News Ironheart Riri Williams Will See What She’s Made of In Ironheart Marvel’s next Disney+ series is only weeks away. By Molly Templeton | Published on June 9, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share There’s a new trailer for Ironheart, the latest Marvel TV series, but don’t get too excited—it’s only a minute long. Still, it gives us a little more sense of what to expect from Ironheart, the six-episode series about Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), who was introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Riri is back in Chicago, where she meets some new friends (and/or enemies) and works on a new super-suit. “My stepdad used to say the best way to know a thing is to take it apart, put it back together—then you can see what it’s really made of,” she says. Alden Ehrenreich’s character thinks this is good advice in other situations, too: “Break yourself down. See what you’re made of.” Here’s the series synopsis: Set after the events of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Marvel Television’s Ironheart pits technology against magic when Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne)—a young, genius inventor determined to make her mark on the world—returns to her hometown of Chicago. Her unique take on building iron suits is brilliant, but in pursuit of her ambitions, she finds herself wrapped up with the mysterious yet charming Parker Robbins aka “The Hood” (Anthony Ramos). This trailer also introduces another invention of Riri’s—her “greatest creation yet,” which involves brain mapping and seems likely to be the artificial intelligence A.M.I. The Disney+ series is created by Chinaka Hodge (Snowpiercer), executive produced by Ryan Coogler, and directed (three episodes each) by Sam Bailey and Angela Barnes. Lyric Ross, Matthew Elam, Anji White, Manny Montana, Shea Couleé, and Craig Pelton also star. Ironheart has a three-episode premiere June 24th on Disney+.[end-mark] The post Riri Williams Will See What She’s Made of In <i>Ironheart</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Ballerina Ballerina Expands the World of John Wick, and Offers Its Own Delights Hold me closer, tiny assassin. By Leah Schnelbach | Published on June 9, 2025 Credit: Lionsgate Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Lionsgate You can’t spend a decade building John Wick up as this mythological killer and then give us a small woman who can magically do all the same stuff as him. And Ballerina… doesn’t do that. Eve Macarro messes up a lot. Her work is difficult, it takes effort, and she fails—often—along the way, but she always gets back up and stabs again. And unsurprisingly Ana de Armas is fantastic as Eve. Ballerina is basically The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Killer, and de Armas shows us every bit of Eve’s journey and growth, and grounds her character even in a fantastical and over-the-top world. While there is some clunkiness, and I don’t think it reaches the heights of the best of John Wick, I enjoyed it for what it is. It has the wit and inventiveness that have always made the series fun, and it expands the world in an interesting way (one that I wish was explored a little more) and leaves room for the further bloody adventure of Eve Macarro. We meet Eve as a little girl (a winning performance from Victoria Comte), living alone with her dad in a castle by the sea (like you do) pining for her dead sister (also as you do in these kinds of action movies), gazing at her ballerina music box in the most foreshadow-y way possible. This Eden is quickly destroyed with the arrival of Gabriel Byrne’s The Chancellor, and Young Eve goes to live with the Ruska Roma, under the strict eye of The Director (Angelica Huston) and her assistant Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster). We watch her learn to fight and learn to dance, and best of all, in an expanded version of a sequence we saw in the trailers, how to CHEAT. Credit: Lionsgate Because again, the fun thing with this movie is that the writers took a long hard look at John Wick, and asked, “What if a much shorter, smaller, woman tried to do this?” So we see her learn to use her thighs more often than her arms, to use her lower center of gravity against arrogant tall people, and to use close-up blade attacks more often than guns—though I think that last one is more about personal preference. (This also leads to a wonderful scene of Eve collecting all the knives she’s used from the corpses they’re buried in—like I said, this movie’s fun.) We get to see more of the inner workings of the school that we got brief glimpses of in John Wick’s movies before Eve goes off on her own rogue mission to hunt down the men who murdered her father. And here’s another place where it strikes out on its own. Part of the appeal of the first John Wick was that we were watching an elite assassin get dragged back into a life he left behind, but not to avenge murdered father or his murdered wife or his honor—it was, on the surface, because of a murdered puppy, but really because he wanted the right to grieve for his wife in peace. Over the course of the series, that initial desire morphed into him caring for a new dog, to honor his wife’s final wish that he find a positive reason to live, and that in turn became a desire to protect every dog he comes across. Eve’s vengeance tour is a little more standard issue—but it, too, gets complicated. Eve isn’t trained to be an assassin, but to be a kikimora—in the Wickverse, the transformation of a sometimes helpful Slavic household spirit into a protector—sent out to guard the vulnerable against more powerful enemies. The fact that she wants revenge actually is a bug, not a feature. Especially when it’s revealed that there’s a shadowy cult involved. But her initial blood-soaked plans are thrown off course when she finds an extremely vulnerable person only she can protect. Like all the other Wicks, there are some bigger ideas bubbling away under the action. In this case, the film plays with ideas of free will versus fate—not enough to turn a solid action film into a philosophical discourse, but enough to give a little more weight to the proceedings. Is Eve fated to be a killer? Or has she chosen her life with the Ruska Roma over other viable options? Is her instinct to protect the vulnerable hardwired into her, or born of her own tragic childhood? Were the people who murdered her father forced into it by their own fates, or actively choosing to upend her life, and calling it her fate to control her? Again, this isn’t exactly a Tarkovsky movie (though the director does get a shout out that delighted me) but it does have a brain along with all of its bullets and blades. I also want to note that kikimora are often associated with wetness and swamps, and leave wet footprints around the house, which makes it extra fun that Eve weaponizes water in some of her battles. Here’s a thing that will maybe tell you too much about me: I love it when people stab well in films. So many times in action movies you see a person stab someone and just leave the knife in there, but here, in the World of John Wick, Eve essentially perforates people—quick stabs in as many places as she can reach, to maximize blood loss and overwhelm her target. And I loved every second of it. Another thing I loved was the Jackie Chan-esque levels of improvisation that went into Eve’s fights. She uses knives, dishes, beer steins, frying pans, swords, ice skates, a flamethrower, and a TV REMOTE as weapons. Credit: Lionsgate And the film continues the tradition of showing us the exhaustion of this kind of fighting. Eve gets the shit kicked out of her over the course of this movie. (Ballerina also upholds the law of Looney Tunes physics that all the movies do—everyone’s spines should be in pieces, but don’t think about that too hard) But where John Wick tends toward stoic grunts, Eve’s attacks are punctuated by feral roars that underscore how much she’s fueled by rage rather than grief. The performances are all perfectly calibrated. Angelica Huston is almost warm in some of her scenes with Eve, but generally speaking she’s still the same steel-eyed Director. Winston and Charon are delightful as ever, and it was a joy to see Lance Reddick for a moment. The new additions work well—if we get more Eve Macarro centered films, I hope we get to see more of Nogi, cause she’s the BEST. Norman Reedus’ Daniel Pine is a perfect grizzled assassin—but I was also pleased that Pine’s role is fairly brief, rather than taking too much of the spotlight from de Armas. Catalina Sandino Moreno wrings a ton of emotion out of a small-but-pivotal role. And Keanu Reeves is at his monosyllabic Wickian best. But then we come to my one slight complaint about the film. Gabriel Byrne is solid as the shadowy cult leader, but we don’t get enough of The Chancellor. He’s mostly relegated to intoning over the phone, when I think if he had been more central, and a bit more dramatic, it would have upped Ballerina’s tension. Instead the film focuses on the Chancellors cult (we hit a point where Eve is basically fighting an entire town, which has its own joys) but I wanted more of the two of them together, and more on the workings of the cult, to give Eve a more sinister foe. Credit: Lionsgate My concern with this film was that either they’d make Eve a Girlboss Assassin, and try to one-up everything that’s come before in the Wick films to establish her as a strong heroine, or, on the other side of the coin, that they’d surround her with dudes. Instead they’ve given us an action movie as process post. We watch her learn to be a killer, how to play to her strengths and fight through pain and fatigue. There is no point where this feels effortless. The film deepens her training by telling her, and us, that these powers can be used to protect rather than to hurt, but it also allows her the space to reject any sort of stereotypical feminine nurturing roles—she gets to hunt some bastards and make them pay, just like her big Ruska Roma brother did, but there’s also a possibility of life on the other side of all that blood.[end-mark] The post <em>Ballerina</em> Expands the World of John Wick, and Offers Its Own Delights appeared first on Reactor.

News ignyte awards Here Are the Finalists for the 2025 Ignyte Awards Congratulations to everyone! By Molly Templeton | Published on June 9, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share The Ignyte Awards, founded in 2020 by L. D. Lewis and Suzan Palumbo, “seek to celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscapes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts toward inclusivity of the genre.” Each year, an awards committee made up of twenty or more BIPOC+ “avid readers, reviewers, and winners from previous years” selects the finalists for the awards; the categories for books for middle grade and young adult readers also include readers from those age groups. Voting for the winners is open to the public and continues through August 15th at the Ignyte Awards site. This year’s finalists have just been announced; congratulations to all! Outstanding Novel: Adult Blackheart Man – Nalo Hopkinson (Saga Press) Metal From Heaven – August Clarke (Erewhon Books) The Emperor and the Endless Palace – Justinian Huang (Mira) The Sentence – Gautam Bhatia (Westland If) Womb City – Tlotlo Tsamaase (Erewhon Books) Outstanding Novel: Young Adult Heir – Sabaa Tahir (G.P. Putnam’s Sons BYR) Moonstorm – Yoon Ha Lee (Delacorte Press) Sheine Lende – Darcie Little Badger (Levine Querido) Spells to Forget Us – Aislinn Brophy (G.P. Putnam’s Sons BYR) The Poisons We Drink – Bethany Baptiste (Sourcebooks Fire) Outstanding Middle Grade Amari and the Despicable Wonders – B. B. Alston (Storytide) Benny Ramírez and the Nearly Departed – Jose Pable Iriarte (Knopf BYR) Sona and the Golden Beasts – Rajani Larocca (Quill Tree Books) The Creepening of Dogwood House – Eden Royce (Walden Pond Press) The Last Rhee Witch – Jenna Lee-Yun (Disney Hyperion) Outstanding Novella Fractal Karma – Arula Ratnakar (Clarkesworld) Lost Ark Dreaming – Suyi Okungbowa Davies (Tordotcom) The Butcher of the Forest – Premee Mohamed (Tordotcom) The Dragonfly Gambit – A. D. Sui (Neon Hemlock) The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain – Sofia Samatar (Tordotcom) Outstanding Novelette “A Stranger Knocks” – Tananarive Due (Uncanny Magazine) “Joanna’s Bodies” – Eugenia Triantafyllou (Psychopomp) “Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being” – A.W. Prihandita (Clarkesworld) “¡Sangronas! Un Lista De Terror” – M.M. Olivas (Uncanny Magazine) “We Who Will Not Die” – Shingai Njeri Kagunda (Psychopomp) Outstanding Short Story “Agni” – Nibedita Sen (The Sunday Morning Transport) “Parthenogenesis” – Stephen Graham Jones (Reactor) “The Spindle of Necessity” – B. Pladek (Strange Horizons) “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” – Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed Magazine) “Whale Fall” – J.L. Akagi (Strange Horizons) Outstanding Speculative Poetry “After They Blasted Your Home Planet to Shrapnel” – P.H. Low (Haven Speculative) “Hijacked Interiors” – Leena Aboutaleb (Strange Horizons) “I Said | मैंने कहा” – Sourav Roy, Translated By Carol D’souza (Samovar) “Reliving: Post Trauma of the Lekki Tollgate Massacre” – Fasasi Ridwan (Strange Horizons) “The Person Who Reminds the Other Person to Cast The Spell” – Bogi Takács (Strange Horizons) Critics Award Ancillary Review of Books Archita Mittra Blackgaycomicgeek Gabino Iglesias Maya Gittelman Outstanding Fiction Podcast Cast of Wonders Khōréō Magazine Podcastle Pseudopod The Nosleep Podcast Outstanding Artist Alyssa Winans Carly A-F Micaela Alcaino Tran Nguyen Outstanding Comics Team Lunar Boy – Jes and Cin Wibowo (Harper Alley) Lunar New Year Love Story – Gene Luen Yang and Leuyen Pham (First Second) The Worst Ronin – Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Faith Schaffer (Harper Alley) Outstanding Anthology/Collected Works A Sunny Place for Shady People – Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan Mcdowell (Hogarth) Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art – Indrapramit Das (The MIT Press) The Black Girl Survives in this One – Desiree S. Evans (Flatiron Books) Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories – Sarah Coolidge (Two Lines Press) Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction – Sonia Sulaiman (Roseway Publishing) Outstanding Creative Nonfiction Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction – Eugen Bacon (Bloomsbury) “All Insurrections Are Not Created Equal: On Writing Resistance After January 6th” – Micaiah Johnson (Reactor) Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I’d Known – George M. Johnson, Charley Palmer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux BYR) “In Other Wor(L)Ds” – Shrinidhi Harasimhan (Strange Horizons) “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” – Ted Chiang (The New Yorker) The Ember Award For Unsung Contributions to Genre Charlie Jane Anders Indrapramit Das Nisi Shawl Renay Sonia Sulaiman The Community Award For Outstanding Efforts in Service of Inclusion and Equitable Practice in Genre Authors Against Book Bans Samovar Magazine Writing The Other: Workshops Wole Talabi [end-mark] The post Here Are the Finalists for the 2025 Ignyte Awards appeared first on Reactor.

Books Time Travel Five Stories About Time Travel on a Limited Scale No rules, no bureaucracy, just some randos messing around with the past, present, and future. By James Davis Nicoll | Published on June 9, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share The larger the organization, the more likely it needs something like a bureaucracy… which both adds efficiency and harms efficiency. Bureaucracies, alas, are known for their office politics and endless red tape. This leads many to believe that bold innovations are best created and deployed by individuals (or at least small groups). This kind of effort also makes for good science fiction plots. Consider these five works about time travel as practiced on a small scale. The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold (1973) Daniel Eakins expected to inherit his uncle Jim’s vast estate. Instead, Daniel was presented with $6000.00 and a fancy belt. The sting of disappointment faded as soon as Daniel discovered that the fancy belt was a fully functional time machine1. The belt provides Daniel the means to pursue hedonism on an epic scale. Daniel can and does shape history to his taste, eliminating developments that might inconvenience him2, while indulging his very particular sexual inclinations. It would be a perfect life, at least for Daniel… if only he didn’t age. Daniel’s preferred bed partner is another version of Daniel; some of these analogs are women, but most of them are men. Daniel wonders if this means he is gay. Many readers might conclude Daniel is just tremendously self-absorbed. The Wizard Children of Finn by Mary Tannen (1981) To protect Deimne from the Sons of Morna, witch Bovmall transported Deimne to a place and time far from his would-be killers. Specifically, to the estate of eleven-year-old Fiona and eight-year-old Bran McCool’s Uncle Rupert. The trio become chums, which is why when Bovmall returns Deimne to his native Ireland, the siblings accompany him. Deimne has a hero’s path ahead of him. The boy, well versed in heroic narratives, is quite familiar with what destiny demands of him. Fiona and Bran, in contrast, find themselves in the heroic adventurer’s equivalent of the Actor’s Nightmare. An actor who flubs a line might get jeered by the audience. Adventurers who fumble their line could well end up dead. One gets the impression that the heroic adventurers + faithful bard combination is extremely successful… except of course there’s a significant survivorship bias there. None of the bards who died horribly along with their companion ever got to celebrate those histories. Making History by Stephen Fry (1996) Leo Zuckerman is working on a time machine. Leo also has a dreadful secret he struggles to come to terms with. Leo is not a Jew, as he believed. Leo is the son of a Nazi war criminal. Leo and his mother appropriated the names of a dead Jewish mother and her child at the end of World War II. Enter feckless historian Michael Young, led to Leo by misaddressed mail. Michael proposes that Leo use the time machine to come to terms with his past by utterly altering that past. All Michael need do is eliminate Hitler. After all, it’s not as if Hitler had been the beneficiary of existing social forces or that in Hitler’s absence, an even greater monster might take his place. Right? One might expect that Michael would be alarmed to find himself in a new world, one where the Nazis decisively won, Britain was crushed, the Soviet Union was nuked, and the Jews completely exterminated, not to mention horrified by his own role in the matter. Michael is impressively self-centered, so the only thing that motivates him to try to fix what he helped break is his discovery that among the many liberalizations that did not happen in this history was the legalization of homosexuality. This inconveniences bisexual Michael personally; thus, he acts. Broadway Revival by Laura Frankos (2021) Recently bereaved David Greenbaum could not save his husband. Nor is David much interested in therapy. Instead, David opts to assuage his grief by an entirely novel approach: steal a time machine, travel back to 1934, and save George Gershwin. Gershwin is merely the first name on a long laundry list of people David intends to save. Armed with detailed knowledge of the era, not to mention drugs as yet undeveloped in 1934, David establishes himself as an empresario of note, then guides performers from Gershwin to Lorenz Hart away from their historical dooms. The catch? The more successful David is, the less he can depend on his knowledge of the era to guide him. Readers should be aware that David is extremely focused on Broadway and that he views other famous events of 1930s solely in terms of how they affected Broadway3. However, because his focus is extremely specific, he manages to accomplish more of his goals than many other time travelers have been able to do. Macy Murdoch, created by JP Larocque & Jessica Meya (2023) The great-great-great-granddaughter of famed Toronto detective William Murdoch, 21st century teen Macy Murdoch takes pride in her famed ancestor. Thus, should the means to clear Murdock of the crime for which he was framed back in 1910 present itself, Macy would not hesitate to take advantage of it. Enter the mysterious, seemingly abandoned time machine. Macy and her friends commandeer the device and travel back to 1910. Once there, however, it becomes evident that clearing William Murdoch’s name will be considerably more difficult than anticipated. Fans of this series who plan to visit Toronto should be aware that not every building conceals a functioning time machine. After all, we need space to store all the illicit tunnel boring machines, death rays, and rudimentary suborbital rockets Toronto’s thriving communities of visionary geniuses have created over the decades. These are just a few stories about what one person (or a small group) can accomplish, given only determination and a time machine. Perhaps I omitted your favourites. If so, feel free to extol their virtues in comments below.[end-mark] Complete with documentation, so he need not worry about e.g. traveling back to 20,000 BP to find himself solidly embedded in a continental ice sheet. ︎There’s no evidence in Daniel’s preferred histories of Women’s Lib or the Civil Rights Movement, so far as I can see. ︎At least Daniel has done his homework. Harry Harrison’s A Rebel in Time has as its antagonist a man who relies overmuch on a single text, Ordeal by Fire by Fletcher Pratt, a short history that omits any mention of John Brown or why the bad guy might want to avoid Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859. ︎The post Five Stories About Time Travel on a Limited Scale appeared first on Reactor.

News Nebula Awards Here Are the Winners of the 2024 Nebula Awards Congratulations to the winners! By Molly Templeton | Published on June 9, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share The winners of the 60th Nebula Awards, which are voted on by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, were announced this past weekend at the annual Nebula Conference. The awards given this year recognize work published in 2024. Congratulations to the winners! Best Novel WINNER: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell (DAW; Arcadia UK) Sleeping Worlds Have No Memory by Yaroslav Barsukov (CaezikSF & Fantasy) Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom) Asunder by Kerstin Hall (Tordotcom) A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher (Tor; Titan UK) The Book of Love by Kelly Link (Random House; Ad Astra UK) Best Novella WINNER: The Dragonfly Gambit by A. D. Sui (Neon Hemlock) The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed (Tordotcom) The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler (Tordotcom) Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tordotcom) Countess by Suzan Palumbo (ECW) The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar (Tordotcom) Best Novelette WINNER: “Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being” by A. W. Prihandita (Clarkesworld) “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld) “Katya Vasilievna and the Second Drowning of Baba Rechka” by Christine Hanolsy (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) “Another Girl Under the Iron Bell” by Angela Liu (Uncanny) “What Any Dead Thing Wants” by Aimee Ogden (Psychopomp) “Joanna’s Bodies” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Psychopomp) “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny) Best Short Story WINNER: “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld) “The Witch Trap” by Jennifer Hudak (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet) “Five Views of the Planet Tartarus” by Rachael K. Jones (Lightspeed Magazine) “Evan: A Remainder” by Jordan Kurella (Reactor) “The V*mpire” by PH Lee (Reactor) “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read” by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed Magazine) Ray Bradbury Nebula Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation WINNER: Dune: Part Two written by Jon Spaights and Denis Villeneuve (Warner Brothers) KAOS written by Charlie Covell and Georgia Christou (Netflix) Doctor Who: “Dot and Bubble” written by Russell T. Davies (BBC) Wicked written by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox (Universal Pictures) Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5 written by Mike McMahan (Paramount+) I Saw the TV Glow written by Jane Schoenbrun (A24 Films) Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction WINNER: The Young Necromancer’s Guide to Ghosts by Vanessa Ricci-Thode (self-published) Daydreamer by Rob Cameron (Labyrinth Road) Braided by Leah Cypess (Delacorte) Benny Ramírez and the Nearly Departed by José Pablo Iriarte (Knopf) Puzzleheart by Jenn Reese (Henry Holt) Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee, (Delacorte; Solaris UK) Best Game Writing WINNER: A Death in Hyperspace by Stewart C Baker, Phoebe Barton, James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J. Kim, Sara S. Messenger, Naca Rat, Natalia Theodoridou, and Marc Fenn Wolfmoor (Infomancy.net) Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast by Jay Dragon, M Veselak, Mercedes Acosta, and Lillie J. Harris (Possum Creek Games) Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut by Tony Howard-Arias and Abby Howard (Black Tabby Games) Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree by Hidetaka Miyazaki (FromSoftware) The Ghost and the Golem by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Choice of Games) Pacific Drive by Karrie Shao and Paul Dean ( Ironwood Studios) 1000xRESIST by Remy Siu, Pinki Li, and Conor Wylie (Fellow Traveler Games) Restore, Reflect, Retry by Natalia Theodoridou (Choice of Games) SFWA also gives several awards that are not Nebulas. This year’s recipients are: Damon Knight Grand Master AwardNicola Griffith ToastmasterErin Roberts Kate Wilhelm Solstice AwardEugen Bacon Kevin O’Donnell, Jr. Service to SFWA AwardC. J. Lavigne Infinity AwardFrank Herbert [end-mark] The post Here Are the Winners of the 2024 Nebula Awards appeared first on Reactor.