News King Arthur A Lost Bit of the Story of Merlin and Arthur Has Been Found at Cambridge Libraries! They’re full of good stuff! By Molly Templeton | Published on March 28, 2025 Screenshot: Cambridge University Library Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Cambridge University Library Many fantasy fans are roughly familiar with the tale of King Arthur—in one form or another. There is no one single Arthurian narrative, but a cluster of tales, written across centuries, that make up the Matter of Britain. And now there’s a little bit more to the story: At Cambridge University Library, in the UK, an archivist found a bit of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, a French sequel to the story of Arthur, that “survived the centuries after being recycled and repurposed in the 1500s as the cover for a property record from Huntingfield Manor in Suffolk, owned by the Vanneck family of Heveningham.” The Cambridge website has a fascinatingly detailed account of just how the 13th century manuscript—which could not be removed from its recycled home without possibly being damaged—was digitally scanned and photographed and recreated. As Cambridge says: Dr Irène Fabry-Tehranchi, French Specialist in Collections and Academic Liaison at Cambridge University Library, was among those who first recognized the importance of the find. “It was first thought to be a 14th century story about Sir Gawain but further examination revealed it to be part of the Old French Vulgate Merlin sequel, a different and extremely significant Arthurian text.” The fragment includes two episodes, one about the Battle of Cambénic and one about Merlin appearing at Arthur’s court, disguised as a harpist and “the most handsome man ever seen in Christian lands.” Using multispectral imaging, computer tomography scanning, and 3D modeling, a team created a digital version of the text that could be digitally unfolded, and you can watch that nifty process here. The process used to recreate this document, researchers say, may be used in other libraries and archives to uncover even more fragile fragments from centuries past. You can explore the manuscript for yourself at Cambridge Digital Libraries.[end-mark] The post A Lost Bit of the Story of Merlin and Arthur Has Been Found at Cambridge appeared first on Reactor.

News Reactor Sign Up for Our Newsletter — Now With Bonus Book News! The Reactor newsletter is the best way to catch up on the world of science fiction, fantasy, pop culture, and more! By Reactor | Published on March 28, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Do you like hearing about new books? Well, you’re on Reactor’s website, so we can probably guess your answer.  We’re excited to announce that we’ve added a new newsletter to our regular email schedule! This monthly newsletter will highlight ALL the new book releases of that month PLUS it will spotlight specific books the Reactor team is excited for! And if you’re already subscribed to our regular newsletter, you’ll receive it automatically–no need to sign up for anything else. For those new to Reactor: Our weekly newsletter highlights the best and most popular articles of the week. It’s free, it’s once a week, and it’s the surefire way to make sure you’re not missing anything from the best source of genre news, criticism, and short fiction. It’s as good as your very own baby dragon in your inbox, from us to you. Don’t worry, it feeds itself. You can subscribe here![end-mark] The post Sign Up for Our Newsletter — Now With Bonus Book News! appeared first on Reactor.

News The Legend of Zelda The Legend of Zelda Movie Has a Release Date Ten-minute pot-smashing montage when? By Molly Templeton | Published on March 28, 2025 Screenshot: Nintendo Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Nintendo It’s really happening! Hey! Listen! Listen, though, if you are kind of viewing the existence of the Legend of Zelda movie with a little bit of side-eye, like, sitting over in the corner waiting to see how it turns out, you are not alone. In November 2023, Nintendo announced that a live-action Legend of Zelda movie was in development, which may have lightly alarmed some fans for a variety of reasons, ranging from casting concerns to thinking, as I did, Oh no I don’t want to hear Link talk. Link, the frequent hero of these delightful games about saving the land of Hyrule, doesn’t talk in them. I mean, he talks to other characters, but we don’t hear it. Even in the most recent, epic, please-can-I-have-another-one please games like Tears of the Kingdom, there is no one delivering Link dialogue in the cut-scenes. Our elfin hero waves his hands and communicates. He grunts adorably while climbing. Now he’s going to talk and it’s going to be weird. The movie date announcement—which came via Nintendo’s new app—contains no additional details beyond the release date: March 26, 2027. Variety says that director Wes Ball (The Maze Runner) is still attached, but did not mention anything about the film’s writer (which was, at least initially, Derek Connolly). In the initial announcement in 2023, Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto said he and Avi Arad would be producing the film. We’ll go smash some pots while anxiously awaiting further news.[end-mark] The post <i>The Legend of Zelda</i> Movie Has a Release Date appeared first on Reactor.

News Whalefall Whalefall: Josh Brolin in Talks to Play Dead Dad and/or The Whale Who Eats Austin Abrams By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on March 27, 2025 Josh Brolin Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons Comment 0 Share New Share Josh Brolin Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons The feature adaptation of Daniel Kraus’ Whalefall is circling its two stars. Today, Deadline reports that Josh Brolin (aka Gurney Halleck in the latest Dune films, aka Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, aka the actor set to star in Zach Cregger’s Weapons and Edgar Wright’s The Running Man) is in talks to co-star in the film against Austin Abrams, who has officially taken on the role of Jay, a young man who is accidentally swallowed by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale, and has one hour to escape before his air runs out. Deadline doesn’t confirm what part Brolin would be playing, but given that the number of characters in the book are few, it’s clear he would be playing Jay’s estranged, deceased father who—as Jay struggles to survive inside various sections of the giant mammal’s digestive tract—also “talks” to his hallucinating, dying son via the whale. The rights to adapt the critically recognized Whalefall went through a competitive bidding process before 20th Century won the project. Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You) is directing and co-writing the script with Kraus. The project is still in its early days, so there’s no news yet on who will play the whale (I joke… maybe?) or when it will go into production and make its way to theaters. [end-mark] The post <i>Whalefall</i>: Josh Brolin in Talks to Play Dead Dad and/or The Whale Who Eats Austin Abrams appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Science Fiction Read an Excerpt From When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory A madcap adventure following two friends on a cross-country bus tour through the mind-boggling glitches in their simulated world… By Daryl Gregory | Published on March 27, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory, a humorous SF twist on the Canterbury Tales set in a simulated reality—publishing with Saga Press on April 1st. JP and Dulin have been the best of friends for decades. When JP finds out his cancer has aggressively returned, Dulin decides it’s the perfect time for one last adventure: a week-long bus tour of North America’s Impossibles, the physics-defying glitches and geographic miracles that started cropping up seven years earlier—right after the Announcement that revealed our world to be merely a digital simulacrum. The outing, courtesy of Canterbury Trails Tours, promises the trip of a (not completely real) lifetime in a (not completely deluxe) coach.Their fellow passengers are 21st-century pilgrims, each of them on the tour for their own reasons. There’s a nun hunting for an absent God, a pregnant influencer determined to make her child too famous to be deleted, a crew of horny octogenarians living each day like it’s their last, and a professor on the run from leather-clad sociopaths who take The Matrix as scripture. Each stop on this trip is stranger than the last—a Tunnel outside of time, a zero gravity Geyser, the compound of motivational-speaking avatar—with everyone barreling toward the tour’s iconic final stop Ghost City, where unbeknownst to our travelers the answer to who is running the simulation may await. The Engineer Considers Oz JP Laurent gazes up at the Frozen Tornado, wondering how, exactly, the Simulators wanted him to feel. Awed? Intimidated? Amused? The thing is ridiculously oversized and out of scale, like a Koons Balloon Dog. He also doesn’t know how he feels when he looks at a Koons Balloon Dog. He and the fellow members of his tour group are standing at the bottom of a manicured slope, huddled around a park ranger, soaking up many cheerful facts about the physical anomaly. They’re three hun- dred yards from the base of the structure, but even from this distance it’s impossible to take in the whole thing at once. It looks like a wide black ribbon, spiraling downward, the top of it hanging a kilometer in the air as if held by invisible fingers. The first loop is as wide as the Tornado is high. As it corkscrews toward the ground, the loops cinch tighter and tighter until it becomes a spike, then a needle. “So let me get this straight,” says Dulin Marks, the comic book writer, in mock umbrage. “It doesn’t even move?” “I’m sorry if you’ve been misinformed,” JP says. “Maybe I’ve seen too many photographs,” Dulin says. “And draw- ings. I’ve made artists drop this thing into the background of so many panels.” “Really?” “It’s comic book shorthand for hey, we’re in New Jersey. You know, kinda like the way the Eiffel Tower signifies Paris.” “But for the exact opposite of Paris,” JP says. Dulin laughs loudly. Every Dulin laugh is loud. The park ranger looks over at them and Dulin stifles himself. The ranger’s a skinny old dude with the relaxed air of a Berkeley professor whose edibles have just kicked in. “That base looks solid, doesn’t it? But it’s just a continuation of the spiral. At the very tip, the bands are wound so tight there’s just a single micron gap—that’s one millionth of a meter. As it spirals outward, the gaps widen exponentially. The technical term is logarithmic spiral. The great mathematician Jakob Bernoulli called it the Spira mirabilis—the miraculous spiral.” The rest of the tour group is eating this up. The quartet of old folks from the back of the bus (in the folder bio they listed their profes- sion as “Active Octos”) are oohing and aahing; the rabbi is practically beaming. The old woman in the wheelchair is staring up at the black spike almost greedily. But Dulin, JP notices, has his eye on the forty- something woman pushing the wheelchair. “Don’t,” JP says. Dulin gives him a What, me? face. At five turns from the base, the ranger tells them, the band is just a centimeter wide and a centimeter off the ground. Two loops later it’s jumped up to a meter. Then the math slingshots into the human scale and the bands explode outward. The spiral widens in a geometric pro- gression, always at the same ratio, each turning 1.5 times more distant than the previous. The width of the black ribbon is also expanding as it climbs. At the very tip of the spiral, the ribbon is a hundred meters wide. But from the ground, every band looks as if it’s the same width, an optical illusion that makes it look tiny, something you could hold on the palm of his hand. “You know, Bernoulli wanted the shape carved on his gravestone.” JP’s whispering to Dulin as if they’re in church. “But the gravediggers put on the wrong spiral.” “Aren’t you an erudite motherfucker,” Dulin says. His rumbling voice has never been capable of an actual whisper. “Which one did they engrave?” “An Archimedean spiral. Very embarrassing.” “Those gravediggers,” Dulin says, shaking his head. “Can never keep their spirals straight.” Buy the Book When We Were Real Daryl Gregory Buy Book When We Were Real Daryl Gregory Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The park ranger gestures for the group to follow him up the hill for a closer look at the Tornado. The pregnant girl hurries ahead of the group, pivots, pouts, and clicks a selfie. Her enormous puffy jacket is chrome silver and seems to reflect every last photon of the New Jersey sun. JP and Dulin amble along at the rear of the pack, just behind the two Catholic sisters and the rabbi. Please God, JP thinks, let me be there when they all walk into a bar. Then the older sister steps away from the group, and JP sees the stripe of a tear along one cheek. What the hell? Dulin sees it too, and they exchange a look. It’s hard to tell whether she’s distraught or merely overcome with, well, the grandios- ity of it all. Dulin rumble-whispers to JP, “Should I say something?” JP is appalled and mouths a silent no. The group spreads out along a chain that’s set up a dozen feet from the base, under the shadow of the spiral. JP can see now that the black surface of the Tornado is lightly grooved, like a vinyl LP. “Marion would get a kick out of this,” Dulin says. Marion is Dulin’s daughter. When she graduated from the University of Oregon she moved to Connecticut, the opposite side of the continent, as far from her father as she could get. The two haven’t spoken in years. “You should call her,” JP says. He tells him this about once a week. Dulin’s mouth twists. “Maybe.” He raises the phone and takes a picture. “I’ll text her later.” JP’s not sure whether Dulin has ever sent Marion a text. If he did, would she answer it? The park ranger calls for their attention. “One of the great mys- teries,” he says, “is what the Frozen Tornado is made of. The technical term—and I’m not making this up—is ‘stuff.’ We’re not sure what it is, though scientists have been trying to study it since the Appearances. We do know that it’s incredibly hard. For example—” “What scientists?” a voice demands. JP looks around; of course it’s the bald guy from the bus (“Profession: Host of the Real Patriot pod- cast”) who gave the tour guide such a hard time about nomenclature. “Isn’t it true that the government’s prevented independent scientists from making their own study of the material?” The park ranger smiles quizzically. “I’m not aware of that.” “Two years ago, a man tried to approach the Tornado with his equipment and the authorities prevented him. They even called the police.” “Maybe that happened on my day off,” the park ranger says blandly, and the Octos chuckle. “There’s a video on YouTube,” the bald guy says. “I’m sure there is. Now, then—stuff! Many of the Impossibles seem to be made of it. But even after seven years we haven’t made much headway in understanding it. It’s so hard that you can’t chip off a piece and take it into the lab. It’s harder than any substance we know of— harder than diamonds, not even lasers can knock a piece free. They’ve even used electron microscopes to see into what stuff is made of, and so far—” “But that didn’t happen here, right?” the podcaster says. He glances over his shoulder. His stork-like son is recording the exchange on his phone and doesn’t look happy about it. “No electron microscope has been allowed to directly sample the Tornado.” “No, it hasn’t,” the ranger says. “The experiment I’m talking about happened at another Impossible, the Flores Negras in Argentina. But that’s because you can’t fit any part of the Frozen Tornado into the chamber of an electron microscope. Now, I hear GE is working on a device, but it’s not ready yet.” “So!” the podcaster says. “This tornado structure could be made out of some new carbon fiber. You don’t know.” “When we get back to the bus,” Dulin says to JP, not bothering to lower his voice, “can I throw him under it?” “I’ve always wanted to see that metaphor in action.” The tour guide raises a hand. “Maybe we can take questions one at a time?” “But what is stuff made of?” someone asks the park ranger. From his accent, JP pegs him as one of the Austrians (“Fun Fact: We are on our honeymoon!!”). “In your opinion,” his husband adds. It’s clear the pair already have opinions of their own. The ranger smiles. “It’s definitely not plastic, or steel, or a carbon alloy. It’s not anything we’ve ever seen. Most material scientists think that it won’t ever be found on the periodic table. When we’re kids, we think that a solid is a solid, a liquid is a liquid. But when we learn a little science, we find out that the world’s made of atoms, and those atoms are made out of electrons and protons, and those are made out of quarks. Stuff, however, isn’t made of any of that.” “Remember when we used to think we were a cloud of quarks?” Dulin says to JP. “That was so crazy.” “But what is it?” the old woman asks plaintively. (Under profes- sion she’d listed “Proud grandmother.”) “It’s only itself.” The ranger puts on another smile. He seems to have an infinite supply. “Pure stuff, all the way down, through and through. It’s a true solid. It may be the only truly solid material in the world.” “But you don’t know that!” the podcaster says to the ranger. His voice is loud enough to share his objection with the group. “You, per- sonally. You’re just repeating what you’ve been told.” “Or maybe I’ll just punch him,” Dulin says to JP. “You’d just break your hand. He’s made of ultradense material.” “A head full of stuff. He’s fucking Winnie-the-Pooh, but adamantium.” The bald man puts a hand on his son’s shoulder and lifts a leg over the chain. “I want to see for myself. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s about to get—” “Sir!” the ranger says. No smile now. “Step back from the barrier.” The pregnant girl has appeared at JP’s elbow. Her own phone is pointed at the podcaster. “Oh my God,” she says, narrating to the phone. “Shit’s going down.” The man’s straddling the chain now. “What are you afraid of?” he asks. The girl swivels her phone toward the park ranger. “Trust me, you don’t want to do that,” the ranger says. “What, am I going to hurt the Tornado?” The girl’s pivoting back and forth, trying to capture the dialogue. It won’t make for great video. “Touch it along a seam and you’ll cut yourself pretty badly,” the ranger says. “The Tornado is basically one giant razor rolled around itself.” The bald guy frowns. “Is that what you tell people?” “Yes,” he answers. “That is what I tell people. All the time.” The tour guide has pushed close to the podcaster. She seems fran- tic. “Please, you must obey the rules of the park.” The man stands there, the chain running between his legs. “It’s fine,” he says to the guide. “Don’t worry.” He turns toward the Tor- nado, but his leg gets hung up on the chain and suddenly he’s on the ground. “Dad!” his son says. The man frees his leg and scrambles under the chain toward them, looking flushed. He stares into the lens of his son’s phone. “I’m fine. We’ll cut that. Ready? One, two . . .” He puts on a grim expression. “More to come.” “Jesus Christ,” Dulin says. “Did he just throw to commercial?” Between the pregnant girl and the podcaster, JP thinks, this trip’s going to be way more documented than he’s comfortable with. The young sister—“novitiate,” it said in her bio, though she’s in full nun drag while her coworker in Christ is in street clothes—has heard the blasphemy and looks over her shoulder. Dulin looks uncharacter- istically chagrined. The podcaster pushes through the group and heads toward the bus, projecting to the world that he is not just leaving, but leaving in a verifiable huff. His son puts the phone in his pocket. His cheeks are flushed, and he’s staring at nothing, making no eye contact. Slowly he walks away, in a different direction from his father. One of the Austrian honeymooners breaks the silence. “I have a question,” he says to the park ranger. “What do you believe is holding it up?” “Nothing,” says the park ranger. All smiles have been used up. “You can watch the film.” He strides away. The tour guide watches him go, and when she turns back to the group, she looks shaken. “Okay!” she says brightly. “Let’s go to the visitor center. Which is . . .” She turns to find it, and one of the Octos points the other way, at the large wooden building. It’s brand-new. The government only opened the park to the public three years ago. “Yes!” the tour guide says. “This way!” The group begins to shuffle after her. “You coming?” Dulin asks. “I’m good,” JP says. “Go on ahead.” Dulin frowns. “You sure? I’ve heard great things about this docu- mentary. All the park rangers are raving about it.” “I just want to walk around a bit.” Then the nurse walks past, pushing her mother. She glances back at Dulin. JP can’t read her expression, but then again, the message isn’t aimed at him. “Well, maybe I’ll check out the gift shop,” Dulin says. He starts to follow the women. “Hey, Dulin?” JP says. His friend stops. “Please don’t try to bang anyone on the bus. We have to live with these people for the next seven days.” “I promise not to bang anyone on the bus,” Dulin says. “Only in restrooms and motels.” JP watches him lumber into the building and feels a twinge of guilt. Dulin’s worried about him. Again. The big man’s never been able to hide his emotions—his facial expressions practically come with comic book sound effects, eyebrows flying up with a WHOOSH! and frowns slamming down with a WHAM! But the constant concern in his eyes gets a little oppressive. JP walks along the curving observation path, which offers up slightly different views of the anomaly. He’s moving slowly, sluggish from the Dilantin and headachy from last night’s dose of Temodar. He wishes Suzanne were here. But since she can’t be, he’s glad he has the path mostly to himself. Summers are probably more crowded, he thinks. But maybe not. There isn’t much more to see here that you can’t catch from the highway. Suicide has to be one of the main rea- sons to see it up close and personal. He thinks of the nun’s tears. Is she depressed? He wouldn’t blame her for trying to off herself. Death is the one sure way out of the simulation, so why not go by Tornado? Worked for Dorothy. The girl got wacked in the head by randomness, then up- loaded to a Technicolor afterlife. The only mystery is why she came back. She got to walk on streets of gold, make new friends, and get a glimpse at the man behind the curtain—and after all that, she chose gray Kansas? Excerpted from When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory. Copyright © 2025. Reprinted by permission of Saga Press at Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>When We Were Real</i> by Daryl Gregory appeared first on Reactor.