Books Seeds of Story Irrational in a Way That Makes Complete Sense: Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had a little more literacy about the capabilities and compromises of their own minds? By Ruthanna Emrys | Published on June 30, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there. This week, I cover Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman founded my area of cognitive psychology research, developing the whole concept of cognitive bias and heuristics. That area then expanded into a laundry list of ways the human mind screws up. Here, he pulls the whole thing back together, attempting to replace isolated phenomena with a shared underlying explanation. I feel extremely nerdy about it, and you should too. What It’s About This is the thickest, most academic book I’ve ever seen in an airport bookstore. The reason it was there is, Kahneman won a Nobel Prize in economics. The reason he won it in economics is that they don’t have one in psychology. So every once in a while, someone does excellent psych work that uses financial stimuli (because they’re easy to quantify), and applies them to pulling yet another brick from the façade of Homo economicus, and business people get excited and want to read about it. (And then they ignore what they’ve learned, because real human behavior is squirmy and complicated.) Kahneman’s classic work is on systematic errors of thinking, and the important—even valuable—aspects of thinking that lead to those errors. This is often glossed as “humans are irrational.” It might be better explained as “real-world outcomes matter more than logic problems.” Our minds optimize for non-optimal situations. Usually, you need to make decisions in limited time and with limited, uncertain information. Real-world rationality, therefore, involves satisficing—making a decision that is good enough to scrape by, with the resources you actually have. You develop heuristic shortcuts to achieve this, all of which can lead to systematic error under atypical circumstances. You can find a lot of atypical circumstances in a psych lab. You can find a lot of circumstances that are “atypical” for the span of human evolution, but which have become increasingly common over the past century. My favorite example: when information-gathering is limited to your own direct experience, and reports from people who live around you, it makes sense to judge how likely an event is by how often you hear about it. Lots of tasty berries up on that crag? You’ll see them yourself, and your friends will talk about them around the campfire. Are bears sometimes going after those same berries? Someone will tell you. This is the availability heuristic, which estimates rough probabilities based on instances in your memory. But it doesn’t work so well when not only are you getting reports from around an extremely variable world, but news and social media tend to emphasize the most exciting reports regardless of accuracy. People’s estimates of their own safety are more related to how much time they spend immersed in the news than on the truths of their own neighborhoods. Heuristics, therefore, lead inevitably to cognitive bias. Some, like availability, become all-too-common in modern life. Others, like the Linda Problem, show up mostly with specific phrasing of trick questions—but still tell us something important about how thinking works. From Kahneman’s initial handful of heuristics, researchers have expanded to a long and occasionally trivial list of errors. They vary from near-universal to deeply culture-bound. (Robin Wall Kimmerer, for example, does not suffer in any way from “plant blindness.”) My professional opinion is that cognitive psychologists have a bias-identification bias, because you get more publications by naming a new one. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman alarmed everyone in the field by saying that he no longer thought focusing on individual biases was the best approach. What matters is that they’re systematic—so what are the cognitive systems involved? System 1 is the baseline: quick and dirty and ready to satisfice. Much of it is non-conscious, with the advantages of speed and automaticity. It’s the realm of instinct and learned patterns, of well-honed expertise and intuition. System 2 is slower, but with the advantages that consciousness provides. It allows careful consideration, holding off to collect more information, and second-guessing your reflexive responses. It’s also prone to errors of its own: for example, the choice paralysis that comes with having too many options and too much uncertainty. Neither one is inherently better. At any given point, you’re in tension between slow, effortful opportunities to process the uniqueness of a problem, and easy, quick opportunities to act fast and hope the odds are in your favor. And System 1 has a lot more capacity than System 2—those conscious resources have to be spent carefully. These systems, Kahneman warns, are a heuristic themselves—a way of thinking about two different types of thinking rather than a claim about brain areas. It’s also important to remember that they work in tandem: that System 2 can check the least helpful impulses of System 1, while System 1 minimizes the System 2 workload. Buy the Book Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman Buy Book Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget I love this book, and am biased by how tightly it’s integrated into stuff I already know. I’ve been reading Kahneman’s stuff and running related studies since college. Often when I talk to people who aren’t immersed in heuristic research, they find it alarming—what do you mean, I can’t avoid making mistakes? What do you mean, most of my decisions will always have to be non-conscious? The differences between reality and people’s intuitions about their own minds quickly get into existential territory. This comes up most frustratingly when people are arguing about how they remember some event. Many people take the suggestion that they’ve misremembered or misjudged something as an insult, whereas I’m more likely to go, “Ooh, confirmation bias!” This is not always a useful relationship skill, but then, neither is yelling “I told you last week!” as if you can logic someone into eidetic memory. Researchers in this area are divided between those who frame everything in terms of error and irrationality, and those who frame everything in terms of adaptations that sometimes go awry. I fall into the latter camp—I find Kahneman’s results reassuring in that they explain why we make mistakes. It’s not simply a matter of humans being flawed (sort of a scientific take on original sin, IMO), but of handling a complex world that doesn’t present itself in the form of logic puzzles. My non-conscious cognitive processes are a part of me, shaped by the experiences and ideas that I’ve spent 50 years feeding into the compost pile, and they’re doing my best. I trust that part of my mind, and question it on a regular basis, because my System 2 processes are also me. Kahneman presents his results as a better way to talk about our decisions—in offices, with friends and family, trying to interpret the firehose of information and disinformation that is modern life. He would like everyone to have a little more literacy about the capabilities and compromises of their own minds, which I also think is a great idea. We would all do well to have an “Ooh, confirmation bias!” reflex, especially these days when AI “search” offers an automatic yes-man for unexamined assumptions. If I have one complaint, it’s that Kahneman’s early skill with finding memorable names for mental phenomena doesn’t continue here. Having studied this stuff all my life, I still had to double-check which one is System 1, and which System 2, before writing this blog post. You have my permission to call them the Compost Bin and the Gardening Gloves, or the Kirk and the Spock, or whatever labels make it easier to think about your thinking. The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories Ace Detectives and Evil Geniuses. Kahneman is particularly fond of adversarial collaborations—a method where disagreeing researchers co-design a study to test competing hypotheses. One of his, with Gary Klein, is on the circumstances that give rise to “intuitive expertise”—that is, the type of swift, accurate judgement that makes for exciting protagonists. Science fiction is full of clever scientists, navigators, mathematicians, etc., whose intuition feels (and sometimes is) nearly magical, perfect for overcoming cosmic-scale problems and infodumping about it. Klein and Kahneman found that this kind of intuition is possible only when given two conditions: a regular, predictable environment; and the opportunity to learn those regularities through practice and feedback. These regularities feed into System 1, allowing the development of fast, accurate heuristics in fields like chess, firefighting, and diagnostic medicine. Areas that lack regularity or effective feedback—stock picking and political punditry, to name two—result in “experts” who have high confidence based on inaccurate intuitions. They also result in failures by lay folk using the intuition that confidence implies accuracy. So when creating fictional experts, we should think about how they’ve encountered the necessary conditions. Foundation, for example, posits regularities in political development that, so far as modern researchers can tell, don’t exist. But it does posit them, and that worldbuilding makes the resulting expertise possible. About Those Adversaries… If you’re looking to add conflict to a core scientific speculation, why not have your researchers work like Klein and Kahneman—perhaps with some juicy arguments and a handful of enemies-to-lovers thrown in? For that matter, cognitive biases are a great way to think about how smart characters can make mistakes without holding an idiot ball, and how you could have two brilliant minds in understandable-yet-violent disagreement. New Growth: What Else to Read I am extremely picky about lay cognitive psychology books, and not going to recommend Nudge (much of which doesn’t turn out to replicate) or Blink (more dramatic than accurate in describing some research). I will happily recommend Kahneman’s Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, and Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds, about Kahneman’s fruitful relationship with Amos Tversky. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s The Enigma of Reason frames cognition as something we do socially rather than individually—a thought-provoking way of looking at rationality. And I’ve had my eye on Pascal Boyer’s Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create. Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation is an excellent illustration of how expert intuition works, and how it opens (and closes) our perceptions of the world. Lois McMaster Bujold’s Memory remains one of my favorite pieces of cognitive science fiction, all about smart people’s intuitions leading them into error; unfortunately, it’s a terrible place to start so you’ll just have to read the whole, excellent Vorkosigan series. Rosemary Kirstein’s The Steerswoman features a main character whose job involves testing her own assumptions—using the scientific method in a world with wizards. Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons is another terrific depiction of someone developing expertise in a fictional field. What are your favorite stories about human error? Share in the comments![end-mark] The post Irrational in a Way That Makes Complete Sense: Daniel Kahneman’s <i>Thinking, Fast and Slow</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Books The Wheel of Time The Triumph of Rand al’Thor and Why I Named My Inner Voice Moridin Sylas discusses mental health struggles in the context of the Wheel of Time. By Sylas K Barrett | Published on June 30, 2026 The Gathering Storm cover art by Darrell K Sweet Comment 0 Share New Share The Gathering Storm cover art by Darrell K Sweet When I was little, I somehow internalized the idea that when I made a mistake, or did something wrong, or didn’t succeed at something I was trying to accomplish, it was reflective of something I was, rather than something I did. This thought distortion began at such a young age that I didn’t have the knowledge to understand the feeling, or the language to explain it to the adults in my life. By the time I was old enough to be able to interrogate the concept, it was too late. The feeling had cemented into an identity, one that would shape much of my adolescence and my adult life. Looking back, I can identify many moments and experiences growing up where something happened to further reinforce that childhood sense of self. Some were normal growing up experiences, like friction in childhood friendships or figuring out how to navigate the requirements of the public education system. Some were more intense, such as growing up queer and neurodivergent—conditions that society views as deviant and other—in a small, rural town in the 90s and early aughts. But before all that, before the painful social interactions of youth or societal messages that told me that conformity and success were the only ways to define one’s worth, there existed a simple childhood misunderstanding that was never caught or corrected by the adults around me. The message I thought I was receiving from the world didn’t literally exist in the way I believed it too, but it was no less powerful for the fact that it came from a misinterpretation. Recently, my therapist suggested that I give a name to the voice in the back of my mind that whispers that I am wrong, a mistake, a failure, even before I have made a mistake or failed at a task. He suggested that this might help me stop believing the voice as something true and intrinsic to me, and see it instead as an interloper, whispering lies and trying to bring me down. In answer, I immediately started talking about Rand al’Thor. I was just finishing up my read of The Gathering Storm at the time, and thinking a lot about themes of identity within The Wheel of Time, and specifically what they mean for Rand and his journey into becoming the kind of man who can be the Dragon Reborn. Despite the fantastical nature of many of Rand’s struggles, there is much to relate to him, as evidenced by the fact that this is now the third essay I have written comparing my mental health journey with his. Like me, Rand had his sense of identity formed for him before he even knew who he was. I am not referring to his identity as Rand the shepherd, of course, but his identity as the Dragon Reborn. Even in his far-flung village, Rand grew up hearing tales and superstitions about the Dragon Reborn. People knew little about the truth of the Dragon and Breaking of the world, but they knew enough to fear the Dragon and associate him with Evil. The dragon’s fang was scrawled on the door of suspected Darkfriends. Men who could channel were shunned or attacked even after they had been gentled and could no longer touch saidin. When Moiraine came to Emond’s Field, Rand left the Two Rivers with his friends and began to learn more about the Dragon Reborn. He encountered people with more nuanced prejudices and fears about who, and what, the Dragon Reborn was supposed to be. He learned about being ta’veren, about fate and the will of the Wheel, and he learned a little about the Karaethon Cycle. Even before Rand discovered that it was he, not Mat or Perrin, who was the Dragon Reborn, he already “knew” that the Dragon was dangerous, destined to break the world, to go mad, and that everyone in power, especially the Aes Sedai, would try to control him. That last bit, of course, was planted in his mind by Ba’alzamon. Of course, most of Rand’s paranoia, self-defensiveness, and anger are also rooted in responses to things that have happened to him over the course of the series. He has been pursued by Darkfriends and by Mordeth-Fain. He was given supernaturally unhealing wounds by two different enemies. He experienced the fear and prejudice of people who knew much more about who, and what, the Dragon Reborn was supposed to be than Rand himself did. He was captured, tortured, and locked in a box. He read the Karaethon Cycle and studied words that he believed foretold his death. He lost Moiraine. He was also affected by the taint on saidin, exposed to the corruption of the Dark One’s touch every time he seized the male half of the One Power, driven mad slowly but surely by a decaying force that nearly always brings those affected by it to a mental state dominated by destructive rage and violent paranoia so great that they lash out even at those they love most. So it is no wonder that Rand fears and mistrusts everyone around him by the time we reach the events of The Gathering Storm. Even without the influence of the taint madness, and even more so with it, it’s easy to see why he would feel isolated, betrayed, and mistrustful. It’s a subject I’ve frequently explored throughout my read of the series. But as I read the last few chapters of The Gathering Storm, I found myself thinking back to those early days of Ba’alzamon whispering in Rand’s dreaming mind, and to how everything that happened to Rand afterwards watered the seeds that Ishamael planted there. Masquerading as the Dark One himself, Ishamael marauded through Rand’s dreaming mind, warning him over and over that the Aes Sedai would use him for their own ends, that they would make him their puppet and their slave. He also spent a great deal of time attempting to convince Rand that defeat was inevitable, that the Dark One was guaranteed to win. He worked hard to sow fear in Rand’s mind and despair in his heart even before Rand ever touched saidin, never mind proved that he, not Perrin or Mat, was the Dragon Reborn. The effectiveness of that time in Rand’s mind can’t be overstated, I think. Rand was already suspicious and afraid of most Aes Sedai long before Galina and the others captured him; their actions merely enhanced and solidified that fear. Rand already doubted his own strength in the face of the Dark even before he found the dead body of a little girl and tried unsuccessfully to use Callandor to bring her back to life. When Rand read the fateful lines in the Karaethon Cycle about how his blood would stain the rocks of Shayol Ghul, he never considered that this prophecy might refer to anything other than his death. I don’t blame Rand for giving up hope—the burden he carries is almost too enormous to contemplate—but I do see how effective Ishamael was at getting into his head, and setting him up to doubt his own strength and see defeat looming in every possible misstep or failure. Betrayer of Hope, indeed. Of course, Ishamael is not the only voice inside Rand’s head. Lews Therin is literally a voice in Rand’s mind, a separate consciousness with its own opinions and designs that do not always agree with Rand’s own. Lews Therin has mostly been an antagonist to Rand since he first began speaking in Rand’s mind, filling Rand’s head with his grief and paranoia, screaming at Rand to take actions Rand doesn’t want to take, ranting or sobbing distractingly, and even trying to seize saidin away from Rand.  However, as the series has progressed—and as Rand’s own madness grew—Lews Therin became more helpful, and seemingly more sane. Then, in Rand’s darkest hour, he provided exactly what Rand needed. As Rand al’Thor stood on Dragonmount, finally confronting the emotions of anger, grief, and hopelessness that had been building in him since he accepted his identity as the Dragon Reborn, and particularly since the death of Moiraine, he was so lost to pain and despair, so consumed by the trauma he could no longer repress, that he actually prepared to end the world, drawing enough power from the Choedan Kal to potentially destroy the Pattern itself, breaking the Wheel and bringing the cycle of death and rebirth to a halt forever. And yet, as he stood on the brink of the destruction of everything, it was Lews Therin’s voice that not only brought him back from the brink but also gave Rand hope again, and a reason to live. I have long wondered whether Lews Therin’s presence in Rand’s mind was literal, in the sense that he was a separate consciousness somehow ported or leaked into Rand’s head to exist beside Rand’s own awareness, or if the identity of Lews Therin was something Rand’s madness assigned to his own thoughts, the two blurring badly in part because of Rand’s ability to access some of the memories and skills he had in his previous life. It is fun and interesting to ponder, and I don’t believe we will ever truly know the answer, but for our purposes here today, and for Rand’s, it doesn’t really matter. Because in the end, after Rand has destroyed the Choedan Kal and found laughter and hope again, he realizes something else. He realizes that he and Lews Therin are not two separate people, and never were. I think we all have a voice inside us that could be analogous to Lews Therin, at least sometimes. A voice that reminds us of the last time we fell and urges us not to try again, to stay safe instead of risking the same injury a second time. A voice that replays our mistakes or embarrassing moments over for us in our heads as we try to go to sleep at night. A voice that keeps us trapped in grief or negative thoughts when we would really just like to let go for a moment, to come up for air and breathe. That voice might be focused on the wrong thing, but it is ultimately a protective voice, one that we might do well to acknowledge as our own. It may be giving the wrong advice, acting out of fear or PTSD, but it is a voice that is trying to keep us safe. We do not have to listen to its direction in order to acknowledge its intent, and accept its role in our lives. But the voice in my head that tells me that I am wrong or bad, the voice that warns me to hide behind people-pleasing and perfectionism lest someone see the truth of me, has no redeeming side. It isn’t trying to protect me, the way fear or anxiety do. It is just a bad thought, a deep-seated belief that is neither true nor helpful. Just as Rand believed that he must harden himself, turn off his feelings of compassion and empathy and grief, so did I believe that I had to make a mask to cover the truth of myself, and hide those messy, weak parts of me from the rest of the world. I truly believed that if I didn’t, I would be destroyed. That voice is the whisper in a dark dream that tells me no one can be trusted, that I might as well turn to the Dark because that is what everyone will see in me anyway. It is Ba’alzamon, it is Ishamael, it is the Betrayer of Hope. In the end, I could pick one of those names or titles for the voice in my head, but Ba’alzamon and Ishamael were such larger than life, terrifying figures, ones that Rand believed to be the actual Dark One for a while. Choosing one of those names feels like giving that inner voice too much prestige. I am not the Rand al’Thor of The Eye of the World, young, confused, and untried against much more powerful opponents. I am a later Rand, perhaps even the Rand at the end of The Gathering Storm, one who is facing my demons and learning how to laugh and cry, to open myself up to the experiences of the world and find strength and resilience without becoming so hard that I make myself brittle. One of the many names for the Dark One is “Father of Lies.” It’s appropriate, though like a lot of the titles people and cultures use, it anthropomorphizes the Dark One, giving it a gender and a human-like function as a “father.” The Dark One is a source of many terrible things—corruption and decay and lies and betrayal—but he needs agents within the world to enact and spread his darkness, as he himself cannot interact with the world directly. Even after the drilling of the Bore, he can only touch the world in a very limited fashion. Ishamael, as his most powerful (and insane) agent, is himself a sort of “father” or “source” of lies, as he enacts the Dark One’s will across the world. And Moridin, though he is the same soul as Ishamael, is a smaller creature than the Betrayer of Hope. Already defeated by Rand more than once, killed and brought back into a new, less horrifically altered body, he gives off the air of a sad emo boy more than a demonic opponent. He is still powerful, of course, and much more dangerous than he appears, and I suspect we will have a very intense confrontation between him and Rand before the series is over. But in some ways, he is also just a man, a sad, confused soul who seems more defeated than anything else, at least when Rand spoke to him in Moridin’s Dream. I like the idea of giving this inner voice, this inner liar, a name that is evocative of the power it has had over me but also suggests that it is diminished in some way, less than it was before, when I did not yet understand it or identify it as the distortion it was. Moridin is such a silly name, after all, a word that simply means “death.” (Although nothing will ever be as silly as Mordeth.) At once both powerful and pathetic, a dangerous antagonist and yet one who, in many ways, belongs to a past version of me, I think Moridin is the perfect name and identity to give to the voice that seeks to defeat me in my life. Rand has yet to face Moridin for the last time, and my own struggle with my inner Moridin remains ongoing, but I think we are now both better positioned than we ever have to defeat this former friend turned betrayer, and to trust in ourselves that our own strength and our own love will prevail. Tune in to Reading The Wheel of Time next week for the first installment of my read of Towers of Midnight. You can find my other two articles on Rand and mental health here and here.[end-mark] The post The Triumph of Rand al’Thor and Why I Named My Inner Voice Moridin appeared first on Reactor.

Books reading recommendations Blood, Sweat, and Trees: Five Horror Stories Set in Jungles and Rainforests Clueless tourists, treasure seekers, ruthless mercenaries… this is not going to end well for you. By Lorna Wallace | Published on June 30, 2026 Rainforest cover art by Lucy Rose Comment 0 Share New Share Rainforest cover art by Lucy Rose The jungle is an environment that is at once beautiful and terrifying. On the one hand, it’s a lush landscape teeming with an incredible array of flora and fauna. But on the other hand, some of that flora and fauna would quite like to kill you. Add in the fact that rainforests tend to be dense, oppressive, hot, and humid, and you’ve got the perfect setting for a summertime horror story. Here are five books and short stories that welcome you to the jungle—not with fun and games, but with giant spiders and carnivorous plants. “The Seed from the Sepulchre” by Clark Ashton Smith (1933) James Falmer and Roderick Thone are orchid hunters who—with the help of a couple of guides—are winding their way along a small branch of the Orinoco River in Venezuela. Before the start of the story, the pair had decided to briefly divert from their flower-hunting mission to seek out an ancient ruined city said to contain a burial pit full of treasure. The story picks up with Falmer returning to Thone, who fell ill on the journey and had to stop and rest. But instead of being laden with gold and gemstones, Falmer comes back bearing a tale about a strange plant that had woven itself through a skeleton.“The Seed from the Sepulchre” may be short on word count, but Clark Ashton Smith doesn’t skimp when it comes to describing the grotesque body horror that results from Falmer’s excursion into the eerie tomb. “How Spoilers Bleed” by Clive Barker (1985) The Amazon rainforest and the Indigenous peoples who live there have long been subject to exploitation and destruction. “How Spoilers Bleed” takes one of the scenarios that has played out time and time again in this location—a group of greedy mercenaries buys a piece of land that is home to a tribe of people and then ruthlessly ejects them by any means possible—and gives it a supernatural twist. Locke is the leader of the mercenaries and while he initially hopes to displace the tribe through peaceful methods (i.e. yelling at them to leave), the confrontation quickly gets out of hand and a child is shot and killed. In response, the tribe’s elder utters a curse—one that dooms the recipients to becoming so fragile that the slightest touch causes their skin to break apart. Given the set-up, it’s not unexpected to see retribution meted out via bloodshed, but Clive Barker’s unique spin on the conflict and its consequences is distinctly more creative and horrifying than is usually the case. The Ruins by Scott Smith (2006) If you’re going to go exploring in the jungle, it’s best to be prepared—that means wearing appropriate clothing, bringing plenty of food and water, and following a knowledgeable guide to make sure you get safely back out. The main characters in The Ruins foolishly do none of these things. Two couples are in Mexico enjoying a sun-and-booze-soaked vacation. When the brother of one of their new friends goes missing, they decide to leave the resort and take a day trip to his last known location—an archaeological dig deep in the jungle—to see if they can find him. But once there, the group of foolhardy explorers wind up trapped on a hill covered with vines that might just have a taste for blood. Every element in The Ruins is vividly described—from the sun that oppressively beats down to the vast amounts of blood, guts, and gore that are spilled. There are also no chapter breaks, which gives the whole nightmarish narrative a breathlessly propulsive energy. The Forgotten Island by David Sodergren (2018) Scottish sisters Ana and Rachel (along with Rachel’s insufferable boyfriend) are on vacation in Thailand in an attempt to reconnect with each other. After a very drunken Full Moon party on the beach, they wake up—along with a few other hungover people—on a boat that is drifting towards an island. Hoping to find people there who can help them get back to the mainland, they start exploring. The massive spiderwebs strung between the trees are admittedly a little concerning, but they have no choice but to forge ahead through the jungle. The Forgotten Island feels like a B-movie creature feature blended with a cosmic Lovecraftian nightmare. There’s a fun and comedic tone throughout, but the skin-crawling horror definitely increases in intensity as the story progresses, and by the final act, full-on eight-legged mayhem has broken out on the forsaken island. Rainforest by Michelle Paver (2025) Rainforest is an epistolary novel that is told via diary entries written by English scientist Simon Corbett during a jungle expedition in 1973. Looking to study mantids, Simon has joined a camp deep in the Mexican rainforest that is mostly occupied by workers for a nearby archaeological dig. But Simon keeps finding himself distracted from his academic research by his guilt over an incident in his past. Oh, and it seems that he’s being haunted too. Michelle Paver excels at crafting an atmospheric setting: The vegetation is lush and dense, the air is hot and sticky, and there’s a plethora of nasty creepy crawlies to contend with. If you aren’t already grossed out by the idea of a botfly larva wriggling around under your skin, Rainforest will definitely get you there. Simon is a deeply unlikeable character—he looks down on those whom he deems less intelligent than himself and he’s often casually racist—but that’s by design. Such a character might be off-putting for some readers, but for me it just meant that I happily found myself rooting for the jungle and the ghosts to put him firmly in his place. Since the jungle is bursting with horror potential, there are surely more than just these five stories that take advantage of the tropical tree-filled setting. I’d love to hear any of your rainforest-set scary story recommendations in the comments below![end-mark] The post Blood, Sweat, and Trees: Five Horror Stories Set in Jungles and Rainforests appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Watchlist Here Are All the Genre TV Premieres Airing in July! Trek and the X-Men are back, and Chrunchyroll has geared up for summer! By Petrana Radulovic | Published on June 29, 2026 Image credits: Marvel Studios Animation; Paramount+; Science Saru Comment 0 Share New Share Image credits: Marvel Studios Animation; Paramount+; Science Saru There is a lot of entertainment out there these days, and a lot of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror titles to parse through. So we’re rounding up the genre shows coming out each month.  It’s summer anime season, which means there’s a lot of isekai titles to wade through. July also brings new seasons of X-Men ‘97 and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. And what’s this? A Big Bang Theory spinoff? That’s all about some minor characters traversing the multiverse? Sure, why not!  X-Men ‘97  — Disney+ (July 1) (Season 2) Disney’s X-Men animated series is a revival of the popular ‘90s series (hence the ‘97 in the name). The classic characters—Cyclops, Wolverine, Rogue, Jean Grey, and more!—are all back. In the second season, the mutants are scattered across time. They must find their way back to the 1990s to stop Apocalypse and his world-ending plans.  Silo — Apple TV (July 3) (Season 3) Silo takes place in a dystopian future where 10,000 people live in a giant silo that extends 144 levels underground. It’s a strict society, but they are all convinced that it’s for the greater good. But as is the case in many dystopian futures, things aren’t all that they seem—there might be something up with how the silo is governed and where it came from… Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — Paramount+ (July 23) (Season 4) The 11th Star Trek series (which is specifically a spinoff of Star Trek: Discovery) features younger versions of some familiar characters from the Original Series, introducing many more as they’re continued. It’s episodic in nature, seeing the old crew of the Enterprise explore—you guessed it!—strange new worlds.  Stuart Fails to Save the Universe — HBO Max (July 23) In the third Big Bang Theory spinoff (yes, you read that right), comic book shop owner Stuart accidentally ends the world. He teams up with some other minor Big Bang Theory characters, including his girlfriend Denise, dry geologist Bert, and insufferable Barry Kripke, in order to save the multiverse. Throughout their multiversal hijinks, they meet alternate versions of familiar faces. The Walking Dead: Dead City — AMC (July 26) (Season 3) Maggie and Negan from the original Walking Dead series travel to Manhattan in search of Maggie’s kidnapped son. In season three, the two have finally put aside their differences to build a community. But in this post-apocalyptic world crawling with zombies and cutthroat survivalists, nothing stays peaceful for long.  The Ark — Syfy (July 29) (Season 3) In the distant future, a spacecraft full of colonists leaves a desolated Earth and embarks to a new home. But after an accident kills nearly all of the ship’s technical crew and senior officers, the remaining passengers must work together to complete their journey. Anime Releases Dara-san of Reiwa — Crunchyroll (July 2) Two siblings venture deep into the woods, where a forbidden shrine dedicated to a dangerous snake goddess lies… and they meet the demonic snake goddess herself! But it turns out, she’s awkward and lonely and very eager to make friends. An unlikely friendship blossoms between the three.  Kaiju Girl Caramelise — Crunchyroll (July 2)  Kuroe Akaishi has a secret—whenever she feels intense emotions, she turns into a giant kaiju! As if high school life wasn’t awkward and terrible enough! She does her best to hide her secret… but when she gets a crush on the most popular boy in her class, concealing her emotions becomes even harder.  The Villager of Level 999 — Crunchyroll (July 2) In a world where everyone is assigned an RPG class with levels, one lowly villager realizes that the only way to better his life is to advance. So since the age of two, he’s dedicated his life to killing monsters—and 20 years later, he’s sitting pretty as a level 999. He meets the Demon King’s daughter and suddenly the whole world begins to shift.  The Exiled Heavy Knight Knows How to Game the System — Crunchyroll (July 2) After classing into what seems like a lowly RPG class, a young knight realizes that his world is actually exactly like a video game he played in a previous life. He uses his knowledge of the lore to develop impressive abilities as he continues on his adventures.  I Became a Legend after My 10 Year-Long Last Stand — Crunchyroll (July 3) A legendary hero faces against a powerful Demon King in a very long battle. It lasts so long that when he returns, it’s ten years later. And no one believes that he’s who he says he is—they all think he died in battle! So he starts over, trying to figure out what to do as a low-level adventurer.  Black Torch — Crunchyroll (July 4) Animal-speaking teenager Jiro saves the life of a cat—who turns out to be an immortal spirit named Rago. After being attacked by some of the evil spirits who tried to kill Rago earlier, Jiro dies. But Rago, who feels indebted to Jiro, fuses with the boy. Now with their combined powers, they work together to stop more evil spirits.  Hell Mode — Hidive (July 4) An office worker and avid gamer becomes disillusioned with modern gaming. But he finds a new MMORPG and eagerly selects the hardest setting: Hell Mode. He’s transported into the game as a young boy and now works to develop his power and level up in this new fantasy world.  Skeleton Knight in Another World — Crunchyroll (July 4) (Season 2) A gamer finds himself in a fantasy world in the body of his online avatar—a skeleton knight! He decides that his appearance might be too off-putting, so he hides under the armor. He encounters magical beings and sets off on quests in this new realm.  The Cat and the Dragon — Crunchyroll (July 4) A group of magical cats take in an orphan dragon and raise him as their own. As the dragon grows, he becomes the cats’ sworn protector! He even gets a special cat form.  Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Exceeds Gun Blaze Vengeance — Crunchyroll (July 4) Humanity clings to survival after an alien invasion nearly wiped them out and a group known as EXCEEDS combats the invasive species. The anime follows a pair of sisters on an island nation who must band together to survive and save humanity. It’s the latest installment in the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha series.  The Ogre’s Bride — Crunchyroll (July 5) In a world where humans and monsters live alongside one another, high schooler Yuzu feels neglected by her parents, who instead dote on her beautiful younger sister, the prospective bride of a powerful fox spirit. Yuzu’s whole life changes when she catches the attention of a handsome ogre, who claims her as his bride.  Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. — Prime Video (July 5) In this world, being a magical girl is a popular profession! A struggling college graduate teams up with a magical girl and soon joins a magical girl startup company. The gals work together to exterminate mysterious creatures—all while dealing with customers and the ups and downs of running a business.  Sparks of Tomorrow — Netflix (July 5) Sparks of Tomorrow takes place in an alternate steampunk past. Two unlikely strangers team up to find a mysterious catalog that showcases the potential of electrical power. Since the streets of Kyoto are clogged with smoke, they’re eager to change the world.  The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You — Crunchyroll (July 5) (Season 3) After a string of horrible romantic luck, high schooler Rentaro prays to a god for a girlfriend. The God of Love appears and lets him know that thanks to a clerical error, he actually has 100 soulmates—but if he rejects any of them, they will die. Uh oh! Renato must date all of them simultaneously.  Azur Lane: Slow Ahead! — Crunchyroll (July 5) World War II battleships have a new look… now they’re all cute high school girls! This show sees them attend an academy together.  Goodbye, Lara — Crunchyroll (July 5) A mermaid princess named Lara fell in love with a human prince. Just like in the Little Mermaid fairytale, she made a deal with a witch—if she failed to find true love, she’d disappear into sea foam. 200 years later, Lara is reincarnated with one final chance to find love and reclaim her life.  The World’s Strongest Rearguard — Crunchyroll (July 5) A corporate worker dies and awakens into a fantasy world, where he serves as a guard for an adventuring party full of cute girls. Since he’s basically their tank, taking damage and providing recovery, they all begin to adore him. Wow!  Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation — Crunchyroll (July 5) (Season 3) An underachiever gets a new chance at life when he’s reincarnated into a fantasy world as an infant. Since he retains all his past memories, he can tap into his previous life and embark on new great adventures.  The Insipid Prince’s Furtive Grab for The Throne — Crunchyroll (July 6) A lazy prince hides his secret identity from his people—he’s actually an elite adventurer who wields forbidden magic! He hides his skill, since the rest of his brothers are engaged in a cutthroat succession battle for the throne. If they think he’s a threat, they’ll take him out! But this prince doesn’t want to rule. Instead, he secretly works to get his younger brother on the throne instead.  The Forsaken Saintess and Her Foodie Roadtrip in Another World — Hidive (July 6) An ordinary woman on a camping trip is summoned into a magical world—and the people who summoned her promptly reject her because they think she’s useless. But this gal’s not about to let some interdimensional hijinks ruin her camping trip! She manages to summon a camping van and continues her journey, eventually befriending new companions and trying all the food in this new world.  The Ghost in the Shell  — Prime Video (July 7) The upcoming anime is the latest adaptation of the cyberpunk manga series. It takes place in a futuristic world, where people can use full-body prosthetics to become cyborgs. But that leaves the brain vulnerable to attack. The story follows Major Motoko Kusangi, a cyborg who leads an anti-crime division. Yoroi-Shinden Samurai Troopers — Crunchyroll (July 7)  (Part 2) Demon warriors attack the human world… so five young heroes must rise up and summon legendary armor in order to defeat the demonic threat! This modern series is a sequel to the classic 1980s anime. Victoria of Many Faces — Crunchyroll (July 7) After being betrayed by her boss, a spy named Chloe disguises herself as Victoria, a simple civilian in a new kingdom. She adopts an abandoned girl and befriends a knight. As it turns out, her spy skills might just be useful in her new normal life. I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day — Crunchyroll (July 7) This doomed romance takes place in a secret academy where orphaned girls with magical powers are trained to be living weapons. Sheena’s whole life changes when a mysterious girl covered in blood shows up at the academy. Her name is Mimi and despite the horrors of the world, she refuses to let anything break her cheerful attitude. The two grow closer, even as death reigns around them.  Clevatess II — Crunchyroll (July 8) An evil ruler of Dark Beasts named Clevatess destroys a human kingdom for attacking his lands. But after he unexpectedly adopts an orphaned baby, he decides to resurrect one of the heroes he killed in order to help him raise the child. Will this evil demon king learn to understand humanity?  Tomb Raider King — Crunchyroll (July 8) After nearly dying, a young man journeys to the past, determined to raid all tombs containing mysterious relics so that he can become powerful and get revenge on the people who betrayed him. This anime is based on a Korean web novel, which was also adapted into a webtoon. From Old Country Bumpkin to Master Swordsman — Prime Video (July 8) A middle-aged swordsman spends his time teaching young students in a small village. He’s very surprised when one of his former students asks him to teach the knights of the kingdom. Soon, he learns that many of his former pupils have become incredibly talented heroes, all using the skills that he taught them. Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games Is Tough for Mobs — Crunchyroll (July 8) (Season 2) An office worker is transported into a dating game… it should be fun, right? But he has to compete with a bunch of handsome men for the attention of women. So he decides to not follow the rules of the game… but ends up getting dragged into all kinds of schemes. The Saga of Tanya the Evil — Crunchyroll (July 8) (Season 2) After confronting a being who claims it is god, an atheist man in modern Tokyo is reincarnated into an orphaned girl named Tanya in an alternate Imperial Germany, where World War I has been delayed and the military uses magical powers. Tanya is told by the powerful being that she must either believe in god or die a natural death—or she’ll be sent to hell. Tanya enrolls in the military, hoping to achieve a high rank so she can avoid the battlefield. Mebius Dust — Crunchyroll (July 9) 10 years ago, a mysterious meteorite crashed to earth and several people developed powerful abilities. But they can only live within the presence of the meteorite’s lingering dust, so they’re confined to a small town. Three of those people—teenagers and childhood friends—grow restless, but their lives change when a strange professor taps them for an experiment. Thunder 3 — Netflix (July 9) Three ordinary middle school students stumble into a parallel world. When one of their younger sisters is kidnapped by the world’s aliens, the trio teams up to rescue her!  Hanaori-san Still Wants to Fight in the Next Life — Crunchyroll (July 12) Usually in these shows, a regular person is reincarnated into a fantasy world. But this time, a Demon King finds himself as a loner in the modern world. His mundane life takes a turn when the hero who defeated him shows up as a regular high school girl! He decides to become a teacher and change his ways. Though I Am an Inept Villainess — Crunchyroll (July 12) The unmarried daughters of five nobles gather in the palace and train to become the next generation of queens. Conniving Shu Keigetsu is jealous of beautiful Kou Rerin, so she uses magic to swap their bodies.  The Elusive Samurai — Crunchyroll (July) (Season 2) After his family is massacred, young Hojo Tokiyuki escapes with a Shinto priest. He’s out for revenge now. Thankfully his supernatural ability to flee and hide will come in handy as he fights to stay alive and reclaim his birthright.  Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War — Hulu (July) (Part 4) In a world full of lost souls and spirits, the Soul Society fights dangerous spirits known as Hollows. Teenage Ichigo discovers that he has the rare ability to see spirits and soon gains powers to help the Soul Society. Thousand-Year Blood War is a sequel to the original Bleach anime (itself adapted from the popular manga of the same name). Ichigo and the rest of the Soul Society face off against a dangerous and hidden empire—a conflict centuries in the making.[end-mark] The post Here Are All the Genre TV Premieres Airing in July! appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV movie reviews Camp Is an Enchanting Tale of Grief and Magic There is still true magic to be found in independent film. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on June 29, 2026 Credit: Dark Sky Films Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Dark Sky Films Camp shows us just how important tone is in film. In only her sophomore feature, writer/director Avalon Fast has created a movie that feels like stumbling into a fairy ring. The plot of Camp is whisper thin: by the end of her first year in college, Emily (Zola Grimmer) has gone through two separate tragedies. She isn’t exactly to blame for either of them, but her actions did cause them. She is wracked with grief and blames herself. How do you keep getting up every morning when you’ve lost the person who was your whole life? Her father (who is great) suggests a summer camp up north—it’s designed to help “troubled” kids, and they recruit counselors who have dark things in their pasts specifically to help them. Once Emily gets to camp, she finds a knot of girls who welcome her into an obsessive love that sometimes threatens to hurt her as much as heal her. And, of course, there’s magic. Camp is a beautiful film—and I mean that literally. In a time when films with even a splash of color are lauded, Camp positively glows. It benefits from the natural light and vibrant greens of the forest, but at night it embraces full matte painted and animated glory, with impossibly starry skies and Technicolor sunsets. And director Avalon Fast does this in really interesting ways: In one pivotal interior scene, the sky outside bursts with shooting stars until it almost seems like the room is spinning. Animation is used to punctuate moments of magic or dream logic, blurring the line between realism and surrealism. Credit: Dark Sky Films Even the most mundane moments can slide into liminality. Emily travels to Camp (it’s just called “Camp”) on a train that looks like it clacked in from a different century. She researches Camp on her laptop, then pauses to answer an incoming call on the rotary phone in her sleeper car—a sleeper car that looks more like a small hotel room than the kind of pod you’d book on Amtrak. She falls asleep and wakes in a field, fully dressed, luggage neatly stacked next to her, the entrance to Camp a few yards down a grassy path. The entrance being tall wooden poles holding a sign with “CAMP” carved into it. That’s it—no fences, no parking lot, no security gate. I’m guessing you have to walk between those poles to get in, though. Fast gently pokes holes in her film’s setting. The script hits a couple typical “camp” tropes: the counselors wear absurd ‘70s style shirts, the Jesus-y one leads everyone in singalongs whether they like it or not, the kids are treated as a nuisance, everyone trudges through the day until their charges’ bedtime, when the counselors drink and dance around bonfires with hedonistic abandon. But time dilates and contracts in weird ways. The kids are barely in the movie. The counselors seems to have way more time to party than they possibly could. Most of them never get hungover, no matter what they do. Booze and drugs are always, inexplicably, available, even though Camp seems to be on an endless plateau surrounded by mountains and forests. Credit: Dark Sky Films But I think my favorite choice here is that Camp sometimes hints toward things that would be huge plot points in a more typical coming-of-age film, cliches about bad boys, summer romances, kids causing trouble or being in real danger, and then ignores those well-worn paths to go in other directions entirely. But again, this isn’t a spoof or a send-up. It’s more that it gestures toward the shape we all know this story should take, and then introduces a different shape. It’s in conversation with David Lynch and Jane Schoenbrun and a certain strain of ‘90s culture, without ever going for cheap nostalgia. When Emily arrives at Camp, she meets Dan (Austyn Van de Kamp) and Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith), the de facto leader of Camp and its Guidance Counselor, respectively, both friendly and helpful, and both maybe a little too eager to bring up the Lord. Luckily, Emily also meets her roommate, Rosie (Cherry Moore) a wild girl who is also friendly, but more in the way that she hopes she’s found a new ally in “getting sloppy drunk” after the campers are asleep. She introduces Emily to the rest of the group: Clara (Alice Wordsworth) who reveals herself to be the leader, Nev (Lea Rose Sebastianis), who is performing the role of “the slutty one” with maybe a little too much desperation, and the ironically named Hope (Ella Reece), whose quiet demeanor hides a deep sense of despair. The women all know each other from previous summers—and before that, at least a few of them were the “troubled kids” sent here to heal. Credit: Dark Sky Films As ever, I don’t want to get too into details that will spoil the experience. So let me just say that yes, of course, once the four become five, witchy shit begins to occur. But it’s very slow burn witchy shit, and while the witchy shit is important, it’s the slow burn part that’s key. This is much more a story of female friendship, specifically the type of female friendship where people become devoted to each other almost overnight, and then have to learn how to actually be friends. When do you support your bestie, and when do you tell her to get her shit together? When do you confess your darkest fears, or your deepest regrets—and what happens when you do? Camp understands that sometimes friendship means following the whispering voice into the forest because the other four girls are going to take you somewhere you need to go, even if it’s terrifying. Sometimes these friendships are destructive, but they can nurture you, too. This is a truly special film, and I hope goth kids are watching it at sleepovers for years to come.[end-mark] The post <em>Camp</em> Is an Enchanting Tale of Grief and Magic appeared first on Reactor.