News Forgotten Island Don’t Forget to Watch This Forgotten Island Trailer The DreamWorks Animation feature comes from the creators of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on March 25, 2026 Screenshot: DreamWorks Animation Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: DreamWorks Animation The creative team behind Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado and producer Mark Swift, have a new DreamWorks Animation feature coming out called Forgotten Island, and if today’s trailer is any indication, it looks like a vibrant BFF tale with a soundtrack that especially appeals to elder Millennial parents who take their kids to the theaters. Here’s the official synopsis for Forgotten Island: While celebrating their last night together, Jo (H.E.R.) and Raissa (Liza Soberano) stumble upon a mysterious portal that transports them to the fantastical island of Nakali, packed with magical and mythological creatures they grew up hearing stories about from their Filipino families.Some of these figures will become friends, some foes. Joined by well-meaning-but-hapless weredog Raww (Dave Franco) and a small-but-mighty pack of pals, Jo and Raissa must face The Dreaded Manananggal (Lea Salonga), the most feared creature on the island. When they discover that the memories of their entire friendship are the price for returning home, Jo and Raissa will race to find a way to leave the island before they forget each other forever. The colors and animation style in the trailer looks awesome, and the voice cast is also impressive. In addition to the names above, you’ll hear Jenny Slate (Marcel the Shell with Shoes On), Manny Jacinto (The Good Place), Dolly de Leon (Triangle of Sadness), Jo Koy (Haunted Mansion) and Ronny Chieng (M3GAN). Forgotten Island will premiere in theaters on September 25, 2026. Check out the trailer below. [end-mark] The post Don’t Forget to Watch This <i>Forgotten Island</i> Trailer appeared first on Reactor.

Books book reviews Anna Kovatcheva’s She Made Herself a Monster and the Ambiguous Fantastic Anna Kovatcheva’s new gothic novel features a vampire hunter, but… is it really a vampire story? By Tobias Carroll | Published on March 25, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Here’s a question: Does a novel need to actually have fantastical elements to be considered a fantasy novel? This question has been on my mind since reading Molly Templeton’s recent column on genre boundaries, but it’s also been coursing through my brain since I finished Anna Kovatcheva’s novel She Made Herself a Monster. The publisher’s description of the novel is coy about just how supernatural the book actually gets; the phrases “feminist fable” and “Gothic gem” come up, though the publisher pointedly does not categorize it as fantasy or horror. There’s a good reason for that. She Made Herself a Monster begins with a woman named Yana, who is traveling from village to village in eastern Europe acting as a vampire slayer. We’re a long way from Buffy Summers or Abraham Van Helsing here, though: Yana’s method involves hammering a brick into the neck of a corpse, then presenting the townspeople with a spike and instructing them to bury the body outside of the town’s borders. The language Kovatcheva uses for this sequence is visceral; she captures both the violence of Yana’s actions and the fear and awe of the people gathered around to watch this ritual. Yana lowers the mallet to the ground and holds the railroad spike out to the mayor. Its sharp end is gummy with flesh gouged from the roof of the dead man’s mouth. What she does not show, pointedly, is a member of the undead fighting for its uncanny life, desperate for survival, to endure one more day with the promise of more bloody feasts in its future. That’s because Yana’s act is precisely that: a show put on for the benefit of the locals, and a way to secure her own livelihood. As Kovatcheva writes, “The simple fact is: they want to believe her.” That said, calling She Made Herself a Monster a work of historical fiction or crime fiction doesn’t fit nearly as well as shelving it closer to the fantasy or horror sections of some metaphorical or literal shelf. Why? Because at its core, it’s still concerned with themes prevalent in both of those genres, including memory, ritual, and fear. While Yana is the character on whom this novel opens, she isn’t the central character. That distinction belongs to Anka, a young woman who is under the guardianship of a man known to everyone as the Captain. In a novel where every other significant character is referred to by their first name, that is the first signal that something is different about this man, but Kovatcheva leaves the specifics vague. Is it just that he holds more power than anyone else in the book? Or is that he has become something different, a person who’s opted to conceal his humanity behind a title and the authority it conveys? Buy the Book She Made Herself a Monster Anna Kovatcheva Buy Book She Made Herself a Monster Anna Kovatcheva Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget She Made Herself a Monster is set at a time in the past when science and superstition are at an uneasy impasse. Anka’s cousin Kiril, another major figure here, is introduced having a conversation about science and astronomy with his friend Hasan, all the while looking on the ways that his horizons have expanded since leaving his hometown. That one of the first things Kiril does upon arriving back home is to defend a widow accused of witchcraft—something he accurately perceives as utterly wrongheaded—establishes the tensions on the ground here, and also helps explain why Kiril sought to move elsewhere. Eventually, Kovatcheva reveals another reason why the Captain is known as the Captain, as opposed to his given name: It’s a way of leaving an earlier version of himself behind. Unfortunately, that earlier version of himself was a more fallible man, one with the capacity to err in tragic ways—but also one capable of levels of compassion that this version of himself has sloughed off. The Captain, it seems, loved Anka’s late mother; he also has designs on taking Anka as his wife when she is of age. The emphasis there is very much on “taking her”; Anka is understandably horrified by the idea of her surrogate father becoming her husband. Alternately, the Captain’s degree of self-justification—“When we marry, we will complete the grand plan—do you see now? Do you see it?”—takes things into the realm of moral horror, if not its supernatural counterpart. The arrival of Yana in the village provides Anka with a glimpse of how different her life could be and of how she might be able to use the locals’ superstitions (including a wariness around Anka due to the circumstances of her birth) as a way of making an escape from a terrible situation. She Made Herself a Monster is a slow-building work; Kovatcheva lets the narrative emerge slowly, rooting the plot and story in the connections between the characters and the events that took place before the start of the novel. Myths, legends, and superstitions are not the only old stories that have a bearing on these characters’ lives; their family histories also play a part. One of the questions Kovatcheva is pursuing here has to do with the connections between rituals and narratives. Can someone be a vampire hunter if they go through all of the motions of banishing a supernatural creature, even if there is no creature to be banished, provided the locals are satisfied with their work? At its core, this is a story about the power of stories, encompassing everything from Yana’s livelihood to the Captain’s troubling search for redemption, and about how stories can transform lives and communities. Anka’s quest to create her own story here may not involve slaying monsters, but it’s just as formidable a challenge.[end-mark] She Made Herself a Monster is published by Mariner Books. The post Anna Kovatcheva’s <i>She Made Herself a Monster</i> and the Ambiguous Fantastic appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Young Adult Read an Excerpt From The Redwood Bargain by Markelle Grabo I’m the fourth Redwood girl, and I mean to be the last. By Markelle Grabo | Published on March 25, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Redwood Bargain by Markelle Grabo, a young adult sapphic fantasy out from Page Street YA on April 28. Indentured servant Katrien longs to make amends after a difficult choice extended her cousin Helsa’s servitude with their lord of the manor. So when a dark creature in the forest known as The Redwood Man demands the lord’s youngest daughter as payment for saving his life, Katrien is eager to make her own bargain that will guarantee her cousin’s freedom―so long as she can successfully lie.Katrien must fool The Redwood Man into believing she is the daughter he was promised, Lady Zaviera. Yet three girls have already lost their lives trying to pose as the young noblewoman, with the increasingly impatient forest lord seeing through each deception and exerting his wrath in return.To ensure Katrien’s success where the girls before her have failed, Zaviera and her sisters teach her how to be the perfect imposter, even as The Redwood Man’s sentient vines threaten to consume the manor and its staff. Turning a kitchen maid into a proper lady is no simple task, and matters are complicated further as Katrien begins to fall for the tenderhearted lady she might die for. Caught between duty, desire, and Zaviera’s own blooming feelings, Katrien must decide if she’s truly willing to risk her life to right past wrongs and sacrifice herself for the girl she’s come to love. Prologue Katrien When our lord of the manor fails to return from his hunt in time for lunch with his daughters, my first and only prayer is that he never returns at all. But like all my divine petitions, this one goes unanswered. Lord Elwood Barras of East Kernshire finds his way home after sunset, agitated and disheveled, and notably without his horse. “Dead,” says the butler from across the kitchen, rousing gasps from my fellow servants. “His lordship didn’t elaborate beyond that.” “He shot it,” fills in his lordship’s valet. “Poor beast suffered a broken leg.” It’s unsavory to think of anything being shot, but horses frighten me, so I’d be more affected if one of the hounds met a similar fate. Thankfully both were found wandering the grounds hours ago, a bit rattled but otherwise unharmed. The tenant farmer who cares for the pair—Lord Barras doesn’t allow the hounds to reside within the manor—must be relieved. It’s nearly midnight, yet light glows from the gas lamps, and every servant of the estate seems to have joined the butler and valet at the crude table where we take our meals. Tired footmen and hall boys who searched the forest; housemaids and the two lady’s maids shared among Lord Barras’s daughters; the housekeeper and the cook. The kitchen and scullery maids are here, too, but we are working, clearing dishes and serving tea, trying to remain unnoticed as we catch whatever bits of information we can. “He’s refusing to see a doctor,” continues the valet. “Claims he’s perfectly well.” A frowning housemaid loudly sips her tea. “But I gathered his clothes for the laundry, sir, and they were covered in blood.” Muttering into her teacup, she adds, “Along with the most peculiar green sap.” The valet’s eyebrows lift along with mine. “Blood and sap, you say? Well, when I helped him into the bath, I didn’t see a scratch on him.” Buy the Book The Redwood Bargain Markelle Grabo Buy Book The Redwood Bargain Markelle Grabo Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget A fellow kitchen maid sets a half-filled sugar dish and an empty carafe for milk on my tray. “What do you think, Katrien?” she murmurs into my ear. “Are we to assume all the blood came from the horse, then?” With what I hope is a discreet shake of my head, I reply, “Doesn’t sound right.” While Lord Barras insists on hunting without his valet, each outing brings more game to the kitchen than we know what to do with, indicating his skills as a marksman. I can’t imagine he would make such a mess of putting down his horse. “He was muttering when he came in,” offers the butler, as if he overheard our exchange. “Seems like he was lost in the forest until a man showed him the way home.” “What sort of man?” asks the housekeeper. “Why didn’t he come inside for a proper thank-you?” The butler shrugs. “His lordship didn’t say. He did mention something about returning the favor.” Now what could that mean? No one seems to have a clue, and a whole-body shiver runs through me at the eeriness of the tale, my unsteady hands causing dishes to slide and clatter as I return the tea tray to the counter. With nothing more to glean from the witnesses to Lord Barras’s homecoming, the servants disperse. Most climb the service staircase to their rooms, though the butler insists the valet and lady’s maids check on his lordship and his daughters before retiring. I linger in the kitchen, taking my time wiping down the counters because I hope to catch Helsa’s return from the stables. My cousin might feel obligated to speak with me if I have updates about his lordship. If only I could give her news that he failed to come back. It’s not that I wish for Lord Barras’s death. He’s a foul man, but I don’t want his daughters to be fatherless as well as motherless. It’s just that, if he were gone, our recent troubles would be solved. Helsa might return to a decent schedule and stop sleeping among the horses. She might stop drinking too. But another half hour passes without her arrival, so I toss the rag into the sink, light a candle for the journey to my room, and turn down the gas lamps. I’m about to ascend the stairs when there’s a curious tapping against the door. It can’t be Helsa; she’d never knock, nor would any of the servants. Has someone telephoned for a doctor after all? I open the door, but the outside lamp illuminates an empty stoop. “Hello?” I call, tugging at the strings of my apron, a nervous habit the cook always scolds me for. No answer. No sign of anyone. I peer into the darkness beyond, wondering if I might catch sight of a moving shadow, but there’s nothing. I close the door, suddenly eager to climb the stairs to my bed. But the tapping starts again. I frown, studying the door handle as if it might turn at any moment. The noise sounds so close—too close to come from anywhere else. I’m certain someone must be on the other side. A hall boy, playing a prank? If so, he’ll get an earful from me. I’m not in the mood for games. I pull open the door a second time, only much quicker, hoping to catch the rotten trickster in the act. The sight of a green snake writhing on the stoop makes me jump backward, a scream nearly escaping my lips. I clutch at the collar of my kitchen dress, my heartbeat heavy under my hand and loud in my ears. I grasp for the broom leaning against the wall, meaning to sweep the snake away before it can slither inside. It turns out my foolish eyes are the true deceivers, because at second glance I realize the green thing is not a snake. It’s a vine, one of the ivy vines that adorn the manor’s exterior walls. And it’s not alone. More vines join the first in a slow crawl, leaves trembling as they scrape against concrete, against each other. I’ve never seen anything like it. Shuddering, I slam the door before the vines cross the threshold, returning the broom to its position against the wall. Surely this is a matter best left to someone else. The groundskeepers. The butler. Anyone but me. The tapping begins a third time. I ignore it, candlelight guiding my way as I ascend the stairs at a rapid pace, breath held until I’m safely in my room. I climb into bed, but I don’t sleep. The servants’ quarters occupy the very top floor of the manor; the vines will have to travel quite a way to reach me. Even so, I stare at the crack beneath my door, listening for rustling leaves. Ivy is fast-growing; the groundskeepers often mutter about its invasive nature, and if they could guarantee it wouldn’t upset his lordship, they might do away with it completely. But I’ve never heard them gripe about it moving the way I just witnessed. Could I have imagined it, then? I’ve been on my feet all day. I haven’t slept well since Helsa and I fell out. Did hearing what happened to his lordship and envisioning a strange man in the forest simply prime me for wild fantasies? I drift off, still wrestling with these thoughts, only to be startled awake by a resounding scream. A second cry draws me from bed, propelling me down the service staircase in only my nightclothes. In the kitchen, I encounter a trembling scullery maid and ivy covering every surface. Vines crisscross the table, curl around the edges. Leaves spill from the sink, gaslight illuminated in their glossy sheen. The counters are draped in a mass of writhing green. The maid clutches my arm. “Katrien, what do we do?” “Find a groundskeeper,” I say, nudging her toward the stairs without tearing my gaze from the scene. “Quickly.” Frantic footsteps carry her away, their sound soon replaced by a string of gasps and startled curses. I’m not the only servant to have been called by her screams. Footmen and housemaids crowd around me, pointing and grabbing hold of one another, seeking comfort as they confront a horror that should only exist in nightmares. From the table, a vine shoots out with alarming speed, darting through the air to wrap around a footman’s neck. A second follows the first, and he’s yanked to his knees. We surge toward him as one, grasping and pulling, tearing and screaming. We free him before his face turns fully purple, then we push his stumbling, wheezing body toward the stairs. My ears ring. Bile burns my throat. Beside me, a housemaid drops to the ground, three ivy vines around her ankle. The ivy pulls her back into the kitchen. She shrieks, desperate hands outstretched. I grab one and a hall boy grabs the other. But the vines are so strong. The bottoms of my bare feet burn as they skid across the floor. My arms ache against the strain. Ivy crawls up the girl’s legs, vanishes under her nightdress. I swallow against the foul taste in my mouth. Something grabs my waist, but it’s only the arms of another maid, offering aid. A footman does the same with the hall boy. I glance over my shoulder to see a chain of servants forming. I’m warmed by our collective effort, but the housemaid is sobbing. She’s almost more vine than girl now. Just when I think she’ll be entirely consumed, and perhaps the rest of us with her, both groundskeepers arrive, garden shears at the ready. Once the girl is free, we leave the pair of young men to battle the vines. We know when something’s no longer our fight. Bloody clothes. Green sap. A man and a favor. Our lord lost his way in the forest, and now our manor is under siege. * * * The ivy vines are only the beginning. Mere days after his lordship’s disastrous hunt, fully grown redwoods appear across the estate. Unlike the ivy, they don’t harm us servants. It’s the livestock they’re after. Sheep, goats, and chickens are drawn as if pulled by invisible strings. More than a dozen animals are found dead atop the roots, traces of bark shavings in the foam spilling from their mouths. Some sort of poison, I hear. Lord Barras orders his tenants to keep their livestock in pens. A few days more and the ground is shaking. Some tremors break vases and statuettes; others cause falls down the stairs. They don’t seem to extend past the manor, as no one comes to offer aid, and no one here sends for it, fearing Lord Barras’s wrath. His lordship decrees that until further notice, no servant will leave the estate, and all visitors to the manor are to be turned away unless they are tenants making their regularly scheduled deliveries. But all is not lost; his daughters have a plan. A plan to make the estate safe again, to finally appease the man in the wood, the cause of all this terror. He had sent the vines, redwoods, and tremors because he was promised a prize for helping Lord Barras, one my lord had failed to deliver. He had been promised a girl. Not just any girl, but one of Lord Barras’s daughters: a Lady of East Kernshire. But the ladies pay this condition no mind. They’re too clever to relinquish one of their own; they know better. And yet all their cleverness is no match for him. We servants call him The Redwood Man. I can’t explain his power or why he bargained with Lord Barras. All I know is his disappointment, his unmet hunger. Because each time the ladies send a girl of their choice to the wood, their offered prize is rejected by week’s end. The first corpse found at the forest’s edge has evergreen needles stuffed down her throat. The second has a tree branch through her middle. The last girl is missing her eyes. There will most certainly be a fourth. The only question is who she will be, and if she will be the one to finally fool him. Excerpted from The Redwood Bargain, copyright © 2026 by Markelle Grabo. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>The Redwood Bargain</i> by Markelle Grabo appeared first on Reactor.

Column Alex Garland’s Civil War Captures What Journalists Do, Like It or Not Reporting the facts, and challenging the narrative those in power want to convey. By Dan Persons | Published on March 25, 2026 Credit: A24 Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: A24 I started writing this piece on Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024) knowing it’d be a stretch. The SF Path to Higher Consciousness is supposed to be about how genre film helps us look at ourselves and how we relate to our world and the universe. Civil War isn’t really about introspection, even though it presents a daunting set of moral challenges. Maybe it’s more that I wanted to use it to look into where I came from, what I seek from myself and my craft. After all, while my route to journalism wasn’t a straight line, the passion for it was always there, even from childhood. Times being what they are, I thought maybe the things I discovered about myself while looking into the film would somehow be beneficial to others. (Maybe you?) I got into covering genre film by writing for Cinefantastique, starting in the late Eighties. A long, long time ago—when dinosaurs ruled the Earth—CFQ was deemed one of the most influential fan magazines in the field. Its coverage of film and TV was so in-depth and clear-eyed that it was read by industry professionals. Its issue on Forbidden Planet was so comprehensive—to the extent that it included a piece on the rough cut of the film—that it is still considered a definitive history of that SF classic. Credit long-time publisher and editor Fred Clarke for making the magazine what it was. From the get-go, he wanted to offer genre fans something beyond the superficial enthusiasm of other fan mags. CFQ was established in the wake of Watergate, and Clarke openly admitted that the magazine not only took its tip from the influential, French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, but also from the standard championed by Woodward and Bernstein. I came to the fold late in the magazine’s history, after some of Cinefantastique’s most infamous efforts (including, most notoriously, an article featuring photos of the Twilight Zone helicopter disaster, something which Fred later expressed regret over publishing), but I was still inculcated into Fred’s philosophy that we may have been a fan magazine, but that didn’t mean we needed to treat the art with any less gravity and candor than a journalist would afford any other subject. There is a caveat to this: Much as we at CFQ reveled in our outsider notoriety (once, during a press junket, a writer for one of the other magazines said to me, “You guys over at Cinefantastique take yourselves way too seriously,” to which I had to constrain myself from replying, “Yes, so what’s your point?”), there was only so far we could go with the righteous-seekers-of-truth thing. It’s called “access journalism,” a nice way of saying that both reporter and subject have to kiss each others’ asses to at least some extent if there’s going to be any story. Fred learned that lesson the hard way when Spielberg and his cohort cut the magazine off after Twilight Zone, and George Lucas did the same after the mag disclosed the big reveal of The Empire Strikes Back before the film’s opening. Relationships would be patched up later, but it would never be the same. Much as I tried to deal honestly and fairly with the films I covered, there was a line I knew I could not cross. I was neither Woodward, Bernstein, Cronkite, nor Murrow. I was a writer for a fan magazine, and in terms of rep, that and $3.25 would get you a Venti at Starbucks. Which is why Civil War hit me so profoundly. Journalists in general get a bad rap. Sometimes that’s deserved—there are some so-called “journalists” too willing to slant a story to fit their biases, and there are certain outlets, which will not be named here, whose whole business model is to repackage propaganda as legitimate news. But very often journalists get knocked because that’s not what they do; because they dare to convey events as honestly as they can, and challenge the narrative that those in power want to convey. They’ll still have their biases, they’ll still make mistakes, and there will be times when their zeal to get a story will lead them into morally gray areas—they’re only human, after all. But the best of them know they work to a higher purpose: Bringing the truth to people who need to know. Civil War is a controversial film. Set in the near future, when a coalition between Texas and California—called the Western Forces—have seceded from the Union and are waging war against the U.S. government, it follows photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and reporter Joel (Wagner Moura) as they endeavor to reach Washington, D.C. before the city falls, in the hopes of getting an exclusive with the embattled President (Nick Offerman). Joining them on a circuitous route that takes them from New York through Western Pennsylvania and into the Virginias are veteran journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) a novice photographer not yet tested in the crucible of war, whom Lee reluctantly takes under her wing. Alex Garland’s father worked as a cartoonist for a newspaper, and Civil War bears the markings of a person who from a young age has been deeply immersed in the culture of the newsroom. While the mise-en-scène is distinctly American—along their odyssey the reporters encounter a stand-off at a weird, Christmas-themed roadside attraction and a group of heavily armed gas station attendants who string up and torture looters back behind their garage—the action overall bears more than a few echoes of civil wars waged elsewhere around the world. Lee, Joel, and Sammy have all covered conflict overseas—their alcohol-infused interactions while holed up at a New York hotel suggest they must have had the same exchanges countless times in countless foreign lodgings. But now war has come home—while the context is different, the brutality and terror stay the same. [Put on your Kevlar vest—we’re venturing into spoiler territory.] Civil War caught criticism for having the journalists embedding with the secessionist Western Forces and for showing the rebels vanquishing the U.S. army, as if the film was meant to be an alt-universe rewrite of our actual Civil War. But Alex Garland is British, has never evinced any zeal to see Dixie rise again, goes out of his way to point out that the politics of our world are not necessarily the politics of the film—I mean, Texas and California falling on the same side of the divide is as likely as KFC being declared heart-healthy—and notes that other Southern states have refused to join the alliance. Even so, what some people have misread as the protagonists’ sympathy to the rebel forces is better interpreted, as the saying goes, as journalists going to where the story is. In this case, the U.S. forces are portrayed as more hostile to the press than the secessionists—numerous people warn Joel that even attempting to get a one-on-one with the president is tantamount to a death sentence—and while the Western Forces are more amenable to letting the reporters tag along, their atrocities—including the summary execution of prisoners of war—are only slightly less horrific than what the U.S. forces, let off their leash, are committing. Garland may be taking sides, but he is neither unfairly stacking the deck nor relitigating our real past. Nor does he ennoble Lee and company. Civil War doesn’t turn a blind eye to the cost journalists pay to serve as witnesses to history. In the end, Lee sacrifices her life to save Jessie, and Jessie’s thanks is to snap Lee’s picture as she falls. Joel gets his one-on-one with the president: A gasped, “Don’t let them kill me,” just before the soon-to-be ex-Commander in Chief is executed. The film ends on the photo of secessionist soldiers arrayed over the slaughtered leader, smiling. Nothing is triumphal about this—if Pulitzers are bestowed on the witnesses to an overthrow, the victory will be a bitter one, indeed. Journalists are not saints. But they are by and large neither enemies of the people for asking uncomfortable questions, nor targets worthy of prosecution merely for bearing witness. Alex Garland has done them a service by taking full measure of them, celebrating what drives them but also appreciating what’s lost in that drive. Civil War brings us uncomfortably close to a future we’re seeing played out in real time. It allows us to appreciate the value of those who make us aware of the peril, so we can better avoid it. For the record, war has never been “woke” nor “politically correct.” If anyone characterizes it as so, and proclaims that all stops are now off, you are justified in wondering what atrocities may follow. Civil War serves as both a rumination and a warning on the true nature of war, and Alex Garland presents it with the unromanticized clarity of a real journalist, cementing the writer/director’s reputation for being one of film’s most incisive and challenging auteurs. If, as he says, he is intending to step back from directing (he also says he will continue to write), it will be a profound loss. But what do you think? Is Civil War prophecy or fantasy? Does it play fair with its fictional journalists and combatants? You can give your feedback in the comments section below. And keep in mind things are tense enough right now—let’s be kind and cordial with each other.[end-mark] The post Alex Garland’s <i>Civil War</i> Captures What Journalists Do, Like It or Not appeared first on Reactor.

News otherwise award Silvia Park’s Luminous Wins the 2025 Otherwise Award The jury also named an Honor List and Long List By Molly Templeton | Published on March 25, 2026 Image: Otherwise Awards Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Otherwise Awards Formerly known as the Tiptree Award, the Otherwise Award “honors works of science fiction and fantasy that expand and explore our understanding of gender.” The winner of the 2025 award is Luminous, by Silvia Park. Each year’s jury may choose more than one winner for the award, but this year’s panel chose a single book. The jury members who chose Luminous were Eugen Bacon (chair), Andrew Hook, Cheryl S. Ntumy, K. Ibura, and Rebecca Fraimow As the Otherwise website explains: The jury unanimously agreed that Silvia Park’s gripping science fiction novel Luminous is a diverse and immersive read that is exceptionally well-crafted. With deep and complex worldbuilding, this work intelligently and realistically explores a range of identities and themes across gender expression, AI, robotics, trans identity, embodiment, dysphoria, disability, and relationships among humans, as well as humanity’s relationship with ‘the other’. The novel casts a crucial gaze at layered societal expectations around masculinity and femininity, and beautifully examines the quest for community and connection. The jury chose five books for the Honor List: What a Fish Looks Like, by Syr Hayati Beker (Stelliform Press) A Song for You and I, by K. O’Neill (Random House Graphic) The Path of Most Resistance: Poems on Women in Science, by Jessy Randall, illustrated by Kristin DiVona (Gold SF) Notes from a Regicide, by Isaac Fellman (Tor Books) Algarabía, by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera (Graywolf Press) They also chose seven works for the Long List: The Everlasting, by Alix E. Harrow (Tor) “möbius loop,” by Samir Sirk Morató (khōréō) Some Body Like Me, by Lucy Lapinska (Gollancz) Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, edited by Lee Mandelo (Erewhon). Authors: Esther Alter, Bendi Barrett, Ta-wei Chi (translated by Ariel Chu), Colin Dean, Maya Deane, Dominique Dickey, Katharine Duckett, Meg Elison, Paul Evanby, Aysha U. Farah, Sarah Gailey, Ash Huang, Margaret Killjoy, Wen-yi Lee, Ewen Ma, Jamie McGhee, Sam J. Miller, Aiki Mira (translated by CD Covington), Sunny Moraine, Nat X Ray, Neon Yang, Ramez Yoakeim Boy Island, by Leo Fox (Silver Sprocket, 2024) The Ghost and the Golem, by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Choice of Games, 2024) Part Time Girl, by Adriaan Brae (Presses Renaissance Press) The winner of the Otherwise award receives an unspecified financial award and a medal, and will be honored during a gala at WisCon 2026. This year’s WisCon takes place entirely online, May 21 to 25.[end-mark] The post Silvia Park’s <i>Luminous</i> Wins the 2025 Otherwise Award appeared first on Reactor.