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.

Books Jo Walton Reads Jo Walton’s Reading List: February 2026 Thoughts on Gene Wolfe, Sharon Shinn, and finally getting the appeal of cosy fantasy! By Jo Walton | Published on March 11, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share February was a pretty much perfect month spent entirely in Florence. I had friends visiting some of the time, and some of the time I was here by myself. I finished the first draft of the novel I was writing. I saw some art, and went for a lot of walks through the beautiful city, and ate lots of great food. I read eleven books, and here they are. Soldier of Arete — Gene Wolfe (1989) Sequel to Soldier in the Mist and really a direct continuation—brilliantly written, very strange. After a head injury Latro can’t remember anything beyond today, and lives in a strange continuous present in which everyone and everything is new every day, but he’s recording what he can on a scroll, which is the book, including his encounters with gods of various kinds. This book has Amazons, the fall of kings, Sparta, a nymph, and an Olympic chariot race. It’s fantasy, I suppose, and I certainly wouldn’t know what else to call it, but it isn’t much like any other fantasy. What a peculiar thing to do. I’m still not sure if it’s for anything, or if it’s just the experience. Brilliant but weird. Read the first book first… or possibly it doesn’t matter, but read it first anyway. Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca — Ferdinand Mount (2020) Re-read, book club. What a strangely interesting book this is, an investigative memoir of the author’s uncle’s wife, who lied about her name, her age, her parentage, and her class background. It’s like a textbook example of truth being stranger than fiction. It led to a good book club discussion too. You don’t usually get a biography of someone who isn’t famous, who didn’t do anything notable, who knew a lot of people and lived a life through part of history, the way people do. So that’s interesting, even without the reinvention of herself and the way the lies hurt other people. Also very interesting memoir detail of Mount as a child and his reaction to his aunt and her family. Growing Light — Marta Randall (2003) A murder mystery set in a very specific moment; I’d say 1987? There’s a tech company and very primitive computers, and the things that the computers can do are interesting. Like you couldn’t trace the provenance of a particular antique knife now, but these are very primitive computers and they’re printing everything out all the time. I didn’t enjoy this much. I didn’t find the humor funny, and I didn’t care much about the mystery, and what I like best from Randall is her worldbuilding, so this book set in a moment of the real world was disappointing. The thing that kept me reading was the characters. But I like her SF and F much better. The Courage For Truth: Letters to Writers — Thomas Merton (1983) A collection of letters from a Trappist monk and poet, from the mid-twentieth century. I’ve decided I don’t like the kind of letter collection that gives you all the letters to x, and then all the letters to y, I much prefer to do time chronologically. However, this does the first, and also made the odd decision to arrange the book by how well known the writers he’s writing to are, so that it starts with Waugh and Pasternak and then goes on to the (actually much more interesting) South American poets he was corresponding with. It’s interesting that Merton was a twentieth-century Trappist and stuck in a monastery and under discipline and censorship, as he lived through the Cuban missile crisis, the anti-war movement, and the advent of the Sixties. When you read a letter collection you really come to know the writer, and sometimes that’s good, but in this case unfortunately I didn’t very much like him. I didn’t like the way he kept repeating to everyone that he thought of himself as a Latin American poet and not an American one, despite being an American and writing in English—weird guy, really. Not recommended. Shifter and Shadow — Sharon Shinn (2025) Sharon Shinn is a vastly underrated writer, and I’m not sure why. She’s just great, her books are well-thought-through and engrossing. She thinks about the implications of her worldbuilding and the effect it has on all sorts of different people. This book is about a shapeshifter magically curing a plague by turning the victims into dogs and giving the dogs medicine that cures the disease but is poisonous to humans. People are understandably reluctant to be turned into dogs, especially people who, for religious reasons, don’t like magic users. So this is a fantasy about vaccine reluctance, while also being rooted entirely and completely in the fictional world. And also it’s a sweet love story, that works very well. This short novel was written later but was the chronologically next in the Twelve Houses series, so I read it next. This world is so interesting, and the magic is cool, and I really like the characters. You should definitely start at the beginning though. The Last Séance: Tales of the Supernatural — Agatha Christie (2019) An odd collection of Christie stories, some of them very classic ghost stories, and some of them stories where the supposedly supernatural thing is a set-up to allay suspicion. All the latter were great, though the ones where there actually was a genre element were very mixed—some of them effective and creepy, others predictable and rote. Christie is wonderful at characters, and many of these stories were immediately gripping even when the supernatural element wasn’t really working. A person could do a lot worse than analyse the very beginnings of Christie to see how what she does to make them so gripping. Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning — Fiona Sampson (2023) After finishing the Browning letters last month I wasn’t ready to let them go, so I bought and rapidly read this biography. It’s an adequate biography, one that thinks hard about a lot of things like the presentation of EBB as a woman and a poet both in her lifetime and since, and about the inherited money made from plantations worked with enslaved people in Jamaica. But I felt she didn’t quite see the person I knew from the letters, even though she’d clearly read the letters. This is the third unsatisfactory biography of EBB I have read, so maybe it’s something wrong with me rather than them. Fascinatingly there don’t seem to be any recent biographies of Robert Browning (though one of the ones I have covers them both) but there are numerous early twentieth-century ones. Talk to Me — Jules Wake (2014) Romance novel. Wake’s first book, and you can tell. It’s much clunkier than her later works. The plot relies on a character who tells lies to hero and heroine and keeps them apart, and, additionally, an obsessed psychopath. Both of these things! That being said, it’s still an enjoyable read, with the seeds of what will make Wake a much better writer later already visible. If there were times when I thought “oh good grief” there were also times when I laughed aloud, and the pacing was very good. The Enchanted April — Elizabeth von Arnim (1922) Re-read, book club. The ur-novel of the romance novels where the characters go to Italy and everything is all right. Two unhappy women in a club in London on a rainy day in February see an ad in the paper for renting a castle in Italy for the month of April, which they do. There are beautiful descriptions of the castle and the gardens, and the power of better places to make people better. In book club we talked about whether it actually was meant to be read as “enchanted” in terms of magic, or whether we were supposed to believe Italy just did that. The characters are all excellently drawn, the book is funny and acerbic as well as sweet, and it is by far the sweetest of all von Arnim’s work. Legends & Lattes — Travis Baldree (2023) OK, now I get it. This is a good book about a retired orc warrior setting up a coffee shop. It’s also silly in the way you’d expect from that, but it’s sweet and fun and has good characters. The difference between this and the boring imitations I’ve read (and the ones I’ve read part of and given up on because I was bored) is that this has heart—Baldree clearly loves what he’s writing about, and loves the details of turning a livery stable into a cafe and having a gnome-designed coffee machine delivered, and because he loves it and cares about it (and is a good writer) he made me not mind the essential silliness and improbability—and honestly, given that this is essentially a D&D universe and that’s a requirement of the premise, the worldbuilding is just fine. Also, the plot is actually quite clever. So, cosy fantasy! This book existed, and people loved it, and I understand why, and now there’s an entire genre of people doing this. I’m not the target audience here, I found this readable and mildly enjoyable, and I would read the sequel on a wet Sunday when I had a cold. But I understand people liking it, and even voting it a Hugo, I understand some of the things that were perplexing about the other cosy fantasies I tried to read, and now I can stop trying to figure it out and read things I like. The Invention of the Restaurant — Rebecca L. Spang (2000) Terrific book about the invention of the restaurant, the myths of the invention of the restaurant, and the French Revolution. But Spang is one of those people who writes about the French Revolution in context, so that she starts beforehand in the ancien régime and goes on through the revolution and past Napoleon to the restoration and the July Monarchy and follows the changing vision and reality of the restaurant through it all. Very few people do this, it’s one of the places where periodization is a real problem, so I very much appreciate it. This is a book about Paris, and about restaurants, and about politics. There was a point in the French Revolution where everything became political, even food, and then there was a reaction where nothing was political, not even government. This is a very readable and thought-provoking book, enhanced with relevant political cartoons, and I think most of you would enjoy it. [end-mark] The post Jo Walton’s Reading List: February 2026 appeared first on Reactor.

Books Reading the Weird The Yolk’s on You: Carmen Maria Machado’s “Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa” “An egg is the most dangerous thing in the world.” By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on March 11, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Carmen Maria Machado’s “Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa,” first published in Lightspeed in April 2014., and collected in John Joseph Adams’ Futures & Fantasies. Spoilers ahead—but it’s short and it’s good and you should go read it. 1. [The man sitting next to the Trapped Woman opens with:] This cabin’s so hot I could hardboil an egg in my mouth. What’s your name? 2. If you watch the whirling egg cook, a golden hemisphere in a corona of white, you’ll see what only a god might see. You (not you personally, now that you know the secret) become a god for a couple seconds and create a new world somewhere in existence. You’ll received prayers from your frightened worshippers via cryptic notes and misheard colleagues. It’s terrible to be a god. I don’t recommend it. 3. If you freeze an egg, the shell will pop off like a bottlecap, and the insides will lie in your hand like a stone. In some countries, you can trade such yolks for necessities. Rumor (inaccurate) has it that planting a frozen yolk will cause something better than potatoes to grow. 4. If you look inside an egg you’ve just cracked, you may see reflected another kitchen, another face from someone else who has cracked and looked inside the same egg, could be in Brooklyn or an alternative universe. 5. woman I once dated thought you cut cows open to get milk. How silly. You can cut eggs out of a chicken, clean off the blood and feathers, and they’re good to go. 6. “An egg is the most dangerous thing in the world.” 7. Farmer’s market eggs sometimes open to drop a fetal dragon into your pan. Don’t try to incubate the other eggs to hatching. All the babies will be dead in the shell. That’s fine, dragons will always turn on you in the end. 8. Hermann Hesse on eggs: “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world.” Hesse isn’t writing figuratively, and he’s a bastard. 9. How many eggs have you eaten in your life? A thousand? All those chickens are now inside you, their potential thoughts and dreams, their lives and deaths. “In a way, I think, we’re all a thousand chickens.” 10. It’s pleasant to take an egg and splat it down on a hard surface with all your might. In some villages it’s a competitive pastime. 11. I’m sure the flight attendant does have some eggs in back, but she’s saving them for First Class. You were smart to bring your own eggs in that lunchbox. 12. Patsy Cline believed that all the parallel universes touched each other in the wet places of the world. She died in a plane crash, but not a plane like ours. A small one. 13. I know you. We shared an egg once. You won’t remember because it was your first time egg-side. I thought you were so beautiful. I’m disappointed to see you looking angry. Smile. 14. [The flight attendant intervenes.] It’s all right, Miss. I’m sure she didn’t mean to throw that egg at me, I don’t need to change my seat. Ha-ha! 15. [In conclusion, maybe.] “That hardboiled egg looks delicious.” I’d like a bite. The Degenerate Dutch: You can’t even call the flight attendant a “stewardess” these days. Whatever are you supposed to say, when you can’t say that? Libronomicon: The universes you’ve accidentally created communicate through scraps of found paper, and mysteriously appearing Word documents. Weirdbuilding: Patsy Cline did not, unless I’ve failed my websearch, have a theory about parallel universes. But Brian May was part of NASA’s New Horizons team and Natalie Portman is a neuroscientist. And Patsy Cline’s voice, in an alternate universe, has been to Mars. (If this really happened in our own universe, I can’t find documentation. Perhaps it’s an uncollapsed waveform.) Ruthanna’s Commentary Someone asked me about Carmen Maria Machado’s writing, and I picked this for an illustrative example. Specifically, they wanted to know if she writes realistic near-future science fiction. Listen. Listen. This story could happen tomorrow. It involves a plane, which is totally science, and mentions parallel universes, which are almost as clear a genre signal as rocket ships. Of course, it also mentions dragons. Perhaps the best genre parallel is Larry Niven’s “For a Foggy Night,” which as best I can recall frames most of the speculative elements in an uncomfortable conversation with some random guy in a bar. There might be actual dimensional travel at the end—listen, I haven’t actually reread any Niven since I got exasperated with Footfall early in the century, and I have fond memories of this story, don’t make me ruin them. Anyway, the difference between a bar and an airplane is that you can walk out of a bar. Into another universe sometimes, but probably with survivable temperature and air pressure. You can even just switch barstools. Plus you’ve probably been drinking, at better prices than an airline’s, which makes every companion in not-entirely-consensual conversation seem cleverer and more welcome. (See for evidence Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Bar series, which I read around the same time period as I was reading Niven. I still wake up sometimes shouting, “Toony is a perfectly reasonable nickname! Don’t marry the incel cyborg! No one else wants to pee in the sink, you’re just tall!”) Where was I? My point, I swear I had one, was that “guy in the middle seat who won’t stop talking” is a perfectly plausible future event. And yet, the genre boundaries waver like uncooked egg white. The dragons get into rocket ships and the ships grow tentacles. A guy can violate your personal space, the rules about things you say to strangers, and your sense of reality all at the same time. Herman Hesse says that who would be born must first destroy the world, and that the world is an egg. Or at least, he says that the egg is the world, which implies the commutative. The Ohtori Academy student council says “Smash the world’s shell, for the revolution of the world!” The asshole in the seat next to you says that Herman Hesse was a bastard, which was certainly also true of the student council. But maybe the world is full of bastards trying to crack it and be reborn as airplane creepers. Maybe they are succeeding, all the time. Maybe that’s how we got to this reality in the first place. Perhaps when we land, more shells will have cracked and we’ll find ourselves in yet a different one. Perhaps if you crack an egg yourself—say, over this guy’s head—we’ll find ourselves in a better one. Every time you talk with a stranger, there’s risk. They may know something you didn’t know, or believe something you didn’t think anyone believed. They may have experiences that break your assumptions about how people act, and what kinds of fixes to the world’s problems could work at all. This can be valuable—but it’s also true that some strangers really are deeply incorrect, or deeply unpleasant, or both. You want to have an out. Yesterday on the train home from Amsterdam, I heard a cellist talking to her friend. An American man had started telling her all about his pets, and this felt to her like an unusual level of “opening up.” She thought he was offering a more intimate relationship; he was just the kind of guy who cheerfully blabs about his life. Or maybe Americans are just like that? (I was tempted, illustratively, to intervene and admit that yes, we kind of are.) It’s an awkward ambivalence. If you tell strangers about your life, they may not understand your intent or appreciate your confidences. But if you never talk about your pets, or your attempt to hatch a dragon army, you will never be known. After a few rounds of rebirth, when you already know everyone—for definitions of “know” that have nothing to do with their personal boundaries or comfort with sexism—it’s tough. I very nearly sympathize. But maybe try it at the bar, rather than mid-flight. And not with me. Anne’s Commentary My first thought on seeing the title of this story was: EGGS ON A PLANE. Slither the hell out of my cockpit, you sorry excuses for CGI that are the Snakes on a Plane ophidians. You make the Anaconda movies look like models of herpetological accuracy. Besides, as Machado’s seatmate from hell declares: An egg is the most dangerous thing in the universe. It’s the ultimate emblem for potential, and the egg’s potential can range from breakfast to dragons to xenomorphs with multiple jaws, maybe even to whole new worlds, somewhere out there, for good or more likely for just one more set of people who pray to an unresponsive god, and what universe needs that? Planes, trains, buses, boats, whatever the vehicle of mass transport may be: It should come with Interaction and No Interaction sections, the rules strictly enforced by burly attendants, or maybe by electric shock emitters in the seat cushions. Or tranquilizer darts embedded in the same. Let the offensive passengers drift off and quietly dream about their obsessions instead of inflicting them on the innocent. Enough with the curmudgeonly venting. Listening to your random seatmates in life can be an act of kindness, of compassion, of contrition for earlier sins of turning away. This poor old guy, he may have no one else to talk to but the stranger temporarily stranded with him for whatever reason. Smile, nod, drop in the occasional “mm-hmm” or “I see.” For extra karma points, ask a pertinent question or two. As Machado says in the Author Spotlight linked to “Observations,” she’s “had to spend many hours at the mercy of people exactly like [her egg-expert character.] Planes are interesting and terrifying like that.” Mr. Egg-Expert is both interesting and, if not terrifying, at least unnerving; the stuff about cutting chickens open for their eggs and competitive egg-splatting are a bit on the far side of enough, while the man’s claim that he knows his listener from that time they shared the same egg before she was born, that’s getting creepy. No wonder that hardboiled egg “accidentally” slipped out of TW’s hands and landed on the old guy. But maybe we can’t call writers complete innocents in such situations. Again in the Author Spotlight, Machado describes imagining that her listener character is jotting down the old man’s comments—hence the list structure of the story. Asked what she would do if she was actually stuck next to such a seatmate, Machado responds that she’d “listen long enough to get a good story to tell later, and then pull out a book.” I guess you could call that a predatory interaction, or at least a commensal one. That’s unless the old man belatedly realizes Observation #13 is stalky enough to merit the retaliation of a thrown egg. From his exchange with the flight attendant, it seems that he might, making the passengers’ encounter mutually beneficial on the whole. Or… We can read the Egg-Expert as someone more sinister than a garrulous senior with a touch of disinhibition. “Observations” reminds me so much of another story we’ve discussed: Shirley Jackson’s “The Witch.” Four-year-old Johnny is riding on a train with his mother and baby sister. He comments on everything he sees from the window, progressing from cows and bridges to “a bad, old, mean witch” intent on eating him, whom he’s chased away. Mom, who is reading, responds calmly, “Fine.” An elderly man, white-haired and pleasant-faced, enters their coach and strikes up a conversation with Johnny that starts out innocuous, then abruptly shifts into a story about the old man’s little sister, just like Johnny’s, whom he loved so much he bought her a rocking-horse and a doll and a million lollipops, and then he strangled and dismembered her and put her head into a cage for a bear to eat. Mom is horrified, especially when Johnny reacts with laughing enthusiasm and suggests they cut his mommy’s head off, or, alternatively, that his mommy eat up the old man. Mom orders the old man to get out of their coach and he retires, still laughing. Mom knows she should say something to counteract the old man’s malice; the best she can think to do is give Johnny a lollipop and insist the man was just teasing. Probably, Johnny allows, but adds that probably the old man was a witch. What if the old man on the plane is also a witch, determined to plant seeds (eggs!) of disquiet in his seatmate’s mind. To rattle her worldview out of whack. To shiver her faith, out of sheer random spite. Or what if their meeting isn’t random, because the old man (wizard, demon) really has met her before, her twin in a double-yolked egg? Easy enough to dismiss the Egg-Expert as demented, deluded, tiresome but not a serious threat. You never do know, though, do you, about random encounters on a plane? Forget about trusting in the kindness of strangers. Even trusting in their harmlessness may be unwise “in a world with eggs, which give us life, and have so many uses besides.” Them’s my paranoid italics, not Machado’s. Next week, we continue to track the fate of the dead in Chapters 5-6 of Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.[end-mark] The post The Yolk’s on You: Carmen Maria Machado’s “Observations About Eggs from the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa” appeared first on Reactor.

News H.G. Wells Gael García Bernal Stars in Netflix’s Adaptation of H.G. Wells The Country of the Blind The adaptation is currently titled In the Valley of Shadows (En El Valle De Las Sombras) By Molly Templeton | Published on March 11, 2026 Photo: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Netflix Here’s an adaptation you won’t have to wait a million years for: Deadline reports that filming has wrapped on In the Valley of Shadows (En El Valle De Las Sombras), an adaptation of the H.G. Wells short story “The Country of the Blind.” The movie comes from director Sebastián Cordero (Europa Report), and stars Gael García Bernal as mountaineer Álvar Toledano, who falls into a valley and finds himself the only sighted person present. The valley—cut off from the rest of the world by an earthquake—is home to a community that has been blind for generations. As Deadline explains, “Toledano is convinced of his superiority, but soon discovers that his ability to see is considered a disturbance rather than an advantage among the people of the valley. As he tries to adapt, Álvar falls in love with Medina (Natalia Reyes), the woman caring for him. Per the synopsis: Álvar must decide whether to renounce who he is in order to belong, or whether the price of seeing is to flee the valley of shadows.” Wells’ story was originally published in 1904 in The Strand Magazine, and later collected in The Country of the Blind and Other Stories. He expanded and revised the story for a later publication, and it seems the end is rather different; it’ll be interesting to see which the film uses. Previous adaptations include radio plays, an opera, a stage production, an episode of a 1962 TV series called The DuPont Show of the Week and a short animated adaptation, but no feature films. Director Cordero co-wrote the screenplay with María Camila Arias (a story editor on Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude). The cast also includes Claudio Cataño, Diego Vásquez, Irina Loaiza, and Margarita Rosa de Francisco. No Netflix premiere date has been announced, though the film will be released theatrically first in Colombia, where it was filmed.[end-mark] The post Gael García Bernal Stars in Netflix’s Adaptation of H.G. Wells <i>The Country of the Blind</i> appeared first on Reactor.