News The Magic School Bus Elizabeth Banks to Play Ms. Frizzle in The Magic School Bus Live-Action Adaptation Legendary is looking to make a live-action feature film based on the classic children’s books By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on June 23, 2026 Photo credit for Elizabeth Banks: Empire Movies, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons Comment 0 Share New Share Photo credit for Elizabeth Banks: Empire Movies, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons Buckle up! The Magic School Bus will be heading to a theater near you. Today, Legendary Entertainment announced (via Deadline) it’s working on a live-action feature adaptation of the children’s book series written by Joanna Cole and illustrated by Bruce Degen. Elizabeth Banks (director of Cocaine Bear and actor with numerous credits, including playing Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games films) is on board to produce and play teacher and bus driver, Ms. Valerie Frizzle. Rob Letterman (Detective Pikachu) is also attached and tasked with writing the initial treatment and directing. This isn’t the first adaptation of The Magic School Bus series. In the 1990s, PBS had an animated show based on the books, with Lily Tomlin voicing Ms. Valerie Frizzle and a theme song courtesy of Little Richard. Another animated series, The Magic School Bus Rides Again, released seasons on Netflix from 2017 to 2021. In it, Tomlin once again voiced Valerie Frizzle (who was called Professor Frizzle on the show) and Kate McKinnon voiced Prof. Frizzle’s younger sister, Ms. Fiona Felicity Frizzle. In the movie realm, Universal has held the rights to adapt the books, and in 2020, Banks, Scholastic, and producer Marc Platt were working on a project there. That effort apparently fizzled out (no pun intended), and Legendary picked up the rights, with Banks, Platt, and Scholastic remaining involved via the new endeavor. The Magic School Bus books (and television shows) are educational entertainment staples for younger children. Each story sees Ms. Frizzle take her students to places like the inside of the human body, the age of the dinosaurs, the ocean floor, and the center of the Earth (did I mention the bus is magical?). Where the new movie’s Magic School Bus will travel remains unknown, including if/when it will premiere in theaters. [end-mark] The post Elizabeth Banks to Play Ms. Frizzle in <i>The Magic School Bus</i> Live-Action Adaptation appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Science Fiction Read an Excerpt From Null Entity by Seth Haddon Wylla and Sable take their revenge to the very corporation that keeps the galaxy turning. By Seth Haddon | Published on June 23, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Null Entity, the second book in Seth Haddon’s Volatile Memory duology, out from Tordotcom Publishing on July 21st. With her identity erased from the Corporate Federation, Wylla is a ghost in the machine: untraceable, unpredictable, and fueled by vengeance. She fights alongside Sable, the digital consciousness she loves in ways no system could ever define. Together, they’ve built a reputation for tearing through VisorForge’s carefully constructed lies.But notoriety has a cost.When one of their attacks draws the attention of the Edenic Order—a clandestine eco-resistance whose insurgents bloom with Old Earth flora—Wylla and Sable are offered something more than revenge: a chance to dismantle VisorForge from the roots up.As they fall deeper into the Order’s radical vision, tensions rise. Wylla: aching to change the world yet seduced by thoughts of a quiet life, free of bloodshed. Sable: pushed to her moral limits when what she’s wanted since death is at her fingertips.To survive, they’ll need to embrace what makes them dangerous: two minds, one body, and a shared resolve to bring down a corporatized dystopia—no matter the cost. Buy the Book Null Entity Seth Haddon Buy Book Null Entity Seth Haddon Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget 1 She’s back. Two words on an innocuous thread were enough to announce your arrival. Within seconds, replies bloomed across the message board, and the game began. “Local hackers are aware of our presence,” I told you. “Probably a minute before station security catches on.” You grunted, all grit and focus. I stayed silent. You crouched over a terminal in the ribbed underhalls of BSMC-07, a routing station so old its walls sweated rust and the relays never stopped buzzing. Through one of the slats, we spied the concourse below, where a mammoth screen blared an ad for cheap freight. That one would end any second. Our target lay three ads ahead. We didn’t have much time. I flicked my focus to your MARK I RABBIT, stashed aboard our vessel in the hangar bay. It monitored station chatter, sniffing for pings or scans—any sign someone had noticed the ship. For now, we were unnoticed. “Sable. Need you again.” I split in thirds—one eye on RABBIT, one on the ad playing, the rest with you. You’d hit another tangle, a firewall cinched with hypervigilance. The system’s bones were Corporate Federation’s, ad-stream code that stretched like scaffolding through half the sector. You’d cracked it before, slipping payloads into feeds they swore were untouchable. It was a supposedly neutral system all its member corps depended on. But neutrality was brittle: VisorForge’s fingerprints now ghosted the firewall. Their interests were knotted, paranoia hardened into your problem. But it wouldn’t stop you. Heat bloomed under your clothes, adrenaline riding you hard. I felt the storm: pulse in your ears, breath catching, thoughts sprinting. We’re going to get caught. Hurry. Hurry— I hovered at the edge of your panic, ready to shield. But my agitation was unfounded. You could handle it. You exhaled steady, fingers flying across the keyboard. “Okay. Project the credentials.” I fed the authorization tokens into the system for the third time. They were a gift from Pell, a chatty VisorForge tech embedded on Beta sector relays. Those creds gave us access to our mark, now two ads ahead: a sector-wide VisorForge drop hitting thirteen stations and three planets. Our tenth cyberattack in six months. The system opened, your hack landing clean. A cluster of holograms floated in the queue, and you paused on VisorForge’s. Its e-tag listed run time, proof of purchase, and transaction details, a ledger of VisorForge’s spend: a staggering sum. You opened it. The HoloProp flared to life on the static-choked screen. On the concourse, OrbitDock Realty hawked micro-cubicles for rent—eight cubic meters, eviction protection sold separately. I flicked my attention back to the terminal. Light bled around a white-toothed spokesperson, his grin stretched in uncanny cheer. “The future of performance is here,” he promised. A jovial ad for what it really was. VisorForge’s latest grab. The small-time mask manufacturer Auntie Donnelly had been absorbed, and now VisorForge was strip-mining their designs into its own catalog. Official statements called it amicable. But scav back channels whispered of a hostile takeover, not with guns but obscure statutes, wielded until the smaller company was absorbed and converted into a VisorForge asset. In the Corporate Federation, every asset meant leverage, every acquisition another seat on the council. Currently on-screen, several low-cost mask models, once Donnelly’s, now spun beneath the VisorForge banner, byronnicum-plated and brand-etched. Donnelly’s masks had never been animalistic. They were sleek, humanoid, form-fitting steel. The ad claimed all original features were intact: cognitive optimization, task automation via embedded AI, emotional dampening, team integration, real-time metric tracking. “Cheaper masks, now with the VisorForge guarantee. Maximize productivity—no distractions, just results.” “No privacy, just profit,” you murmured, smiling when I snorted. With surgical precision, you sliced into the hologram’s code and embedded our payload. Our counter-ad carried the contract we’d salvaged from my dead husband’s ship, proof of VisorForge’s pact with the Martial Syndicate. In the months after Fyster’s death, we uncovered the truth: VisorForge had cut the deal without the Corporate Federation’s knowledge. We gambled that exposure would force the board to act against VisorForge—and if not, then public outrage would. We bolstered the ad with months of evidence detailing intra-mask surveillance and the sale of behavioral data to the Syndicate and other Federation branches. As you stitched the last lines in, the hacker message board pinged, replies flooding in. User: CodeWeaver43Narrowed the signal to BSMC-07 or BTP-09.BSMC makes more sense cause it’s got a stronger comms array + easier injection vector.If I were hijacking a multi-planet ad feed, I’d launch from there too.User: SignalPathFinderr → replyingK. Which corps ship ads out of BSMC? User: CodeWeaver43 → replying HJK, POM, VF, WERT.It’s central enough for Beta sector routing. Hit it right, and you can splash twelve systems.User: Lastlightt708a → replying CodeWeaver43VisorForge mentionUser: Z4L3Nix → replying Lastlightt708aAgreed. The specter is the VF fugitive. Sotain whatever.User: Fyro22 → replying Z4L3NixSotain doesn’t exist. Btw “specter” is so lame. What the fuck kind of complex does this ghost have about VisorForge anyway? Vf’s a corp like any other.User: CodeWeaver43Sotain’s id returning a null value is just proof she’s a good hacker.→ replying Fyro22“Vf’s a corp like any other.”Go look up the Pholan’s World data dump n say that again “Hackers are catching on,” I said. “Your old ID’s been mentioned.” “Okay, okay. I’m almost—” Suddenly, you put your hands up. A symbol eclipsed the terminal screen: a tiny sapling sprouting from a seed, wrapped in roots. It looked innocuous. But it shouldn’t have been in our code, which meant it wasn’t. Sweat rolled down your temple. You’d seen it before. A variant, and never inside live tech, let alone a VisorForge framework. “What—?” RABBIT sent an alert through me. “Ignore it. Encrypted channel just opened between station security and an inbound vessel. Shit.” “Ass,” you agreed. We both knew who it was. Subsidiary Four had been on our tail for months, and here it was again, negotiating with BSMC-07 for landing clearance. You dove back into the feed, ignoring cramping fingers to shove the counterhack aside and claw back control. We had to disrupt the encrypted channel. If the Subsidiary’s credentials got through, station security could lock down every ship in the port. I had RABBIT spin up the jump drive. When I refocused, you were standing still, a deep frown plowing your brows. The terminal blared warnings. The encrypted channel between Four and station security had dropped. But it hadn’t been you. You’d had no time to act. “Sable,” you murmured. “I know.” Someone else had infiltrated. A goading message flickered across the screen: AM I BETTER THAN YOU, SPECTER? Sparks spat from the terminal as the treacly stench of burning coolant filled the shaft. You recoiled, and the unit overloaded and burst. From the ruined venting, tufts of green surged outward, slick with sap. Leaves unfurled, and a single bulb swelled, luminous and unfamiliar. “Biocode,” you breathed. And we both knew who was helping us now. The Edenic Order. On the concourse, the billboard flared with the VisorForge ad. A corporate jingle hummed, the crest unfolding like a promise: productivity, unity, control. It lasted six seconds before our splice took hold—you’d made it in time. The transition was almost elegant. First, a stutter in the voiceover. Then a flicker. The ad split open along the seam we’d left, revealing what we’d buried: the contract stamped by VisorForge and the Martial Syndicate—fine print, pay schedules, telemetry logs, surveillance records indexed by emotional spikes and dissident keywords. Employee faces flickered beside coordinates and IDs. It was raw, clean, and inarguable. VisorForge was watching; VisorForge would happily scrape your brain raw for profit. In the shaft, you pressed your eye to the slat and peered down at the concourse, waiting for a reaction. At first, nothing. Then people slowed, and stopped. “Okay,” you whispered, relieved. For this to work, we needed eyes on the feed. And for a moment, we had them. They weren’t angry yet. They weren’t afraid. But they were thinking. And then the Edenic Order fucked it up. The screen didn’t glitch this time. It dimmed like a great exhaling. The footage slowed. Green crept in from the edges as something bloomed within the circuitry, as though the machine itself had sprouted. YOU ARE NOT YOUR METRICS. ROOTS SPLIT STONE. Those words grew from moss over the screen, part of which fizzled and went black, only to flare again with a kaleidoscope of green-tinged light. Someone screamed. That beautiful pause we’d managed disintegrated as panic swept the concourse below. RABBIT pinged, sharp and fast. “Station interference escalating. Comms echoing irregular signatures. Biological growth in secured corridors. Bay lockdowns initiated.” On the outbound grid, the Subsidiary vessel still held position, flagged as “observing.” Traffic control hadn’t locked us down yet. “Bastards!” You struck the terminal. “Why did they— It was fucking perfect!” “Later!” I shouted. Fantasy tugged at me: hours from now, safe, we could lament this great fuckup. But for now— Snapping out of it, you bolted down the shaft, boots clanging over grated flooring as you ducked beneath entrails of cables spilling from open panels. At the door, you grabbed an oil-stained towel draped over piping and slung it across your shoulder. The door opened onto a thoroughfare crowded with confused dwellers. You dusted off your hands, nodding to passersby as if they had cause to know you. We’d infiltrated during the shift change, slipping in with maintenance and cargo vessels. Routine traffic dulled suspicion, but it only shielded so much. The scanners read you as human, but you lacked designations. Erasing your GIRS record had made you a specter, a null entity. That absence was its own alarm. My task was to shape a mask the networks would accept in place of truth—that Wylla Sotain no longer existed. You were maintenance worker Lars P. Olivier to anyone who might look. Easily, we climbed back onto the ship and requested release from the station lock. rabbit pinged, confirming the Subsidiary vessel was still in place. Security was busy with the Edenic hack, but traffic control hadn’t heard yet—or someone had blocked the command. We were cleared for takeoff. Hoping to throw off Subsidiary Four, we made two jumps away before pausing at the quieter edges of Beta sector. You laid your hands on rabbit and slumped back in the seat. I stayed quiet, letting you sit there stroking the mask, waiting for your thoughts to still. Our hack wasn’t meant to fix anything. It wouldn’t unmake the masks or dismantle the systems that filtered expression through corporate optimization and sold it back as freedom. But it might show someone—just one—that what they wore each day was neither neutral, nor benign, nor theirs. That was our hope. But the Edenic Order had undermined it. Fury swam through you. They’d made us complicit in their message. You are not your metrics. RABBIT chirped as new data flagged across multiple networks. You blinked, pulling yourself together. A message had appeared—simultaneously—on scavenger forums, hacker boards, and an old mask-parts trade site you hadn’t touched in years. The symbol that had spread across the billboard signed this message now. I felt your breath catch in the quiet between us. Facility 34X, GTM-11. The door’s cracked, but not for long. Step through if you can keep up. If not, stay behind and wonder what you missed. You didn’t speak, but your silence was familiar: recognition, purpose, the old burn under the skin. The message ended with a signature we knew couldn’t be for anyone else. Do you want it? Come and get it, scavenger. And I could feel it, even before you said a word. You wanted it. We both did. 2 It’s obviously a trap.” You’d said that five times now, but it hadn’t stopped you from landing on GTM-11—a backwater mining planet—and agreeing to scout the facility. Desire outweighed the risk for both of us. You sat nursing a cup of synthetic tea at an AI-manned eatery, staring across at Facility 34X. It wasn’t tucked into some hidden cliffside. It sat squarely in the heart of Nacarat City, bold as anything—which meant we’d need to wait for a lull in foot traffic to avoid attention. On the outside, it looked like a dingy warehouse: corrugated steel, reinforced concrete, windows sealed beneath bolted sheets. Graffiti scrawled across the façade, paint faded under rust. It didn’t scream VisorForge. It screamed ambush. Bright strip lighting labored against shadows. A fine rain drifted through the night, blurring flickering LEDs into a smear of color. The planet’s three hours of sunlight were long gone, and I was working double to filter the smog from your air. I rested beside your wrist on the table, our connection alive only where a strip of bare skin slipped free of your black nylon suit to touch LYREBIRD’s surface. You looked frayed. Hair once clipped sharp now hung ragged, sides shaved only to keep off the heat. Dark crescents bruised your eyes, stamped like thumbprints of exhaustion. Your body bore double the weight, your fatigue and mine pressed into the same skin. At least here you looked like you belonged. Miners carried the same marks from endless shifts. “I want it,” you whispered, “but what if this is how we end up buried?” I tried for brevity: Fine. Leave, then. I’ ll do it myself. Your mouth pulled tight. I imploded with embarrassment. Outside, a sudden crowd signaled a shift change. Three young people caught your eye. Their masks were makeshift, stitched from mismatched manufacturers. A prism—Parallax’s modular mask, unpopular for its pay-locked AI add-ons, its smooth faceplate cracked and patched with sheet metal; a discontinued VisorForge mark ii moth meant for night vision, seams leaking light as the shell strained from a rebuild used in blackout tunnels; and a Coreform miner’s rig spliced with an obsolete Auntie Donnelly, its sleek steel upper face swelling into a geometric snout for breathing in pits. Pirated overlays tangled inside: AIs whispering scam warnings or flashing market costs to catch price gouges. It wasn’t the first time we’d seen off-grid masks, but it was the first time they were worn so openly. A symptom of our leaks in this sector. Complicated emotion flared in your chest, but ebbed when the moth caught your stare and tossed you a rude gesture. Your gaze shifted to the holorotator spinning above the plaza: a forced update would be pushed to all VisorForge masks within twenty-four hours. The warning pulsed in emergency red. Mandatory System Update. Tampering with VisorForge software is prohibited. A slogan followed: A Mask Unkept is a Self Unraveled. They couldn’t risk anyone else ending up like us. Below, a nomadic adbot wheeled through the street—cheap, engine sputtering, screen flickering as it flipped through desperate, time-starved pitches. Each brand had seconds to sell salvation. KaroGen Biotechnics—“Heal fast. Keep working.”—hawked dermal graft kits, nerve dullers, and sleep stabilizers. A dime-a-dozen media sub, Flick, promised a daily ten ad-free minutes of escapism. Coreform advertised barebones masks. Built for hazard zones, the ad read, trusted by miners across five systems. A flat voice rasped: “Nothing but what you need.” Corporate code for: the bare minimum to stay alive. As the bot trundled into range of the VisorForge holorotator, its sputtering ads froze. The screen snapped into a booming counter-ad. A familiar synthetic voice—bright and chipper—rang out. VisorForge’s preferred AI. They used it for everything. “Your mask. Your mind. Trust the Original—Trust VisorForge.” You snorted at the use of proximity override on something so petty. But humor didn’t last. VisorForge still ruled the sector, even here on forgotten edges where workers bled for minerals they’d never own and wore masks they couldn’t afford to fix. “VisorForge cleaned up too well,” you murmured. “We found nothing for months, and now this is handed to us?” “It’s the Order who want us to see something,” I reminded you. You thought of the forums they’d used to bait you. Most were battlegrounds, fueled by ego, and over the years you’d ghosted through them under a dozen pseudonyms. The Order had seeded those same spaces with bait, taunting you: Am I better than you, Specter? If you can keep up… They mimicked the ecosystem, counting on pride. You told yourself duty brought you here. But part of you, burning, wanted the fight. “The Edenic Order,” you repeated, mind snagging on the altered symbol that had overridden your hack. The Order’s mark was a sapling, but this one had been ensnared in thorny roots. You worried it meant these people were different—not the Order you thought you knew. But that was the issue. You didn’t really know them, just a nurtured idea. You, who once considered giving your flesh to their cause, thought of them as monastic. Meditative. Religious in a way you respected. Not the terrorists the Corporate Federation called them. Yet your fingers tightened on the warm mug, and somewhere in your thoughts I heard: What if I’m wrong? “Even if it is a trap,” I said, “that isn’t going to stop us.” Your shoulders drooped because I was right. We couldn’t ignore something this tangible. Six months of running was wearing you down. The first month I’d been ravenous for more about lyrebird. I still had Fyster’s death rattle echoing in my stores. Revenge felt good, but not enough. Everything we found led nowhere. VisorForge wiped their tracks until lyrebird became myth. Even the early HoloProps were removed, buried under reissued brand media. For just the two of us, VisorForge had unleashed a dedicated Subsidiary. Protecting IP demanded nothing less. Subsidiaries had once been rare, deployed only to erase threats. Now reports placed them everywhere: guarding sites, overseeing byronnicum mines, embedded in offworld factories. While we chased dead ends, VisorForge broke precedent, multiplying what had once been legend and turning them into instruments that coerced, litigated, and enforced absolute control. It was no longer wielding a myth—it was manufacturing them. We’d decided to change tactics. If they wouldn’t show us LYREBIRD, we’d show everyone VisorForge. We fought the way you knew: hacking systems, disrupting their message. You were nobody to the system, so you became somebody to anyone paying attention. DDoS attacks. A leaked whistleblower report. An internal audit proving how VisorForge underperformed in safety, ethics, responsibility. We caused a months-long PR disaster. Now, someone else had taken interest. I felt conflicted. You were too busy watching the street to notice, but if you’d checked, you’d have seen my uncertainty. Not because I feared a trap, but because I feared what it meant to share this fight. This was meant to be you and me. Together. The two of us against the world. What if it became something bigger? “Why do they care?” you whispered, mirroring my wariness. You weren’t really asking me. “Why deploy biocode into a station just to help us disembark?” My attentions were split. I imagined what we looked like together, how in another life you might have sat with your fingers tangled in my hair. I loved you. I hadn’t told you; I was too frightened. “Sable?” you prompted. What did it matter if I was nothing but a woman in a mask? You cared about me. Finish your tea, and let’s go find out. Excerpted from Null Entity, copyright © 2026 by Seth Haddon. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>Null Entity</i> by Seth Haddon appeared first on Reactor.

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

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

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