News The Wheel of Time The Laughs Keep on Turning in The Wheel of Time Season 3 Blooper Reel How many pairs of sunglasses does Rosamund Pike have? By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on May 21, 2025 Screenshot: Prime Video Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: Prime Video The third season of The Wheel of Time has had its finale, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more we can watch from the show as we wait to hear whether the series will return for a fourth season. Today, Prime Video put out a blooper reel, which made me laugh out loud more than once. In it, we see Rosamund Pike as Moiraine sporting sunglasses in the Aiel waste (multiple times!) and Sophie Okonedo breaking her performance as an angry Suian Sanche by declaring, “Sorry, I’m just looking at this little sack!” (That sack is a stand-in for a bloody Kate Fleetwod, aka Liandrin, who has her own bloopers in the clip.) There are several other bloopers from other actors as well, including Daniel Henney (aka Lan), Madeline Madden (aka Egwene), Zoë Robins (aka Nynaeve), and Natasha O’Keeffe (aka Lanfear). I won’t spoil them all for you here, except to say that Josha Stradowski has a few when he plays Rand’s ancestors in the fourth episode of the third season. All three seasons of The Wheel of Time are now streaming on Prime Video for you to (re)watch at your convenience. Check out the season three blooper reel below.[end-mark] The post The Laughs Keep on Turning in <i>The Wheel of Time</i> Season 3 Blooper Reel appeared first on Reactor.

Excerpts Fantasy Read an Excerpt From School of Shards by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko The story of Sasha comes to a revelatory climax as she learns to take control of her powers and reshape the world… or destroy it forever. By Sergey and Marina Dyachenko | Published on May 21, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from School of Shards, the final chapter in the Vita Nostra series by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, out from Harper Voyager on June 17th. The Institute of Special Technologies teaches students just one thing: the magic that allows them to become parts of speech, and in doing so, transforming into a specific piece of grammar (a verb, or an adjective, or an article) so they will be able to shape the world around them. As the new provost, though, Sasha is facing an enormous problem: the students in the world she just created, her “world without fear,” are unable to master the curriculum. Whether it’s the magic or the natural order of things, what they need to learn and become—Speech—is the basis of the material world.And if she can’t teach it, Sasha knows that matter will soon cease to exist.To protect the world, Sasha must collect fragments of her former reality. Only three people carry these fragments within themselves: her younger brother, Valya, and the Grigoriev twins, Arthur and Pashka, the sons of her former lover, Yaroslav Grigoriev. Sasha must lure these three to the Institute and make them learn—and understand—at any cost.But she knows how difficult the path is, even more so from the other side of the teacher’s desk. Forced to act ever more ruthlessly, Sasha also notices the faster the world around the Institute changes. It is a vicious circle.And one she must break.To do so, she will have to shape reality again, one in which communication doesn’t break down and Speech once again needs to evolve and grow and flourish.Sasha has already given up so much in pursuit of this dream—often her nightmare—and she might be asked to make one more sacrifice so that the world and Speech might live on. “As you know, Alexandra Igorevna, yet another incoming class is a disaster,” Adele said. “All first years are going to fail their winter finals. The second years are a bit stronger, but half of them are having trouble recovering from deconstruction. How will any of them pass their third-­year final?” Adele had a deep, velvety contralto; she spoke with authority and conviction. The more trouble the department was in, the more elegant were her choices of perfume and makeup. Sasha had no idea where Adele found her bespoke jackets, suits, designer bags, and shoes, but she also didn’t care enough to find out. “They are incapable of making an effort,” Adele continued. “They are wet noodles, not real students. Zero motivation, no matter what song and dance we’re performing in front of them, no matter how hard we’re trying to engage them.” “They are showing quite a bit of potential in Phys Ed,” Dima Dimych said. He was perched on the desk, one leg crossed over the other. “Incidentally, I’d like to bring up the pool question again.” Sasha looked at him without saying a word, and Dima immediately backpedaled. “I mean, I know it’s not the most convenient time, but we talked about it at the end of last semester…” Still silent, Sasha lit another cigarette. Dima wrinkled his nose and stopped speaking; a devoted athlete, he despised smoking. Adele, unfazed, spoke again. “The issue isn’t just a matter of passing, but who is passing. The grammatical composition is unbalanced. There is a dramatic shortage of verbs. And most of the verbs we do have are in the conditional mood. Very few are in an indicative mood. And we do not have a single imperative one.” “To put it bluntly, the Great Speech is degenerating, and the grammatical structure is declining,” Portnov said quietly. Unlike the others, he’d remained unchanged, and even his jeans, sweater, and glasses were the same as Sasha remembered from her own first year at Torpa. It made it all the more painful to see how much Portnov was changing from the inside. He held it together—­he resisted the simplification of the Great Speech—but now and then he would get stuck like a second year during a routine exercise. Watching him, Sasha knew: every time he struggled, yet another block of meanings would break off, disintegrating into incoherent lowing, and eventually ceasing to exist. And so would Portnov himself. Buy the Book School of Shards Marina and Sergey Dyachenko Buy Book School of Shards Marina and Sergey Dyachenko Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget “We will have to sift and eliminate,” Adele said, knocking on the desk as if calling to order. “Let us keep one group, even if it’s only ten people, but the ten capable of mastering the curriculum.” “They won’t make it,” Sasha said softly. A smoke ring glimmered dangerously, folding into a flat spiral with a dark cloud in its center. Sasha flapped her hand, forcing the emerging projection to disperse. The room fell silent. The basement had no windows, so no noise came from Sacco and Vanzetti Street—­no birds singing, no passing cars. The only sound heard was the humming of an old air-­conditioning unit. “This world that I created has a built-­in defect,” Sasha said. She winced at the inexact and false nature of human words, so inefficient in describing the processes of true Speech. “Yes, this world exists, and it’s not that bad—­some people enjoy it. It even has some ability to develop. But Speech cannot be fooled.” She looked at Portnov. “Oleg Borisovich is right: all of us can see what’s happening with the grammatical structure.” “Shocking,” Dima said, batting his eyelashes. “We will recruit a new class,” Sasha said, putting out her cigarette. “Dmitry Dmitrievich, you will have to give up your current champions, because the recruiting efforts will take place last summer, three months ago.” “We’re just running in circles,” Portnov said, wiping his glasses with the hem of his sweater. “Our students are the product of their reality; you simply don’t have anyone to choose from. Another round of recruiting won’t solve anything.” “It will if I execute a grammatical reform,” Sasha said. Adele stared at Sasha like at a shiny shop window. Dima Dimych rocked back and nearly fell. Portnov narrowed his eyes. “Are you planning to bring back prerevolutionary orthography?” I am so lucky to have Portnov at my side, Sasha thought. Even as tired, wounded, and disintegrating from the inside as he is right now. Dima swung his feet in their white sneakers, seemingly hypnotized by the bright yellow shoelaces. “Dmitry Dmitrievich, please sit up properly,” Sasha said. “You’re attending a department meeting, not hanging out at a street corner.” “The local athletic society has a nice pool,” he said, reluctantly moving to a chair. “We can get hours for the students, and we won’t even need to pay—­it’s just paperwork.” “And what sort of a reform are you proposing?” Portnov cut in, returning his glasses to the bridge of his nose. “I am not proposing anything,” Sasha said. “This is my will.” At half past midnight, she ran out of cigarettes. Portnov showed up at twenty to one with a new pack. “You smoke too much,” he said disapprovingly, as he lit up his own cigarette with Sasha’s lighter. “At least that’s something I excel at,” Sasha said. Her basement office had no windows either. Sasha could have easily opened a new window onto Sacco and Vanzetti, or Montmartre, or into space, but she didn’t bother. What she needed was nowhere to be found. “This new reform of yours is quite an interesting way of getting things done,” Portnov said, straddling a chair. “You are an assassin of reality. Everything is happening the way you wanted.” “No,” Sasha said. “The world, as you see it, is not real. And the way you imagine—­it doesn’t even come close.” He nodded appreciatively, smirking at the memory of the very first Specialty lecture for Group A and the first year named Alexandra Samokhina standing by the blackboard and staring into the darkness behind her blindfold. Today, she paid him back. “The world exists the way you created it, Samokhina. Once a book reaches its audience, it’s too late to rewrite it.” “Thank you for the cigarettes,” Sasha said by way of dismissal. “I’ll get you another pack, I promise.” From School of Shards by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko. Copyright © 2025 by Sergey Dyachenko and Marina Shyrshova-Dyachenko. English translation copyright © 2025 by Julia Meitov Hersey. Reprinted with the permission of Harper Voyager, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. The post Read an Excerpt From <i>School of Shards</i> by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko appeared first on Reactor.

Books Reading the Weird Worst Friends Forever: Eugenia Triantafyllou’s “Joanna’s Bodies” Never trust a flea market spell book… By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on May 21, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Eugenia Triantafyllou’s “Joanna’s Bodies,” first published in July 2024 in Psychopomp. Spoilers ahead—but go read! Eleni and Joanna have been best friends since preschool, and it looks like they’ll be best friends forever. Really forever. Not even Joanna’s deaths have separated them, and Joanna’s died ten times in the four years since Eleni first resurrected her. Joanna isn’t particularly accident-prone. It’s just that the bodies into which Eleni’s spellwork transfers Joanna’s soul keep rejecting her after a few months. Eleni doesn’t know whether this is her fault, witch’s error, or whether it’s a spell feature. She does know that she’s getting profoundly sick of the process. The movie Jennifer’s Body used to be her favorite. Now she prefers Jurassic Park as a less on-the-nose fantasy about resurrection. Nevertheless, every time one of Joanna’s surrogate-corpuses begins exuding black mucosal rot, Eleni has the next host lined up. She owes Joanna some form of life, considering she’s the one who killed her the first time. Or so Joanna never fails to remind her. Eleni doesn’t rob bodies for her BFF. She borrows them. Rents them for a couple seasons. When the eviction notice comes, she makes Joanna leave before she kills or seriously damages her temporary dwelling. She also picks safe “rental units,” older women living independently and thus more easily isolated from family and friends. Joanna chafes at the old bodies. She died at seventeen, on the verge of new freedom and fun! She wants bodies her own age! Understandable, but Eleni has to protect them both from intervention, however well-meant. * * * From the first, Eleni and Joanna were kindred spirits in quirky imagination. When Eleni was ten, her father gone, her mother working nights, she’d get so spooked she’d call Joanna for comfort. Nightly calls became their habit. At an Athens flea market, they bought ostensible spellbooks and read them to each other at bedtime. Eventually they tired of “witchy” things. In high school, they began to challenge each other in new ways: who would be first to leave the other behind? Eleni went the goth/emo route, dressing in black and adopting a don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. Joanna started dressing up for school and joined the volleyball team. But at the end of the day, they usually ended up on the phone together. Then Eleni’s mom entered her in a cram school. The school became a Joanna-free-zone where Eleni did meet new people. This change led to Joanna’s first death. One night when Joanna called Eleni’s house, she wasn’t home—she was hanging with her new friends. Joanna biked out to find her, enraged, and got hit by a truck. Eleni sank into grief and guilt. Her new friends faded away. Alone, she pored over the spellbooks she and Joanna studied in happier days. She finds a spell for summoning souls; it calls for intense visualization of the dead, and the summoner’s blood. Eleni smeared hers on her mirror, supposing Joanna might appear in it. But souls can’t inhabit inanimate objects, whereas living flesh absorbs them like a sponge absorbs water. The living flesh into which Joanna’s soul bounced was Eleni’s mother’s. She possessed it. A few months later, she nearly destroyed it. Eleni got Joanna to release her mom by promising to re-embody her. But has Eleni’s mom ever fully recovered? Eleni ran before she could find out. She’s kept running. She, and Joanna’s various incarnations. Joanna has recently departed from a woman named Maria, in whose apartment they’ve been living. Eleni has two weeks to resummon Joanna. She’s already picked out an older woman named Elisavet. Eleni always was a momma’s girl, Joanna often taunts, saying it’s the real reason Eleni selects old ladies. Eleni goes to the coffee shop where Elisavet works as cashier. By now she’s got her spell down. She rubs her blood onto a coin, which she’ll give to Elisavet as payment for her drink. Then she’ll sit and visualize Joanna into the new body. It’s always worked before. This time Elisavet-turned-Joanna never signals that the magic’s done. Instead she nervously retreats from the counter, leaving a young pink-haired girl in charge. Later, as Eleni dithers outside, the pink-haired girl approaches—possessed by Joanna! Joanna has been learning, and managed to take the young body instead of Eleni’s pick. She later proves adept at convincing the pink-haired Adriana’s friends that she’s Adriana. At last she admits that when she possesses a person, that person lingers adrift in her own body. Her thoughts tangle up with Joanna’s, so that when Joanna leaves, she tears pieces of the owner’s essential mind out with her. Eleni’s never had the nerve to check up on her mom. Now she phones, only to have mom call her Joanna, who’s become a scar in her mind. When Joanna wears out Adriana’s body, Eleni promises she’ll get her another young body. She knows that she’ll always call her back; she can’t help it. Joanna has been the one constant in her life. Joanna departs Adriana. Two weeks later, Eleni goes into the mountains north of Athens. She thinks of summoning Joanna into a bird she lures with sunflower seeds, but even a bird’s soul has value. She tosses away her bloodied coin and begins her visualization. Joanna first died because she feared Eleni was leaving her. Eleni ensures that will never happen by letting Joanna possess her body. Now Joanna’s safe, because Eleni is the one host who won’t fight her. For herself, there’s only floating in what was hers, already detached from the world. Joanna feels sad, even abandoned, when she recognizes her latest host. Now no one will call her back if she ever returns to the gray-sea void that is Death’s true country. She shoulders Eleni’s backpack and hits the road. Libronomicon: Never trust a flea market spellbook. Weirdbuilding: This week’s references are cinematic, and largely focused on cult classic Jennifer’s Body. It used to be Eleni’s favorite film; for some reason it’s still Joanna’s. Madness Takes Its Toll: Eleni’s convinced that Joanna’s possession has left her mother deeply damaged, unable to tell her and her friend apart—but isn’t willing to learn the details. Anne’s Commentary “Joanna’s Bodies” triggered an obscure memory for me. You all remember Casey Kasem, right? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? I guess Ferris is taking the day off, because surely he’d remember Kasem, whose weekly radio show, American Top 40, ran with him as host from 1970 to 1988, and again from 1998 to 2004. In addition to counting down hits, Kasem ran a segment called “Long-Distance Dedications.” Listeners could send in letters asking to dedicate a song to that special someone from their past, hoping that someone might hear it too. I only remember one of these dedications, probably because it struck me as crazily inappropriate. A woman wrote about a (high school? college?) friend (female) with whom she’d shared warm and fuzzy BFF times. So far, so normal for the feature. But then Kasem revealed the song she’d requested. Which was: John Mellencamp’s “Hurts So Good.” What?! Hadn’t the dedicator ever listened to the lyrics? Like, “Hurts so good/Come on, baby, make it hurt so good/Sometimes love don’t feel like it should/You make it hurt so good.” Also, the plea to “Sink your teeth right through my bones, baby.” I was a naive young thing back then, unscarred by knowledge either personal or secondhand about how destructive yet seductive some close relationships could be. Still. “Hurts So Good” would have fit right into the soundtrack of Eleni and Joanna’s fave movie, Jennifer’s Body, which includes “Kiss with a Fist,” “Chew Me Up and Spit Me Out,” and “Toxic Valentine.” I haven’t seen Jennifer’s Body, but from IMDb’s synopsis I can see the parallels between its BFFs and Triantafyllou’s. Both pairs have been friends since childhood and can’t quite quit one another in high school even though one is dorky/gothy, the other an alpha girl. Homoerotic elements are implied in the story, overt in the movie. Messing around with the occult when you don’t really have a clue, never a good idea. Movie Jennifer is more victim than perpetrator, though, because it’s neither herself nor BFF Needy who perform the problematic magic; a rock band seeking Satanic sponsorship sacrifices Jennifer as a virgin. Only she’s not a virgin and ends up revivified by a succubus with a taste for high school boys. Eleni might have learned from Jennifer’s fate, but hey, J’s B is just a horror show. Playacting, like the amusement she and Joanna get out of their flea market grimoires. When Eleni returns to the set-aside spellbooks, it’s out of grief and guilt over Joanna’s death, and it’s she whose experiments are earnest enough to set eldritch consequences in motion. Jennifer mistreats and dominates Needy even before her transformation. There’s mutual vying between Eleni and Joanna for top spot in their relationship; though Joanna is the more naturally dominant, by high school both express ambivalence about their interdependence by playing at separating. Joanna scores higher at this game until Eleni’s transfer to cram school expands her social circle. Eleni only triumphs briefly. Ironically, Joanna admits her need by being so blindsided by Eleni’s “defection” that she gets herself killed. The spellbook Eleni uses to summon Joanna evidently assumes the would-be magician has read enough “beginner’s manuals” to know what she’s getting into, and that the final price of the spell won’t be just a little blood on a coin but the essential mind of the host selected. She believes that if she can get Joanna out of her “rented” body before it dies, damage to the rightful owner can be minimal. When Joanna reveals that she necessarily tears out pieces of every host on leaving, Eleni’s horrified. She contacts the first accidental host, her own mother, and confirms Joanna’s claim: Mom isn’t all there. She’s diminished by the spiritual space Joanna has left emptied. This means that from revivification to revivification, Joanna leaves behind a trail of semi-corpses. No, Eleni is leaving the trail, because she instigates each jump. She’s the summoner, the enabler. Joanna is like Jennifer in the movie: She can’t halt in her monstrous course. Someone else must stop her. Needy in the movie stops Jennifer. Eleni can’t stop Joanna by refusing to resummon her. She can never leave Joanna behind in the gray drift of the afterlife. Not because the spell compels her to resummon. Not because Joanna compels her to, but because the choices Eleni made all through Joanna’s life have linked them together, inseparable. Eleni has always chosen to answer the phone when Joanna called. Always, except that one disastrous time. Now she must choose either to keep Joanna her “constant” by destroying endless hosts, or to keep her by—truly becoming Joanna’s constant. BFFs, inseparable, promises kept. Yet Joanna-in-Eleni feels sad, abandoned. Yet Eleni feels cut off from the world, trapped in herself. Maybe it takes time for host and hosted’s thoughts to “tangle,” uniting them in the consummation they so devoutly wished. Or maybe there must always be an alpha. The uncertain magic finalized, one can only pick up the backpack and walk on. Ruthanna’s Commentary Before I get into this post, my caveat is that I’ve never watched Jennifer’s Body, and my knowledge of it comes entirely from Wikipedia. I was drawn to “Joanna’s Bodies” anyway because the Wizards Versus Lesbians summary made me think of older tropes that Jennifer’s Body was also presumably playing with, and then I went “Oooooh” and had to read it. It’s the homoerotic best friends, the ones who have dangerous occult dealings instead of sex. The domineering one, and the one who can’t resist their demands. The one who seems to be in charge, and the one who actually has—but never uses—the power to stop the cycle. Lovecraft’s “The Hound” is a prototypical example: partners in competitive goth degeneracy, robbing the graves of grave-robbers. But Randolph Carter also starts out with such a friend. Herbert West is the domineering asshole friend. The pattern builds on the definitely-not-gay intensity of romantic poets (the original goths) and continues through later authors—with occasional actually-gay variations. But the gender rarely varies: these are usually no-homo-till-death male partners, obsessive and obsessed, engaging in unnatural activities together. A thing that girls totally never do. Especially not in high school. So I love Triantafyllou fitting this kind of unequal, intense friendship to such an appropriate age and setting. I love the pace of the disaster, slowed over years to let Eleni really appreciate the nature of the trap. I love the harm being less gory, more deniable to a point. I love the acknowledgment that people usually grow out of these things—that in the absence of tragedy and spellbook, both girls might have managed the awful process of disentanglement, of finding friends who would accept more agency from Eleni and demand more compromise from Joanna. Twenty years later they might have been ordinary, healthy people who thought of one another, occasionally, with an odd frisson of wistful discomfort. Instead they’re frozen in the last stages of their friendship, resentment and codependence and desperation tangled together, in the closed-off just-the-two-of-them world that neither entirely wanted any more. There’s a particular horror to being supernaturally stuck in high school just as you were about to escape. Sometimes the devil you know really is worse. And Eleni could, in fact, still get away. It’s too late for Joanna, dead and utterly, horrifically dependent on her much-abused best friend for a continuing half-life. She never had the chance to grow up, and if she hadn’t already hated Eleni’s potential to move on from their friendship, she could hardly help despising it now. Someone who missed a nightly call just might, at some point, fail to summon your spirit into an innocent host, and after that there’s nothing but the gray afterlife. Eleni, though… she could cut the cord of that dependence. She’d feel miserably guilty, but what else is new? I don’t know if she could, though. Another Eleni, one who’d learned through a few weeks hanging out with new friends that there really was a world beyond Joanna—maybe. One who hadn’t had that growth cut off by having it trigger her old friend’s death. One who hadn’t learned how harshly independence can be punished. This Eleni can only let Joanna die by destroying herself, and so avoiding the accusation of abandonment. Instead they’re together forever, in the hell of their own making. Next week, join us for Chapters 15-21 of The Night Guest, in which we’re sure that stain will totally turn out to be lipstick and not blood.[end-mark] The post Worst Friends Forever: Eugenia Triantafyllou’s “Joanna’s Bodies” appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: Living and Dying in the World We Create Miyazaki’s classic celebrates scientific curiosity as a heroic act. By Kali Wallace | Published on May 21, 2025 Credit: Topcraft/Studio Ghibli Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Topcraft/Studio Ghibli Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, based upon his manga of the same name. Starring Sumi Shimamoto, Gorō Naya, Yōji Matsuda, and Yoshiko Sakakibara in the original Japanese cast, and Alison Lohman, Patrick Stewart, Shia LaBeouf, and Uma Thurman in the 2005 English cast. Let’s get this out of the way: Hayao Miyazaki is one of the most written-about filmmakers in the world. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve researched a lot of filmmakers for this column, and there are very few, even among the most revered auteurs, who have as many books, essays, scholarly articles, and documentaries about them and their work. On top of that, Miyazaki himself has spent decades talking freely and frequently about his life and work; he has never been shy about sharing his thoughts about anything from his own art to world politics and everything in between. On the one hand, that’s great, because there is an answer out there for every single question anybody might have. On the other hand, there is nothing that I can say here that hasn’t been said one million times before, and the sum of what has been said is far more than I can sift through in the week or so I have to write this piece. So please forgive me if I awkwardly try to land in the center of an enormous Venn diagram where “things of interest to animation fans” and “things of interest to cinephiles” and “things of interest to sci fi fans” all overlap. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is pretty interesting for how it sits at the intersection of those realms of art and entertainment. It’s a Japanese animated film from the 1980s deeply inspired by folklore, real-world events, and American and English sci fi and fantasy of the ’60s and ’70s. It led to the founding of Studio Ghibli, whose films have so thoroughly influenced the art and business of animation that their impact is apparent everywhere you look. It’s an environmental fable with elements of atomic-era sci fi, and it’s also a story about a princess saving the day. There are giant bugs; they’re kind of psychic. It makes everybody who watches it wish they could fly. But for all of that, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind actually has a pretty mundane origin story. Unlike many of the movies we’ve watched, it wasn’t a flashy debut or a passion project or a genre-bending experiment, and it certainly wasn’t the world’s introduction to a hot young auteur filmmaker. I like that about it. I like that a movie that would have such a cascading effect on animated cinema can come about just because a longtime industry veteran was doing his job really well. Hayao Miyazaki began writing the manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in 1981. He was forty years old and had been in the animation industry for nearly half of his life. He had started in 1963, when he went to work at Toei Animation as an inbetween artist, or one of the animators who would illustrate frames to provide the transition between the main artist’s primary frames. As I mentioned in the article about Soviet animation, he almost gave up as soon as he started; the way he tells it, it was a screening of Lev Atamanov’s The Snow Queen (1957) that convinced him to stick with it. Miyazaki spent the next twenty years or so working in the industry: advancing from inbetweening to key animation and storyboarding, spearheading labor negotiations, seeking out more creative opportunities, writing tie-ins as well as original manga, contributing to dozens of projects in both film and television animation. His first work as a director came in 1971, after he left Toei to work at Tokyo Movie. He directed several episodes of the anime series Lupin III, or Lupin the 3rd Part I. (The “Part I” was added later when more parts came along.) If you’re an anime and manga fan, you already know about the Lupin III franchise; if you’re not, it might be hard to appreciate just how enduringly popular it is. It’s a long-running series of stories about a gentleman thief who gets into all manner of criminal shenanigans; the first manga was published in 1967 and the franchise has been going strong ever since. That included the 1979 film Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, which was the first feature film Miyazaki wrote and directed. I haven’t seen The Castle of Cagliostro—feel free to chime in if you have. Although the film was well-received by critics, it wasn’t very successful upon release. It has gained a cult following in the decades since its release, although that’s mostly on account of it being Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature film. Even though it wasn’t successful, The Castle of Cagliostro caught the eye of Toshio Suzuki, editor of the manga magazine Animage. Suzuki approached Miyazaki about writing something for Animage, and Miyazaki began Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The manga became very popular, and Suzuki encouraged Miyazaki to make an animated adaptation, even though that hadn’t been part of the publishing agreement. Miyazaki agreed, provided he was allowed to direct it. Animage’s parent company, Tokuma Shoten, was a magazine publisher, not an animation studio, so Miyazaki and producer Isao Takahata had to find a studio to work with. They chose a small studio called Topcraft. You’ve seen their work before, even if you don’t recognize the name: Topcraft worked on several Rankin/Bass films, including The Hobbit (1977), The Return of the King (1980), and The Last Unicorn (1982). Topcraft was already struggling financially by the time Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind came along, and in 1985 Miyazaki, Takahata, and Suzuki acquired the studio and folded it into the newly formed Studio Ghibli. But that came later. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was made before the founding of Studio Ghibli, and the studio probably wouldn’t exist if the film hadn’t been successful. It has been retroactively slotted into the Ghibli library, which is why a lot of people refer to it as a Ghibli movie, even though it technically isn’t. I know that’s the sort of thing only pedants really care about, but anime fans are among the world’s most enthusiastic pedants, so maybe I should have called it “the first Ghibli movie” just to provide enrichment for commenters. The Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga has a total of 59 chapters and was published sporadically between 1982 and 1994. The movie was made pretty early in the process, when there were only 16 chapters. I haven’t read it, but from what I understand the story we see in the film is, for obvious reasons, a much shorter and more focused tale than the sprawling, philosophical graphic novel. Much has been written over the years about the many inspirations behind both the manga and film. Those inspirations include Frank Herbert’s Dune, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, and Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse, a book I am thinking I need to read since it keeps making unexpected appearances in things I write about. Another facet of the idea came from the industrial pollution of Minamata Bay and subsequent Minamata disease, which was caused by a petrochemical company dumping tons of mercury and mercury compounds into a harbor in a seaside town on Japan’s Kyūshū island. We can see the threads of this real-world inspiration in the sickness that afflicts Nausicaä’s father, and in her desperate questions about who could have polluted the world so badly that nature would change itself in order to adapt. One more source of inspiration worth mentioning is the Japanese folktale The Lady Who Loved Insects, which is about—you guessed it—a lady who loves insects. The woman in the folktale is an eccentric who defies the expectations of Heian-era womanhood by caring more about making up little poems about her caterpillar friends than she does about being beautiful and demure. The story exists only as an incomplete fragment of unknown authorship, but most scholars seem to think it was originally meant as a cautionary tale against such unladylike behavior. But what’s meant as a warning in the 12th century can be wholly aspirational in the 20th century, and that’s how Nausicaä’s character is presented. That’s also what I love most about this movie. Don’t get me wrong; I’m very fond of the whole movie. The art is beautiful in spite of having been animated on a very brisk timeline (as was and still is normal in the Japanese animation industry). The music by Joe Hisaishi is delightful in a very ’80s anime epic kind of way. That was the first time Hisaishi and Miyazaki worked together, and Hisaishi would go on to score all of Miyazaki’s films from that point forward. The story may be simplified from the manga, but it’s still refreshingly complex for a family-friendly animated feature film. It contains all the elements that would become hallmarks of Miyazaki’s films: the earnest naturalism, the determined anti-war stance, the lived-in sense of place and worldbuilding. This movie also has one of my favorite horrifying atomic bomb analogues in sci fi: the Giant Warriors. The film doesn’t go into much detail about them; all we know is that they were created to be more destructive than anything else, they nearly destroyed the world in the Seven Days of Fire, and it’s a bad idea to use them again, because it is always a bad idea to use a weapon that previously destroyed the world just because you think you can control the destruction this time. The warriors are eerie and terrifying—I love the glimpses we get of their skeletal remains in the wilderness—but the best part is the way the revived warrior horribly melts when the Tolmekians try to deploy it. It’s grotesque and ugly in the worst way, strongly implying the ravages of atomic weaponry while looking like an absurd caricature of a human. Fun fact for anime fans: The warrior attack sequence was animated by Hideaki Anno, who would later go on to co-found the studio Gainax, where he would create and direct a little show called Neon Genesis Evangelion. All of that is great, but what I really love about this film is that Nausicaä saves the world with scientific curiosity. Her heroic act is one that is woven into the entire film, from the very first moment she appears on screen. She wants to study and understand the world. She wants to know why her father is sick, why the Sea of Corruption exists, why the Ohmu are so protective of it, why the world outside of her safe valley works the way it does. (Note: The Sea of Corruption is called the Toxic Jungle in the 2005 English dub. I don’t know why. The Japanese name is 腐海, which translates to Sea of Decay. What’s important is that all of these names would make excellent titles for angry, anthemic, environmental-themed metal albums.) Maybe it’s because I find Nausicaä’s curiosity so very relatable. I don’t normally want or need fiction protagonists to be relatable in any particular way, but I did spend many years of my life studying the natural sciences. It’s very difficult for me to understand how people can not be curious about the way the natural world works. So I get it. I get why Nausicaä looks at a post-cataclysm world that everybody else has accepted as inevitable and thinks there is more to it. Everybody agrees the Earth is poisoned and the Sea of Corruption is spreading and the insects are trying to overtake the world. But Nausicaä wants to explore precisely what that means. Where is the poison? Is it in the soil or water or plants or animals? What is making the Sea of Corruption spread? Why do the insects react to stimuli the way they do? What happens when those stimuli change? What would it look like to have a mutually beneficial relationship with the inhospitable wilderness rather than an antagonistic one? It’s not enough to wonder and speculate; she conducts experiments herself, in secret, exploring possibilities she knows others won’t understand. My personal appreciation for sci fi that treats scientific curiosity as a heroic act is one thing, but I think my reaction to rewatching this movie now, in the year of our unending miseries 2025, goes beyond that. It is a distressing truth of modern life that pro-environmental and anti-war stories only ever get more relevant and more urgent. A feeling of urgency doesn’t really sit well with this movie—or any Miyazaki movie, as a sense of timelessness is part of the style—but it’s there nonetheless, rearing its head this time with wearying predictability every time I read an article about politicians attacking scientific research, or college students outsourcing their ability to think to ChatGPT, or nations insisting that this time setting the world on fire is going to cleanse it properly. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a beautiful movie with a lot of very smart things to say about human curiosity and aggression, about the endless adaptability of nature, and most of all about how to view ourselves as an active, intrinsic part of the natural world rather than a force separate from it. Those ideas have only grown in importance in the past forty-one years. I wish we didn’t need so very badly to be reminded of them, but I guess I’m glad we have films like this ready to serve as a reminder to anybody willing to listen. What do you think of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind? I didn’t get into the tale of the infamous first English dub released as Warriors of the Wind (1985), which was so bad it made Miyazaki swear off allowing Americans to edit his films ever again, but if anybody has seen it and cares to share their thoughts, I would love to read them. Same goes for anybody who has read the whole manga! Next week: It’s about cute bunnies, right? Everybody likes stories about cute bunnies. Watch Watership Down on Max, Criterion, Amazon, and more.[end-mark] The post <i>Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind</i>: Living and Dying in the World We Create appeared first on Reactor.

Books Five Books Five SFF Works About Meddling, Mystery-Solving Kids Darn kids, always battling ghosts and exposing conspiracies and making a mess… By James Davis Nicoll | Published on May 21, 2025 Art by Simon Stålenhag Comment 0 Share New Share Art by Simon Stålenhag Masterminds, villains, cults, realtors, and other dimensional beings inimical to the very fabric of reality know that their dastardly schemes face one true foe: Kids. Governments can be suborned, police paid off, authority figures easily distracted. Kids, on the other hand, can be annoyingly perceptive, don’t know enough to dismiss the evidence of their own eyes, and lack the well-developed sense of self-preservation that would keep them from poking into dangerous matters. You can prep all you like, but the moment you see a van with four nosy teenagers and their talking dog, a kid proudly proclaiming himself the finest detective in all of Lillköping, or even a group of bored D&D nerds, fold your tent immediately and leave town. Pay heed to these five instructive works. Rocketship Galileo by Robert A. Heinlein (1947) Invited by Don Cargraves to help kit-bash an atomic rocket from surplus parts before heading off to the Moon, all-American teens Ross Jenkins, Art Mueller, and Maurice Abrams could hardly say no. Parental qualms are easily assuaged and bulk orders of thorium are surprisingly affordable. Despite the project’ curiously high incidence of accidents, mishaps, and overt sabotage, the quartet departs Moonward. The quartet is prepared for hazards such as space debris, vacuum, and radiation. That someone has beaten the four to the Moon; that that someone is a vast, right-wing conspiracy whose plan for global domination relies on their secret moonbase; that that someone is aware of Don and kids, and has been working hard to prevent them from discovering the illicit moonbase—and plans to kill the four of them to keep the base secret—it’s all a surprise. As is the fate of the Moon Nazis once they get Don, Ross, Art, and Maurice’s full and complete attention. As I once said in a review, “if it’s wrong for an atomic scientist and three expendable teens to head to the Moon in a homemade rocket to shoot Space Nazis, then I don’t want to be right.” Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero (2017) Exposing the Sleepy Lake Monster as would-be burglar Thomas Wickley in a rubber mask was the triumphant final case of the Blyton Summer Detective Club. Too bad that the teen detectives—Peter, Kerri, Andy, Nate, and their dog Sean—followed their successful teen detecting careers with decidedly less than successful adult lives1. They can at least comfort themselves with the knowledge that, as teens, they confounded many a miscreant. Thirteen years later, the surviving members of the Blyton Summer Detective Club discover that their final triumph was no triumph at all. In fact, they got it horribly wrong. No choice, therefore, but for the former teens to dust off their detective skills, return to Blyton, and confront the villain they overlooked. Or die trying. Yes, technically the club members no longer qualify as kids, but the plot is shaped by what they did back when they were kids. This either reflects how age cannot prevent us from being young at heart or (more likely) that it is impossible to escape the past. I could not resist the book’s title. Spirit Hunters by Ellen Oh (2018) The Grady House has a reliable life cycle. (Well, cycle—not so much the “life” part.) Would-be homeowners focus on its affordability, not its dire reputation. Once resident, each new set of owners discovers for themselves why the Grady House has gained that dire reputation. The owners flee, and the house is on the market once more. Lather, rinse, repeat. Enter Harper Raine and her family. A mixed blessing for the ghost who calls Grady House home. Both Harper and brother Michael are sensitive to the occult. Michael is the perfect candidate for possession, but Raine could end the ghost’s threat… provided that Raine masters certain abilities about which she has been kept in the dark. A considerable part of the plot is set in motion by Raine’s parents, whose well-meaning efforts to protect Raine from knowledge that would only upset her have denied Raine vital, need-to-know, information. I am sure there’s no general lesson to be learned. The Dark We Know by Wen-Yi Lee (2024) Following the tragic deaths of two of her closest friends, Isa Chant fled backwater mining town Slater for art school. A meager inheritance tempts the cash-starved student back for her father’s funeral. Isa would have been better off staying at school. Slater is plagued by tragedy. Isa’s friends were only two of the many young people who died or vanished under mysterious circumstances. When she was sixteen, fleeing Slater was the best option Isa had. Now that she is a world-weary eighteen-year-old, Isa may be Slater’s best hope to discover the cause of the deaths and put an end to it. Or perhaps it may put an end to Isa. There are some terrible people in Slater but that plays less of a role in the plot than one might expect. The major players, protagonists and antagonist alike, pursue what they believe is the greater good. It’s just that they have a fundamental disagreement about what constitutes the greater good. Tales from the Loop by Simon Stålenhag, Nils Hintze, and Tomas Härenstam The Loop, largest particle accelerator in the world, was intended to advance the cause of human science. Perhaps the Loop did. Thanks to certain unforeseen properties, the Loop has provided the immediately neighborhood2 with a surfeit of Weird Crap. Adults are useless or worse. It’s up to the Kids to investigate the odd goings on around the Loop, and where possible, resolve them. Each Kid brings their own special expertise… but will that be sufficient to deal with the Loop’s legacy? This Swedish roleplaying game shares a name and inspiration—Simon Stålenhag’s remarkable illustrations—with 2020’s television show Tales from the Loop. Otherwise, the two properties are not closely connected. Meddling kids appear over and over in fiction, particularly fiction aimed at younger readers. The above-mentioned works are only a few of those I could have discussed. Feel free to mention your favourites in comments below.[end-mark] Sean the dog seems to have had a perfectly respectable life. For a dog. Thirteen years is a lifetime for dog, so it’s Sean’s descendant Tim who accompanies the last three members of the club. ︎Either the Mälaren Islands (Swedish game setting) or Boulder City, Nevada (American option). ︎The post Five SFF Works About Meddling, Mystery-Solving Kids appeared first on Reactor.