Independent publisher Zando has announced a new dedicated horror imprint coming later this year. Per the publisher: “Evil Twin will bring readers new and distinctive voices in horror that confront our darkest fears and deepest questions, from psychological twists, to supernatural terror, to bone-chilling gore. The imprint will exclusively publish in the horror genre, focusing on all things unabashedly scary so readers can trust its titles to be unputdownable, unsettling, and utterly inescapable.” Evil Twin will launch with two books in fall 2026: A.P. Thayer’s debut novel Tapeworm (Aug 18) and Abe Moss’s Morsels (Oct 6). By my count, that makes five dedicated horror imprints from Big Five or mid-sized indie publishers: Nightfire (Tor/Macmillan), Run For It (Orbit/Hachette), 12:01 (Atria/Simon & Schuster, launching later this year), and Hell’s Hundred (Soho Press). The post Demon Descendants and Deadly Diet Culture: Horror Highlights for March 2026 appeared first on Reactor.

News The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum Kate Winslet to Star in The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum Production is set to start in New Zealand in May By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on March 11, 2026 Miya Mizuno/HBO Comment 0 Share New Share Miya Mizuno/HBO Andy Serkis’ Lord of the Rings film is heading toward production in New Zealand later this year, and Kate Winslet will be moving there with him. According to Deadline, Winslet (Titanic, Mare of Easttown, pictured above in The Regime) will be “the female lead” (aka “one of the leads”) of the film. She’ll be joined on-screen by LOTR alums Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, and Serkis, who respectively played Frodo Baggins, Gandalf, and Gollum in the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films. The Hunt for Gollum will reportedly take place between the events of The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring. It will follow Aragorn (played in the Lord of the Rings films by Viggo Mortensen) as he and Gandalf seek to track down Gollum before the creature can let Sauron know where the One Ring to rule them all is hiding. (This description means that the events of the upcoming film actually happen during The Fellowship of the Ring, after Gandalf visits Bilbo for his birthday and sees that his old dear friend is not quite right. But I digress.) The Hunt for Gollum is in pre-production, and sees Serkis in the director’s chair. Production is set to begin in New Zealand in May, with shooting lasting until October. It’s also the first planned movie in a duology, which means that the hunt for Gollum will likely span more than a mere single film. We don’t have any details yet on who Winslet will be playing, much less whether the character will be human, hobbit, elf, or dwarf. We’ll find out when The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum comes out in theaters on December 17, 2027. [end-mark] The post Kate Winslet to Star in <i>The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Science Fiction Read an Excerpt From The Subtle Art of Folding Space by John Chu This isn’t your usual jaunt through quantum physics. By John Chu | Published on March 11, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Subtle Art of Folding Space by John Chu, a science fiction novel that channels unhinged physics, generational trauma, and the comfort of really good dim sum—out from Tor Books on April 7th. Ellie’s universe—and this one—is falling apart. Her ailing mother is in a coma; her sister, Chris, accuses her of being insufficiently Chinese between assassination attempts; and a shadowy cabal of engineers is trying to hijack the skunkworks, the machinery that keeps the physics of each universe working the way it’s supposed to.Daniel, Ellie’s cousin, has found an illicit device in the skunkworks—one that keeps Ellie’s comatose mother alive while also creating destabilizing bugs in the physics of this universe. It’s not a good day.If she can confront her mother’s legacy and overcome her family’s generational trauma, she just might find a way to preserve the skunkworks and reconcile with her sister…but digging into her family’s past is thornier than it seems, and the secrets she uncovers will force Ellie to choose between her family and the universe itself. Chapter 1 “Attention passengers: The next Red Line train to Alewife is now approaching” echoes off the walls. Not only has the next Red Line train to Alewife arrived but its passengers have already flooded the station, a torrent rushing up the escalators, through the turnstiles, then down the concourse to spill out the doors to Cambridge. The deluge arriving as the PA system squawks catches Ellie off guard. It’s rush hour. When a train arrives on one side of the platform, the one on the other side leaves seconds later. She sprints, a beleaguered salmon racing against the current of bodies. Her pack sloshes between her shoulder blades, a sloppy fin batting the waves of people surrounding her. No one has tried to kill her today—yet. Her sister, Chris, arranges something at random intervals. It’s to keep Ellie sharp, Chris claims, because, occasionally, skunkworks isolationists try. Not that Ellie believes Chris has her best interests at heart. Well, not anymore, but she doesn’t know how to stop the attempts on her life, and they do keep her sharp. Maybe the mistimed announcement is part of today’s attempt. She’ll be caught in the rip current of bodies, a wave will overwhelm her, and a shark hiding in the swell will tear her to pieces. Compared to the attempt with the Mylar balloons, the jar of Marmite, and the US men’s Greco-Roman wrestling team, an ill-timed flood of people at Alewife Station is downright practical and likely. None of that happens, though. The crowd flows around her as she plunges down the stairs toward the platform. The car doors shut just as she reaches them. While the PA system blasts, “Attention passengers: The next Red Line train to Alewife is now arriving,” the train clatters away. The train supposedly now arriving sits already emptied on the opposite side of the platform. It beeps as its doors slide shut. As the crowd streams up the stairs and escalators, the platform quickly clears, leaving a couple of people who must have, like Ellie, just missed the train. Some guy wearing shorts that stretch across his thighs, no shirt, and more self-possession than Ellie thought possible hovers in front of one of the train doors. Someone else sits on a bench, staring at her e-reader. A thin woman reaches for Ellie like a drowning person reaching for a buoy. Her luggage crashes to the floor. She asks in rapid Mandarin whether Ellie knows how to get to the Best Western. Her oboe-like voice skips through her words. Ellie blinks. Strangers start conversations in Mandarin with her all the time at school. Not so much outside of school. The Best Western is only a short walk away. With luggage, though, the woman will want a taxi, but there’s almost always one dropping someone off outside the station. All the woman needs to do is go up the escalator and cross the concourse. She tells the woman all of this in Mandarin. Ellie’s response doesn’t draw laughs, her irrational fear whenever she talks to a stranger in any language that’s not English. In fact, the woman thanks her. Ellie decides she is not today’s assassin. The woman doesn’t turn to the escalator. Instead, she freezes for a moment, then glares at Ellie. People randomly start sounding like her sister way more often than Ellie would like. Some people text. Her sister commandeers convenient strangers. It’s never less than creepy, and it always catches Ellie off guard until the glare. “If you’d quit school after Mom’s diagnosis like I’d told you to, you’d have moved back to DC,” the woman says in fluent English, her voice now husky and incongruously casual. “You wouldn’t need to worry about missing the Amtrak now.” It’s not Chris’s voice, but it absolutely is. A childhood in Taipei clashed with an adolescence in Buffalo to give Chris an accent that’s all non-rhotic and flat nasal vowels. She’s always sounded like a panhandler in 1930s New York, albeit one who made unreasonable demands on your life rather than begged for a nickel. After Mom was diagnosed with glioblastoma, Chris became a 1930s New York panhandler who’s always promising to send Ellie to sleep with the fishes. Buy the Book The Subtle Art of Folding Space John Chu Buy Book The Subtle Art of Folding Space John Chu Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Chris has always treated Ellie like this. Ellie was mostly through her undergrad when she had even an inkling that anything was different. None of her university friends have older siblings who talk to them like this. Granted, their older siblings are only a couple of years older, not practically a decade. Still, the idea that Ellie became a full-grown adult before realizing this is too embarrassing to think about, so she usually doesn’t. “Even if I miss this Amtrak, it’s not like there won’t be another one tonight. What do you have to tell me that’s so urgent that it can’t wait until, at worst, tomorrow afternoon?” Ellie folds her arms across her chest. “You did not waylay some random stranger so that you can taunt me about missing the train.” As Ellie says this, it strikes her that maybe Chris did. The obvious opening to needle Ellie is right there. Whenever Chris does it, she is, of course, always “ just joking.” The woman only comes up to Ellie’s neck. She glares down at Ellie anyway. “Of course not. Who do you think I am?” The woman folds her arms across her chest. “If I have to stay at home to watch Mom, you have to go to the skunkworks and repair the physics of this universe. Mom brought you with her so many times by now that you have to be dense if you can’t make a straightforward repair by yourself by now.” Ellie ignores the jab. When Chris doesn’t have to play the good, dutiful sister around witnesses, Ellie has to ignore a lot of jabs to get through a conversation. “What’s the problem?” “Everyone’s wrong about why the International Prototype of the Kilogram is losing mass relative to its official copies. We’d see divergences between them even if the kilogram were defined by something more fundamental than a cylinder of platinum alloy. The notion of the kilogram, itself—” “Has become unstable.” Ellie frowns. “Fundamental physical constants are changing—” “Yes. Now the good news—” “There’s good news?” “—is we’ve found some hold-time violations in the skunkworks. Probably caused by some leaking valves. They must be why the kilogram’s unstable. Fix them and I promise I won’t judge you when you don’t get here until tomorrow afternoon. First time for everything.” By “first time,” Ellie isn’t sure whether Chris is talking about repairing the skunkworks by herself or not judging her for being late. Probably the former. The skunkworks that generates a universe lives within the surrounding universe. She’s only ever assisted Mom, albeit more times than she can count by now. There are an infinite number of skunkworks and universes. Nothing in the matryoshka doll that is the set of nested universes can prevent Chris from judging Ellie. She would ask, but Chris has already gone. The woman turns around as though she hasn’t said a thing. She goes to the escalator, trundling her luggage behind her. At least someone gets to go where she wants to. Ellie doesn’t. Chris won’t let anyone else stay by Mom’s side. Mom lies comatose, the end stage of glioblastoma, on a bed in Chris’s den. She needs constant attention from Chris the way dolphins need tax advice. However, taking care of your parents is a filial obligation and no one is more Taiwanese than someone who no longer lives in the motherland. All of the relatives see Chris as the good daughter, the dutiful daughter. Even though Chris wants Ellie in the same house as Mom, she never lets Ellie do anything. Ellie visits every weekend anyway. She does because she’s more like Chris than she likes to admit, just as stubborn and also someone who no longer lives in the motherland. Also, once in a while, Mom shifts in bed. She yawns. Her eyes open a crack and, for a moment, she stares right at Ellie, as though she’s about to wake from her long nap. Then her eyes close again, and she slumps back into oblivion. This seems like much more than random firing of neurons in a brain about to die. Ellie, even though she knows better, can’t help thinking that the next time might be the time she wakes for real. The train beeps. Its doors slide open. Passengers stream onto the train. Ellie shakes her head clear, then joins them. Everyone else is headed toward Davis Square. Ellie, on the other hand, is headed to the universe that surrounds this one. She blends into the crowd, so no one notices when she disappears. Chapter 2 The air in the skunkworks feels spackled onto her skin. It burns into her lungs like hot fudge, slow and slick, its aftertaste at once sickly sweet, bitter, and sour. It takes effort to force back out. The skunkworks looks like the masterpiece of some mad plumber who failed perspectives class in art school. The labyrinth of pipes surrounding her make her dizzy at first. Standing on one of the broad swaths of transparent mesh stretched between pipes, she bobbles until she gets her bearings. Fat pipes pass overhead. They form a de facto canopy hiding the rest of the skunkworks, which stretches for miles above her. In actuality, it stretches for miles in all directions. Fixes have piled on top of so-called improvements have piled on top of emergency repairs forever. Rust covers the gates and reservoirs at the intersection of pipes. Most pipes block each other’s way and have to zigzag around each other. No pipes are unscarred from dead welds of stubs where pipes used to join together. Data pulses through the pipes in all directions. The pipes ripple, but stabilize in time for the clacking of valves and the burbling of reservoirs. Probably because she already knows which ones they are, the pipes that violate the hold-time requirement look out of sync even to the naked eye. Pipes are supposed to be stable from a little before reservoir valves clack shut until a little after. The pipes that violate the hold-time requirement start to ripple again too soon, corrupting the reservoirs they feed. Someone stands on a mesh below her. Daniel. He’s a verifier, not an isolationist. None of the latter have found her yet. Ellie lets go of the breath she didn’t realize she was holding. Even though Mom always pulled Ellie into the skunkworks with her, she never admitted, at least not to Ellie, to the existence of isolationists. She had to learn who they are from Chris. They believe whatever universe a skunkworks generates is by definition correct, even as a skunkworks inevitably decays. Any change introduces error instead of removing it. They’re what Chris used to scare Ellie into doing what Chris wanted when Ellie was a kid. Be good or the isolationists will get you. Mom only ever talked about maintainers. They fall into three rough groups, with some overlaps. Architects design the configuration of gates and pipes that generate the next universe in. Builders, like Ellie and Chris, install those gates and pipes, translating the architects’ designs into reality. Verifiers, like Daniel, check whether architects have designed the right thing and whether they have designed the thing right. They understand the skunkworks better than anyone, to the extent that anyone really understands the workings of any universe. The first one to show up when the skunkworks has gone wrong is almost always a verifier. Or a generalist, who’s skilled at all three jobs. Even looking down from above, no one can mistake Daniel. His long legs are proportionately too short for his torso, and his shoulders are too wide. He manages to be both lithe and stocky at the same time, as though he were the runt of a family of impossibly elegant giants. He was voluntold to play football in high school and, even now, he does not look like someone you want to tackle you. A black T-shirt is draped over his left shoulder. The pipes beyond his gaze blur as though a giant thumb has smeared a broad swath of petroleum jelly on the air. He holds his hand out. The blurred air twists and swirls into a ball on his palm. It coalesces into an egg tart. Bright yellow custard sits inside a pale, blond serrated crust. The perfume of eggs and sugar hangs in the thick air. Every verifier Ellie has met except Daniel generates equivalence reports as sheafs of something crystalline. Daniel’s, for reasons best known to Daniel, are always edible. He studies the egg tart from every angle. His neck cranes and his hand twists. Crumbs fall when he lifts the tart to look at the crust’s bottom. He brings it to his nose to sniff. The custard jiggles slightly when he shakes the tart. He frowns. Ellie bounces from mesh to mesh, swinging around pipes and ducking under reservoirs, landing next to Daniel. This mesh, already taut from his weight, barely registers her. “Cousin! Your first time solo.” Daniel’s voice, despite being practically subsonic, is never the thunder she expects from an elegant giant. He speaks with the rustle of leaves and the rush of water as it smooths rock. “Congrats.” “Chris mentioned hold-time violations, probably valves gone faulty. Should be an easy fix. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have sent me instead of coming herself.” Ellie’s arms wave in slow-motion semaphore as she steadies herself. “Your egg tart shows a mismatch between how the skunkworks that was built functions and how the skunkworks that was designed functions, right?” “Yeah, no point calling in an architect. The design itself is fine. The problem is in the implementation. It’s all yours.” She sets her backpack down, then walks around Daniel to a knot of intertwined pipes. Reservoir valves clack, and the pipes they feed ripple too soon. Data races through those pipes, corrupting the reservoir they feed in turn. All of the valves, however, are fine. Their actuators swing smoothly. Their seals fit perfectly against the pipes and reservoirs. Nothing leaks. She could add some delays to satisfy the hold-time requirement, to make the data take longer to reach the reservoir they feed. That’s almost as simple as the leaky-valve repair Chris expected. That, however, would merely get rid of the symptom. Mom taught her better than that. She has to find the cause of the hold-time violation first. The skunkworks predate humanity and, if she’s guessed the age of the hardware right, no human has ever made any changes to this section. Any mismatch in construction should have been found eons ago. She checks anyway, working through the checklist her mom taught her, hoping that’s what the problem is. If the design is fine and the hardware is correctly constructed, the remaining alternatives are all unthinkable. She draws a large rectangle in front of her with her hand the way Mom taught her. A plane of air detaches and folds itself into an origami Black Forest cuckoo clock. The transparent, crystalline structure floats before her eyes. Its pendulum swings back and forth and the skunkworks fills with the sting of an offstage chorus whenever the pendulum stops at the peak of its arc. Light diffracts through leaves lining its sides. Color sprays across the pipes and Daniel. The egg tart still sits in his outstretched hand and he looks sillier than Ellie would have thought possible given his “I am deadly if you come within five paces” body. The clock unfolds itself back into a rectangle, marked with creases where it had been folded. They divide the plane of air into facets that refract pipes behind them into something Syncretic Cubist. She grabs the newly retrieved blueprint. Its hard edges dig into her palms. She warps it, at first, into a dome, then into a sphere that seals her in. Daniel splinters into “Man with an Egg Tart,” a Braque that Braque never painted. He’s all shards of black, gray, and brown flecked with grains of yellow. This piece of the skunkworks, however, resolves into something uniform and regular. The multiple perspectives merge into one. Pipes straighten and meet at right angles. Ellie spins along three axes inside the sphere. Her hands and feet work their way up, down, and around the hard, cold sphere for support. Dense knots of machinery explode, laying bare their pipes and gates. The labyrinth of pipes has become now a regular matrix. The hardware matches the blueprints then. That’s one possible issue eliminated. She’s not shocked. No problem as straightforward as a mismatch goes undiscovered for days, much less millennia. The sort of things that take forever to discover tend to be subtle. Fundamental constants shifting, even slightly, is not subtle. That implies a recent change. What she has to do now is find it. The dataflow through the machinery is now perfectly straightforward. Pulses of data bulge from one pipe to another. They sweep in waves across the matrix, each wave a straight line traveling from one side of the matrix to the other. Whoever built this hardware followed the design rules derived from the physics for this universe. That’s another possible issue ruled out. Again, a design-rule violation that makes the kilogram unstable was unlikely to stay undiscovered for millennia. So far, the lack of any mistakes in construction suggests that none of this hardware has changed for the longest time. The waves propagate, however, faster than she expects. They should be regularly spaced. Each wave should be swallowed by a set of reservoirs that, a moment later, sends out a wave of its own. Instead, waves crash into each other. That’s bad. In fact, that’s not possible. It does, at least, highlight which paths are violating the hold-time constraint. Daniel has verified that the design is correct. The hardware matches the design. It follows the design rules derived from the physics of this universe. It’s in good shape. There shouldn’t be any hold-time violations. It’s supposed to work, exactly as it has for millennia. But it doesn’t. While the skunkworks match the blueprint in construction, they don’t match the blueprint in function. She’s tempted to give up and just fix the symptom. A few buffers inserted into the relevant paths and the violation would be gone. Anyone with any training as a builder could do that. But she wants to know why a repair is necessary in the first place. Otherwise, she’s not really solving the problem. “Fuck me.” She slams a foot against the sphere. It shatters with a chord from the offstage chorus. “The valves are fine. The design is fine. Everything is fine.” She falls face up onto the mesh and thinks horrible things about Chris. Her backpack bounces above her, then lands on her stomach. Daniel seems to have disappeared. This completely tracks. Ellie was running bog-standard diagnostics. Three seconds of boredom and Daniel wanders off, sometimes to another universe. In this case, almost certainly back to their own, probably the instant she started doing her thing. It’s too bad because Ellie could use someone to talk through whatever is causing the skunkworks to fail like this. Ellie knows the right thing to do. Chris probably has some idea of how to deal with this. Ellie should ask Chris for help. However, Ellie dismisses the idea almost before it crosses her mind. She can already hear exactly what Chris will say. Ellie doesn’t need a helping of “How can you be so useless? I ask you to do a simple bit of maintenance and you can’t even do that by yourself. And you wonder why I don’t want your help with Mom” before Chris finally deigns to offer a suggestion. Instead, Ellie closes her eyes. Mentally, she ticks off entries on the checklist that builders follow when they troubleshoot. Mom walked her through it every time they were in the skunkworks together. Usually, though, they don’t make it as far as checking for design-rule violations before they have some clue of what’s going wrong. There’s one entry on the checklist left, she realizes. Something happened that shouldn’t have in the skunkworks one universe out. That is, the skunkworks that generates the universe she is in now, which contains the skunkworks that generates her own universe. The recent change is there, not here. In other words, she needs a verifier, say Daniel, to check out whether that skunkworks is working right. She keeps her eyes shut and listens to the valves around her clack open and closed with metronomic precision. Maybe a moment or three to clear her mind would be a good thing. “I’m back.” Daniel’s rumbling voice shocks Ellie’s eyes open. “Did you miss me?” Daniel looms over her, his hands behind his back. He smells like soy and ginger. An amused expression sits on his face. “Egg tart?” He crouches, then places the pastry on the backpack. His other hand is still behind his back. “I don’t need to study the equivalence report.” She pushes herself up by her elbows. “I trust your analysis.” “I meant to eat. It’s a functional mismatch but still edible.” He nudges the backpack toward her head. “You haven’t had dinner yet, right? You’ll feel better with something in your stomach. Personally, I think that’s just a story my boyfriend tells me, but maybe eating really does clear the mind.” She sits up. The backpack and egg tart slide to her lap. “Don’t you want your mind cleared?” “Nyah. I don’t believe in emotions.” He notes her skeptical gaze and a grin lights his face. “I had a protein shake and a banana before I showed up.” “I’ve checked everything else, so there’s only one thing left that can be wrong.” She takes a bite of the egg tart. It tastes sweet, sour, and… gamey. “Turkey and cranberries?” “Hey, I said the report was a mismatch. I do what I can.” Daniel rolls his eyes. “So what’s wrong, cuz?” “This entire universe.” She finishes the egg tart. It’s not bad if you know what’s coming. “It’s like someone secretly added lots of helium to the air and now we all squeak. Except less resistance rather than higher pitch. The skunkworks wasn’t designed for data to flow through pipes this easily. The properties of this universe can’t have changed much. Most of the skunkworks still works right or we’d be seeing—I don’t know—people diffracting through fences or something, but a few paths are now too fast.” “Which is why we’re seeing functional failures even though what was built matches what was designed then functionally verified.” Daniel nods. “What next?” “Check whether the skunkworks one universe out is working properly. I want to know whether just fixing the violating paths will solve the problem for good.” “I popped out to check while you were assessing equivalence here. It’s fine.” From behind his back, he brings out a plate made of compressed, deep-fried rice that he must have been holding all this time. He puts it onto her backpack. Pieces of pan-fried fish coated in brown glaze sit on the plate. That’s why he smells of soy and ginger. “Also, I went to an archive and pulled a copy of the latest changes made to the skunkworks that generates the universe we’re in now.” He digs a small, clear, iridescent dodecahedron out of the right, front pocket of his jeans and tosses it to her. Its facets are numbered. You could make an attack roll in an RPG with it. Fractures appear and disappear inside the die as Ellie rolls it around in her hand. She rotates the die from 20 to 1 and reads the shifting cracks. Her eyes widen at the sheer scope of some of the changes. These are not mere parts replacements or surgical bug fixes. “So the maintainers of this universe intentionally changed their own physics? Why would anyone do that?” This goes against everything maintainers are supposed to stand for. “If you already knew that, why bother asking me what’s wrong?” “I didn’t already know. Speculative generation.” He smiles. “You were busy and there was no reason not to check before you asked. I know what the builders’ checklist looks like, and it wasn’t impossible that you’d make it all the way down to the bottom. Sooner we get out of here, the less likely we’ll have to deal with any troublemakers. I saved us some time. And if it turned out you didn’t need me to do anything, no big deal.” Ellie breaks off a shard from the plate to test the fish. The glazed fish’s crispy skin cracks against the deep-fried rice. She sniffs at this equivalence report. Then again, the egg tart smelled normal too. “Is this going to taste icky sweet like 八寶飯 or something?” Now Daniel looks annoyed. His gaze is sharp and his hands rest on his hips. “No, it’s going to taste like a deconstructed garlic fried rice paired with a soy-and-ginger-glazed tilapia. The skunkworks one universe out is fine. Eat.” She lances a piece of fish and tries it. The tilapia is mild. Its triumph is that it doesn’t sit like cotton in her mouth. The glaze is lovely. Garlic, shallots, and a little brown sugar round out the soy and ginger. Daniel simply shakes his head when she offers to share. She hasn’t had dinner yet, and she doesn’t have time, so it all disappears quickly. The glaze never cloys even when it coats her mouth. The plate made of rice clears the glaze away in any case. “Show-off.” Ellie smiles before letting sparks flit from finger to finger on her left hand. She can show off, too. The air becomes gauze that scatters the pipes, valves, reservoirs, even Daniel into mathematical points that then recombine. The machinery that generates the universe shimmers. When the gauze coalesces, it becomes cool, metallic, and malleable, not coincidentally the stuff that thickens into pieces of the skunkworks. Her right hand extrudes a delay element out of the gauze. In time with the omnipresent clacking of valves, her left hand strikes the pipe in front of her twice. Sparks fly. The pipe splits into three pieces. Clean, parallel scars separate a ring from the pipe on either side of it. She removes the ring and replaces it with the delay element, her left hand sparking again to fuse the delay element into place. One by one, she inserts extra delays to slow the paths that have become too fast. Click. Insert. Clack. Insert. She can only repair the skunkworks in the moment when the pipes are settled. It never halts. The skunkworks that lives in the innermost universe generates the outermost universe, whatever “innermost” and “outermost” mean when the universes are arranged in a loop. Stopping one skunkworks stops all of them. How you start them back up again is something she hopes she never has to figure out. She dismisses the gauze and the skunkworks sharpen. The pipes grow and shrink in sync with the clacking of valves. Data no longer skids through paths causing pipes to expand or contract when they should be still. “OK, Daniel, show me where to go. We need to flush out any speculative state before it’s committed, or we’re stuck with the results of a faulty skunkworks.” The skunkworks is constantly speculating multiple possible futures. Ideally, only the correct one is committed to become the present, which becomes the past and what the skunkworks uses to speculate possible futures. The rest are all flushed away. Those futures never happen. They, of course, are already stuck. Some mistakes of a faulty skunkworks have already been committed. Say a bug in the skunkworks causes fundamental constants to go out of whack. As a result, a beach ball tunneling through a brick wall is committed as the present instead of being flushed out. That’s now the state of the universe. Within the universe, whoever was looking at the beach ball saw it glitch from one side of the wall to the other. There’s no point to letting those errors compound, though. The universe should be generated correctly from as early as possible. Daniel shifts his T-shirt across his back and ties it around his neck. It might look like a cape except it’s way too short. He appraises her, his face pensive. “Anyone else might declare it close enough and leave. You really are Aunt Vera’s child.” Ellie rolls her eyes. Mom’s reputation precedes her. “Considering how long you lived with us, you might as well be, too.” Daniel looks annoyed again. “No, I mean her attitude about the skunkworks and the generated universe… Never mind. You have to see it yourself. Come on. Follow me.” He leaps to a thick pipe way overhead. From there, he swings to a swath of mesh, he bounces, and off he goes. “Hold up, you big lunk. You have over a foot of wingspan on me.” Ellie sighs too loudly, then follows him. Excerpted from The Subtle Art of Folding Space, copyright © 2026 by John Chu. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Subtle Art of Folding Space</i> by John Chu appeared first on Reactor.