Table of contents for June 2019 in SFX

1 THERE’S LIFE AFTER THE AXE After Fox opted not to renew Lucifer, Netflix resurrected it for a 10-episode fourth season. But for a while even showrunner Joe Henderson didn’t think it would find a new home. “I didn’t, and here’s why,” he tells Red Alert. “I thought we were going to get picked up by Fox. When that didn’t happen, I felt like all my instincts went out the window. To be honest, what I felt was going to happen was we were going to find out just how amazing our fans were and get this wonderful send-off. In the beginning it was like, ‘Wow, the fans really do love the show. This is amazing. What a great curtain call, a great opportunity to say goodbye and honour what…

Set in the Valiant Universe’s far future, the Adam Pollina-illustrated Fallen World sees Dan Abnett swapping 2000 AD for the 41st Century. “It isn’t as full-cosmic in the Guardians of the Galaxy or Justice League Odyssey sense,” Abnett says of his four-part story. “In simple genre terms, it’s less outer space/space opera and more post-apocalyptic.” Beginning in the Bloodshot Free Comic Book Day Special, Fallen World sees cyborg samurai Rai teaming up with Bloodshot and the Eternal Warrior. “It seemed pretty clear to me that they would all be pivotal characters, as they slot into the story in roles that not only create drama and conflict but also really build on their outlooks and backstories,” explains Abnett. The story involves Raijin, an early prototype of Rai, who appears to be…

WHAT’S IT BEEN LIKE HAVING NEIL GAIMAN, ONE OF THE WRITERS OF THE NOVEL, AS SCREENWRITER AND SHOWRUNNER? It hadn’t been adapted for the screen before for a number of reasons – one of which is because it’s so difficult to adapt for the screen. So having the confidence of knowing that one of the original writers was doing it himself made a huge difference. And knowing that he wasn’t just there as a writer – he was the showrunner – and that it had to change to a certain extent, that just because it works as a novel doesn’t mean it’s going to work as a TV series. The fact that the changes were being made by Neil made you feel much more confident about that. HOW DID YOU…

BY ALL RIGHTS, ALIEN SHOULD NOT HAVE turned out nearly as well as it did. Greenlit in the wake of Star Wars, when every studio executive in Hollywood was desperately searching for sci-fi scripts, it was a derivative idea which owed its inspirations to schlocky low-budget B-movies with titles like Planet Of The Vampires and Night Of The Blood Beast. It was originated by two largely unproven screenwriters, Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, with a first draft titled Star Beast. But under the guidance of producers Walter Hill and David Giler, with direction from a visionary filmmaker and some other incredibly fortuitous developments, Alien became a classic. All involved delivered superb contributions which made Alien not only a great movie in its own right, but one of the most influential…

WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU, dear readers, that our old friend Russell T Davies has become one of them – the industry types we can’t help cursing under our breath. He damns himself with his own words… “I hate to be one of those really disappointing producers who appear in SFX saying, ‘It’s not very sci-fi,’” he laughs, “Because I read them myself and I go, ‘Oh, shut up!’” Can you sense the “but” looming on the horizon? Here it comes… “I love a spaceship and an explosion more than anyone,” Davies protests. “But there’s not much of that in this!” To be fair, at least the former Doctor Who showrunner isn’t saying this while standing on the bridge of a star-destroyer next to a lizard-man holding a ray-gun (it…

THE NEW DC UNIVERSE STREAMING platform announced its arrival as a major player on TV with new shows Titans and Doom Patrol. The two live-action comic-book adaptations brought a gritty and quirky sensibility to a new generation of superheroes, but their upcoming third outing will explore the darker corners of the DC universe – a landscape more suited to supernatural folk, gothic love stories and moments of unnerving terror. Welcome to Swamp Thing. “We wanted to be true to the nature of the comic books, especially the Alan Moore stories,” showrunner Mark Verheiden (Battlestar Galactica, Ash Vs Evil Dead) tells SFX. “To me, the series we are doing is inspired by it. We are not adapting the books, per se, although we are certainly using bits and pieces of the…

IN APRIL 2019, MARVEL STUDIOS RELEASES Avengers: Endgame, the final film of Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That the MCU has changed the landscape of cinema cannot be refuted, whether you’re a fan or not. Dramatising its properties has always been something Marvel had sought as diversification. Comic sales are down, and have been for a long time – in 1942, the monthly sales of Superman comics were about 1.5 million copies, but the most units sold in January 2019 was for a Batman title, just 119,000. The most significant element Marvel Studios brought to the movies was not their wealth of intellectual property like Thor, Captain America and Black Widow, but the idea of the extended universe, where characters bleed into each other’s narratives. A staple of…

RELEASED OUT NOW! PG | 85 minutes A lot of animated movies turn on the idea of putting away childish things, only for the protagonist to realise they need to find them again. This latest example adds little fresh to the concept. Bright, occasionally dazzling animation and a sprinkling of funny voice work can’t paper over the fact that this tale of a girl and the animal-run amusement park she dreams up is Children’s Film #3785 reminding you not to forget to imagine/love/whatever. Thanks, but can we have a new story core, please?…

UK E4, All 4 US TBC Showrunner John Brown Cast Alexa Davies, Will Merrick, Charlotte Ritchie, David Mumeni EPISODES 1.01-1.06 It’s easy to be suspicious of a comedy that proclaims to be “for gamers” – what are we, a different species? – but this six-part E4 offering is an often surprisingly funny foray into juggling MMORPG playing (that’s massively multiplayer online role-playing games, if you’re a Muggle) with real life. A couple of episodes tread into stereotypical territory, but a sharp script adds some bonus lives. Flatmates Meg and Nicky are obsessed with fictional online MMO Kingdom Scrolls, so much so that their lives are ruled by its fantasy world. We see them in-game as their online characters about a quarter of the time. Dead Pixels is at its funniest…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2018 | U |Blu-ray/DVD/download Director Rob Marshall Cast Emily Blunt, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer The original is a classic. Dancing penguins, catchy songs, the worst cockney accent ever unleashed… they’re part of the tapestry of our childhoods. It’s frankly astonishing that it’s taken 54 years to find out what happened next, but here it is at last, with Emily Blunt stepping into Julie Andrews’s shoes as the flying nanny with magical powers. Sadly, this isn’t a patch on the original. Blunt is magnificent, but Andrews was in a class of her own. However, this movie tries, damn it, and at times almost makes it. The highlight is a music hall sequence with animation and, yes, penguins, and the performances are uniformly excellent. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1987 | 15 | Blu-ray It’s “bored stiff, more like” for the plodding first three quarters, as a couple fall foul of a curse laid on a slave trader’s descendants. Why, given that they only move into his mansion, is just one of the logic gaps in this magpie horror, which also valiantly tries (and fails) to make pigeons sinister. Still, a sports-obsessed cop inspires wry smiles, and the Elm Street-style night-marishness of the last 20 minutes is enjoyably OTT. + Extras Commentary; Making Of; composer interview.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2018 | 15 | DVD Director Boots Riley Cast Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Jermaine Fowler Join a union. It’s the only way to prevent the balance between shareholder profit and the fair treatment of labour getting grotesquely out of kilter. That’s the message of Boots Riley’s debut feature, smuggled inside an absurdist fable Charlie Kaufman might have written. It follows call centre drone Cassius Green. Advised by a co-worker to use his “white voice”, he’s soon climbing the ladder to become a “Power Caller”, peddling arms to foreign governments. Initially, only the magical realist treatment and the existence of WorryFree (a new employment concept that’s essentially slave labour) nudge the film towards fantastical territory. But later a mad twist pushes it over the cliff. Brimming with…

EXTRAS RELEASED 29 APRIL 2019 | 12 | Blu-ray/DVD Director Sam Liu Cast Elyes Gabel, Diane Guerrero, Kevin Conroy, Susan Eisenberg Animated like an episode of noughties TV series Justice League Unlimited, Fatal Five is an anomaly in the DC animated movie line-up, and not just in terms of how it looks. It’s a rare DC entry not based on a comic. It follows two new additions, Starboy and Jessica Cruz, as they struggle to overcome mental health struggles (schizophrenia and anxiety, respectively) while attempting to defeat the Fatal Five, who need Cruz to help them complete a nefarious plan. The script’s adult, in a positive way. We finally see Jessica Cruz’s origin story, and it feels like David Fincher’s Zodiac. Miss Martian swears the first time we see her.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 304 pages | Paperback/ebook Author David Quantick Publisher Titan Books Literary comic horror is not a crowded field. It is, after all, tricky trying to unsettle readers while also endeavouring to make them laugh. David Quantick sets out to do both these things with his third novel, and succeeds admirably. At the centre of the novel lies Todd Milstead, “an asshole” whom we first meet “giving free rein to his inner dickhead” as he oversees a literary soirée. Or at least what passes for a literary soirée in DeKalb, Illinois, considering it’s essentially a booze-fuelled Saturday night hosted by a lazy and childish man with absolutely no discernible literary talent. Milstead is a small fish in a small and dull pond. But his life is set to…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 608 pages | Hardcover/ebook Author Adrian Tchaikovsky Publisher Head Of Zeus Adrian Tchaikovsky filters the end of human civilisation through the prism of a prison drama in Cage Of Souls. The last refuge of mankind is the city of Shadrapar, surrounded by a scorched desert on one hand and a predator-filled swamp on the other. The swamp is also home to The Island, a floating prison where those condemned by the corrupt justice system eke out their lives under a regime of ordered brutality. That’s where Tchaikovsky’s protagonist, Stefan Advani, finds himself after his involvement in an ill-considered effort to revitalise Shadrapar’s society runs foul of the authorities. Advani is a man of letters, and his account of his ordeal is delivered in a meticulous and measured…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 261 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Jane Rawson Publisher Picador Authors taking inspiration from family history is nothing new, but Jane Rawson’s approach is uniquely peculiar. On 6 August 1859, the steamship Admella ran aground on a reef off the coast of South Australia. For eight days, crew and passengers were trapped, dying from hunger, thirst and exposure. Only 24 of 134 survived. One was George Hills, the author’s great-great-grandfather. Rawson uses this event as the starting point for a very rum tale. Her Hills survives with the aid of a shape-shifting alien that’s fallen to Earth and taken on the form of a female passenger. Later, it attaches itself to his first-born son, living on his back as a birthmark, telepathically communing with him – with its…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 392 pages | Paperback/ ebook/audiobook Author Bex Hogan Publisher Orion Children’s Books Bex Hogan ticks a lot of familiar boxes with her debut novel, the first entry in the Isles Of Storm And Sorrow trilogy. Her protagonist, Marianne, is instantly recognisable as the heroine of a Young Adult fantasy adventure. She’s brave, compassionate, stubborn, and of course there’s a secret buried in her past and a hitherto untapped source of power that she is only just beginning to comprehend. The story introduces Marianne as the daughter of the titular Viper, the captain of the deadliest ship to sail the waters of the Twelve Isles, carrying out the King’s dirtiest work. Marianne shares none of her father’s bloodlust and suspects that he’s no longer working for the good…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 256 pages | Hardback Author Rob Bredow Publisher Abrams Let’s cut to the chase: yes, for a book that claims to be about “making Solo”, there is a massive Bantha in the room. Author Rob Bredow, a visual effects supervisor on Solo, might argue that the much-publicised change of directors mid-production was not the kind of behind-the-scenes shenanigans he was interested in detailing with this exhaustive photo-chronicle. However, as you progress through the book it becomes clear – if not overtly stated – that the transition from Miller and Lord to Ron Howard (who writes the foreword here) had a significant impact on the design he is highlighting. By not acknowledging that, the omission becomes all the more obvious. “The book’s power lies in its imagery” It’s…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Christine Lynn Herman Publisher Titan Books Remember the sign in The League Of Gentlemen that proclaimed “Welcome to Royston Vasey – you’ll never leave!”? Four Paths should erect something similar. It’s your classic spooky small American town – surrounded by forest, and with an atmosphere that could generously be called “unwelcoming”. When Violet moves there, she discovers a disturbing truth: she’s related to the founding families, a group of super-powered individuals bound to the town and tasked with protecting it from a terrifying beast. Despite this premise, the core of the book isn’t the mystery surrounding the Gray (think Stranger Things’ Upside Down), but the endlessly troubled relationships between the Founder children. That may help the book connect with its YA audience, but…

RELEASED 2 MAY Publisher Rebellion Writers John Wagner, Alan Grant Artist Eric Bradbury COLLECTION “A Polaris missile streaked on course… for Glasgow!” That quote gives you a good idea of the breathless, brutal tone of Invasion 1984!, written by the insanely prolific John Wagner and Alan Grant. It appeared in the pages of UK weekly comic Battle, which usually dealt in historical war stories: for a change, Invasion 1984! was set in the very near future and told of a devastating invasion of Earth by merciless aliens, all rendered in gloriously craggy, hard-hitting line drawings by Eric Bradbury. The story is told largely from two viewpoints: linguistics professor Ed Lomax, tasked with decoding the aliens’ language, and Major “Mad Mac” McVicker, commander of the Dirty Dozen-esque Storm Squad, who run…

“Are we in an episode of Riverdale or Soviet Russia?” asks one of the stranded teenagers in episode three of new Netflix series The Society. It’s more than just an amusing pop culture reference. What they’re actually in is a contemporary twist on The Lord Of The Flies, with one big difference. These kids aren’t fighting to survive in a wilderness like the young boys in William Golding’s novel. They still have access to mod cons, and are isolated in a place that superficially resembles their old lives. The things that have shaped them culturally help shape how they react to their new normal. “They have resources, they’re not living on an island,” says Christopher Keyser (The Last Tycoon, Party Of Five) who co-created the series with Amazing Spider-Man director…

For its 19th year, Sci-Fi-London film festival has a famous new location just off Leicester Square from 15-22 May. “It’s a welcome return to the West End,” says founder Louis Savy. “The home of cult cinema is the Prince Charles, so it seemed like a natural fit.” He continues, “It’s a new chapter. We decided to tighten up the festival so it’s a little shorter, with 17 features, but I think we’re stronger because of that.” The festival will be split across two locations. “We’re only showing feature films at the Prince Charles, and a mixture of features, documentaries and our shorts programme at our previous venue, Stratford Picturehouse.” As for this year’s features, Savy promises, “A very eclectic and wide mix. Saturday is our fun day with three super…

Earth never really stood a chance on The 100. In five seasons, equating to about 100 years, humans nuked it twice, finally rendering it uninhabitable. So, what are the remnants of humanity to do? Find a new planet to potentially mess up, of course, which is where season six of the series starts up this month. Clarke, Bellamy, Madi, Octavia, the now teen child of Monty and Harper, and other ragtag survivors of Earth and the Ark bring themselves, and a whole lot of personal baggage, to the habitable planet Monty found for them. “For me, [this season] is a blank slate in the sense of we’re world building all over again,” creator/showrunner Jason Rothenberg tells SFX. “This is a hardcore sci-fi show, but we’re really now taking it to…

One of the most talked about films at last year’s Frightfest was also one of the most unexpected. The Man Who Killed Hitler And Then The Bigfoot sounds like the title of a deliberately OTT horror romp. Instead, it’s one of the most thought-provoking and unabashedly emotional feature debuts we’ve seen in a while. No, really. It’s the story of Calvin Barr, a retired man who – unbeknownst to most of the world – assassinated Hitler. This is no delusion or fantasy – we see the young Calvin (Being Human’s Aidan Turner) execute a daring undercover mission and off the Führer in the film’s opening moments. In the present day of the 1980s, Barr (now played by Sam Elliott) lives a life of solitude until the military calls on him…

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THIS IS MORE LIKE AN EPISODE OF TOP GEAR than your average trip to a TV set. It’s February 2018 and SFX is squeezed into the back of a 4x4, with a driver who seems determined to put his suspension through its paces. He’s relishing taking us on a rollercoaster ride through impossibly narrow passages, implausibly steep drops, and skids that wouldn’t be out of place in the Fast & Furious series. Out of the window, all we can see is sand and – on the horizon – a strip of sea and the famous silhouette of Table Mountain looming over Cape Town. Perhaps surprisingly, our destination is the Garden of Eden – y’know, the one where both the Bible and (conveniently for our trip) Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s…

NAME KING GHIDORAH ALSO KNOWN AS King Ghidrah, Monster Zero, Demon of the Galaxy, Supreme Ruler of the Cosmos, Evil Companion, Space Super Terror-Beast, Super Dragon Monster, Holy Guardian Beast, Golden Demise, The One Who is Many, Future Super Monster, and many more… FIRST APPEARANCE Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964) TOTAL APPEARANCES 12 HEIGHT 50-158 metres tall. SPECIAL ABILITIES Gravity beams, supersonic flight, hurricane winds, thunder spark, energy shield, light barrier, wing lightning, protective dome, meteorite creation. WEAKNESSES The front of Ghidorah’s neck isn’t covered in scales, so that’s the bit to aim for. Probably best to let Godzilla take care of it, though. CAREER HIGHLIGHT Being transformed into Mecha-King Ghidorah by time-travelling aliens in 1991’s Godzilla Vs King Ghidorah. Toho was influenced by Back To The Future when making…

RELEASED OUT NOW! PG | 95 minutes Director Chris Butler Cast Hugh Jackman, Zach Galifianakis, Zoe Saladana For such a tiny niche, stop-motion cartoon movies have become darn diverse. Aardman’s ones are cuddly and funny; Wes Anderson’s are, well, Wes Anderson. And the ones by the Laika studio tend to be scary (Coraline) or serious (Kubo)… except that its newest one is an all-out comedy. Wolverine himself, Hugh Jackman, voices Sir Frost, a Victorian British adventurer with the proudest cheese-shaped conk we’ve seen, standing in the tradition of manly heroes like Professor Challenger and Phileas Fogg. He’s mad on monsters – there’s a hilarious prologue concerning a certain Scottish lake – and charges off to Canada to seek its legendary apeman, the Sasquatch. He finds the hairy beast in no…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 15 | 101 minutes Directors Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Widmyer Cast Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, Jeté Laurence, Hugo Lavoie The Pet Sematary remake is a curious beast. For the first half, it’s bursting with new ideas and technical brilliance (cinematographer Laurie Rose lights this like it’s an Oscar contender). But something happens at the midpoint that buries the potential, turning the film into a changed animal that’s somehow more soulless, more generic. If you know the Stephen King novel, the story is basically as you’d expect. A young family moves house, bringing the family cat, Church, with them. When the cat passes away, dad Louis (Jason Clarke) discovers that a local Native American burial ground has the power to bring things back to life, albeit a bit meaner.…

A tech mogul is turned into her 13-year-old self in fantasy comedy LITTLE (out now). The 13th Puppet Master film, PUPPET MASTER: THE LITTLEST REICH (out now) sees Nazi puppets gorily slaughtering minorities at a convention. We’re betting on de-dustings aplenty in AVENGERS: ENDGAME, (25 April). The Weeping Woman is the creepy menace in ’70s-set supernatural chiller THE CURSE OF LA LLORONA (3 May). Finally, an amnesiac Pikachu (Ryan Reynolds) investigates a detective’s disappearance in DETECTIVE PIKACHU (10 May).…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2018 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download There’s always been a close kinship between the science fiction film and the western, but few SF movies wear their western influences as proudly as this low-budget debut from writer/directors Christopher Caldwell and Zeek Earl. Set (mostly) on a planet that’s home to a valuable crystal (think gold), there’s much to admire here, from the subtle effects that help make the locations look convincingly alien, to Sophie Thatcher’s turn as the teen who forms an unlikely bond with her father’s killer. + Extras None.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2016 | 15 | Blu-ray “It’s fine, as long as it’s fun,” director Takashi Miike says during an excellent feature-length doc, included here. A fast-paced opening gives you all the info you need: cockroaches were sent into space as part of an mission to terraform Mars; 500 years later, a team’s sent to exterminate the unexpectedly evolved bugs. Think Blade Runner meets Prometheus, overseen by the maniac behind Ichi The Killer. It’s oddballs vs roaches – all in the name of fun. + Extras Making Of; cast interviews; outtakes.…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2018 | 15 | DVD/download Director Diederik Van Rooijen Cast Shay Mitchell, Kirby Johnson, Grey Damon, Nick Thune Alert Trading Standards! The Possession Of Hannah Grace isn’t actually about the possession of Hannah Grace. She’s fully possessed already by the movie’s opening scenes, which are really the only parts of the film that play with the satanic panic themes you might expect from the title. Instead, Hannah Grace runs more like a low-rent crime thriller mixed with a generic body horror, as the resurrected corpse of Grace, a young woman who’d seemingly died during an exorcism, terrorises an ex-cop (Shay Mitchell) who’s taken a night shift in a morgue after a traumatic event on the beat. While it takes a different path from superior subgenre movies like…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 1959-1964 | 12 | Blu-ray Creator Rod Serling Interviewing Jordan Peele recently on his podcast, Jonathan Ross said of The Twilight Zone, “Most of them are pretty bad.” Sorry Wossy, but you’re talking rot. There’s a reason this groundbreaking anthology show is still a pop culture staple 60 years on. It was intelligently written, addressing social issues under the guise of fantasy. And it was beautifully crafted by its various directors and cinematographers. For every well-known episode like “Nightmare At 20,000 Feet” or “To Serve Man” there are another dozen impeccable miniature noirs. Sure, occasional comedic tales tend to fall flat. And season four’s switch to a longer timeslot was an error: at 26 minutes, The Twilight Zone is a perfect pre-bedtime treat; at 52 minutes,…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 384 pages | Paperback/ebook Author KJ Parker Publisher Orbit KJ Parker (aka Tom Holt) clearly has a soft spot for engineers. Whilst Sixteen Ways To Defend A Walled City isn’t part of his Engineer Trilogy, the protagonist of the tale is another character with a talent for building his way out of trouble. Orhan is Colonel-in-Chief of an Engineers Corps in the Imperial army of the Robur (a civilisation analogous to ancient Rome), and when their capital city is besieged by a massive army of unknown provenance, he finds himself forced to take charge of the defence. Orhan is an archetypal Holt hero, with a sharp, self-effacing sense of humour and an aversion to slaughter that makes his every victory against the invaders laced with regret. In…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 294 pages | Hardback/ ebook/audiobook Author MG Wheaton Publisher Hodder & Stoughton It’s thought that our sun has enough hydrogen to burn for another five billion years, before it flares out like a giant red zit. But in this debut cyber-thriller, we’ve got our calculations wrong… and, uh, time’s up already. It’s written in informal, first-person prose; we approach this catastrophe through the perspective of Emily, an artificial consciousness developed by MIT. Wearable interface chips enable people to “see” Emily – and, it turns out, let Emily influence their thoughts and movements. She hasn’t been “alive” long before the government commandeers her servers for an evacuation plan. With mere weeks of civilisation left, Emily and her boyfriend (she was trying to experience life as a student) find…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 400 pages | Hardback/ebook/audiobook Author Gareth Rubin Publisher Michael Joseph The idea that World War 2 could have taken a very different path has been explored in countless counterfactuals over the years. Gareth Rubin’s debut novel doesn’t exactly reinvent the genre, but it does take a slightly different path. In this history, D-Day failed, but Britain was saved from Nazi invasion by intervention from the United States and Russia. After the war, London is split in two. On one side of the wall, people live in apparent comfort; on the other, a communist regime keeps the population in line. Jane Cawson lives quietly on this side, but when her husband is accused of murder, she’s pulled into a mystery that goes further than she could have imagined.…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 374 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Jim Al-Khalili Publisher Bantam Press The first novel by physicist/BBC science expert Jim Al-Khalili, Sunfall is a Roland Emmerich-style end-of-the-world blockbuster with real science. Lots of it. You keep wondering if you’ve picked up the University Challenge Quiz Book by mistake. The ecological disaster this time is the increased threat from the Sun’s coronal mass ejections (CMEs). In the past, these have merely played havoc with electrical fields. In the future, though, the weakening of the Earth’s magnetic field could lead to them wiping out humanity with massive doses of radiation. Forget global warming, this is global microwaving. While Al-Khalili does a fine job popular-sciencising the threat, his characters’ attempted solutions are often more difficult to grasp. More problematic is that once…

RELEASED 25 APRIL 384 pages | Hardback/ ebook/audiobook Author CA Fletcher Publisher Orbit In a world where we’re only a few steps from babies created in laboratories from combined DNA, you’d think that old SF chestnut about civilisation ending when women become infertile would be a thing of the past. Author CA Fletcher clearly doesn’t agree. But that’s not the only quaintly oldfashioned quality to this book, which feels achingly reminiscent of such ’70s sci-fi as Z For Zachariah. A dystopian travelogue from a remote Scottish island across a deserted UK, the book follows the journey of young Griz and loyal mutt Jip in search of Griz’s other beloved hound, Jess. She’s been stolen by a redbearded rogue in a red-sailed boat. Along the way Griz encounters other survivors and…

RELEASED 7 MAY 384 pages | Hardback/ebook Authors Amie Kaufman, Jay Kristoff Publisher Oneworld Publications Channelling a multitude of very familiar tropes, characters and tones (Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, Star Wars… the list is huge), Aurora Rising somehow manages to juggle them all while giving the reader a cocky wink that says, “Yeah, we know, but you’re loving this anyway, aren’t you?” And yes, you will. This shouldn’t be half as compelling as it is. It certainly shouldn’t be able to get away with such lines as “Holy flaming nadsacks!” But it does. Set in 2380, the book opens with the leader of a group of space cadets stumbling across a young woman lost in space, deep in cryosleep. Waking up to discover that everyone she loved…

THE 100 During five seasons CW’s The 100 has become less like the Kass Morgan novels that inspired it but, at the start, this tale of a group of Earth teens stranded on an alien planet wore its influences on its patched-up sleeve. “I was actually looking to do a Lord Of The Flies-like story at the time that this studio sent The 100 my way,” said producer Jason Rothenberg. “It touched all those creative erogenous zones. Lord Of The Flies was one of those books that I could blame for the fact I’m a writer.” LOST Both Lost and Lord Of The Flies begin with a plane crash that strands its survivors on a desert island. Both feature a mysterious beast in the jungle that forces the survivors to…

FAVOURITE SF/FANTASY MOVIES In general I like stories that evoke a sense of awe and wonder in me – Cocteau’s Beauty And The Beast, Cuaron’s The Little Princess, Pan’s Labyrinth. Watching For Your Eyes Only was the moment that I really truly fell in love with cinema, and from there it was the first Terminator, the first two Alien films and Brazil by Terry Gilliam. I’m also a huge John Carpenter fan. If you haven’t watched They Live, it’s the best bad film that’s ever been made, and I actually say that Escape From LA is better than Escape from NY – I got into an argument with Tarantino about that! FAVOURITE SF/FANTASY TV My dad’s a huge Star Trek fan and got me onto the original series fairly early.…

With Anthony Mackie set to star in season two of Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan’s world is also coming to comics in a new graphic novel from Dynamite Entertainment. Developed by Morgan with writer Rik Moran and artist Ferran Sellares, Download Blues occurs at an unknown point during Takashi Kovacs’ numerous lifetimes. “It’s a story that takes place after Kovacs’ exit from the Envoy Corps, but apart from that, it’s really up for grabs, although you could comfortably imagine Download Blues taking place before or after Altered Carbon, or before or after Broken Angels,” says Morgan, referring to the first and second instalments in the saga. “Even some time after the whole trilogy ends isn’t impossible, though looking at Kovacs’ demeanour and behaviour, that’s less likely. The great thing about sleeving…

By the time Liv Moore (Rose McIver) chomps her last brain in the iZombie series finale later this summer, she’ll have experienced almost 70 lives vicariously, and saved a whole mess of people (and zombies) along the way. Those are pretty great stats for a good-hearted zombie, and a television series run in general, but executive producer/co-showrunner Diane Ruggiero-Wright still isn’t ready to say goodbye to the little zombie-show-that-could. “I was so much cooler about it during the actual breaking of the episodes,” Ruggiero- Wright tells Red Alert. “But then I was like, ‘Wait a second! Is this definite? Is there some wiggle room?’” Sadly, yes, it’s a done deal, as Liv gets to wrap up all the New Seattle drama, explore her now public persona as Renegade, and figure…

ON PAPER CROWLEY’S THE BAD GUY BECAUSE HE’S A DEMON. DO YOU SEE HIM THAT WAY? I don’t really see him as a villain. He would very much identify as a villain because that’s the team that he works for, and that’s what he’s supposed to be doing. And yet he keeps confounding that, because actually I think what’s the great charm of Crowley and Aziraphale is that they are not very binary. And that’s their great tragedy: over the thousands of years they’ve lived on Earth, they’ve sort of slipped from their primary mission. That’s, of course, what makes them such good friends. Although they wouldn’t even admit to being friends, and that’s what makes them the yin and yang for each other. Aziraphale is actually a bit of…

Alien is no Blade Runner. No, that’s not a statement on the relative quality of either movie, but rather a statement on how both movies were released. While Blade Runner was infamously chopped up by its studio, the version of Alien which appeared in cinemas in 1979 was pretty much Ridley Scott’s ideal version. Which makes it interesting to observe that, in 2003, an alternate version described as the “Director’s Cut” was released on the big screen. According to David Crowther, who worked on the edit, it began as part of an idea by Twentieth Century Fox to include alternate cuts of the movies in the Alien Quadrilogy box set. “There was a whole crew sifting through boxes of negatives trying to find all the deleted material,” he said. “We…

HEAD CASE “In the ’80s comics, the Kingpin was so massive and he had this tiny head. We just thought, can we get away with that and wouldn’t it be a cool challenge to push the medium and do something that would look so different, if we limit a character to just the form, like his silhouette. When I first presented the idea to [visual effects supervisors] Danny Dimian and Josh Beveridge they said, ‘We’re not quite sure how we can do that,’ and I said, ‘Could we make his head detach from his body so we can move it around?’ They created this really crazy thing.” PRINTS CHARMING “I wanted to figure out how to do a movie that was from a comic book character’s point of view. I…

AS THE CO-CREATOR OF NOT only Into The Spider-Verse’s Miles Morales but also Jessica Jones and African-American Iron Man Riri Williams, Brian Michael Bendis spent the bulk of his two-decade-long comics career at Marvel Comics. But as he tells SFX when we meet him during a trip to London, DC Comics has always been close to his heart, and in late 2017, the Cleveland-born writer and occasional artist made the move to the House of Ideas’ Distinguished Competition. Starting out on the Man of Steel’s twin titles Action Comics and Superman, he has since relaunched his creator-owned label Jinxworld and also headed up teen-focused imprint Wonder Comics, for which he pens Young Justice and co-writes Naomi with David Walker. This month he and his old Daredevil foil Alex Maleev reunite on six-part crossover event Leviathan, but first he’s telling us about his Heroes…

RELEASED 3 MAY TBC | 111 minutes Director Dome Karukoski Cast Nicholas Hoult, Lily Collins, Colm Meaney, Anthony Boyle Most biopics about writers can rely on a clear through line from their biography to their art. But JRR Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings, resisted such readings of his work – which was apparently inspired more by linguistics and mythology than his life. Biopic Tolkien, directed by Finland’s Dome Karukoski, respectfully navigates this by distancing Tolkien (a solid Nicholas Hoult) from the books – focusing instead on his troubled upbringing, his “fellowship” of friends, and his romance with future wife Edith, whom Lily Collins plays like a fey Elven muse. These scenes are earnestly performed, but don’t feel particularly cinematic or engaging. The better sequences…

RELEASED OUT NOW! PG | 112 minutes Director Tim Burton Cast Colin Farrell, Danny DeVito, Michael Keaton, Eva Green Tusk, tusk… a live-action remake of Disney’s 1941 cartoon should have seen Tim Burton at the (big) top of his game, playing ringmaster to a glorious parade of loveable misfits and makeshift families, with pathos clogging viewers’ throats like a gulp of sawdust. But while the pixelated pachyderm is a triumph of effects and Burton’s reimagining has moments of soaring joy, it is, for the most part, a curiously cumbersome affair. Herding a pack of dull humans to the foreground of the circus-set tale immediately divests Dumbo 2.0 of the original’s delightful simplicity, as Holt (Colin Farrell) returns from WWI minus an arm and a job, with the one-time trick-rider now…

UK Sky One, finished US Spectrum Originals, TBC Showrunner Simon Maloney Cast Phoebe Fox, Malachi Kirby, Ike Bennett, Andi Osho, Rose Williams, Billy Zane EPISODES 1.01-1.08 A shot of a car zooming past a sign for Milton Keynes suggests one reason why we don’t tend to see things like Curfew made in the UK. Great Britain just doesn’t seem like a suitably cool or romantic setting for a road movie – or, in this case, a near-future show which follows a cross-country road race. Thank goodness producers Tiger Aspect were willing to overlook that, because for all its faults Curfew is just the sort of thing British TV companies should be making more of: madcap, colourful, action-packed populist entertainment. Five years after a viral outbreak, the UK is under lockdown…

EXTRAS RELEASED OUT NOW! 2018 | 12 | Blu-ray (4K/standard)/DVD/download Director Christian Rivers Cast Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Hugo Weaving, Jihae Given that it was shot in New Zealand, written/produced by the team behind the Lord Of The Rings movies, and directed by Christian Rivers – who’s worked with him for years – it’s no surprise that every frame of Mortal Engines reeks of Peter Jackson. He’d been wanting to adapt Philip Reeve’s book since 2009; now a movie’s finally here Jackson’s fingerprints are still all over it, despite him not having his hand on the tiller. But there are other influences: Howl’s Moving Castle is an obvious one, and the opening action sequence, featuring the giant, moving city of London chasing a smaller city across a grassy plain, is…

EXTRAS RELEASED 29 APRIL 2018 | 12 | Blu-ray/DVD Replicas might have made a good black comedy. Instead it’s a poor modern Frankenstein, grafted onto a really poor conspiracy thriller. And you have to question the judgement of any director who casts Keanu Reeves as a brilliant scientist. Here, after killing his entire family in a car crash, Reeves’s boffin scans their brains and sticks their memories in clones, hoping no one will notice. Too ludicrous to take seriously, but too dull to be so bad it’s funny. + Extras Director’s commentary; Making Of; deleted scenes.…

EXTRAS RELEASED 6 MAY (download out now) 2019 | 15 | Blu-ray/DVD/download Director Robert D Krzykowski Cast Sam Elliott, Aidan Turner, Larry Miller, Caitlin FitzGerald The fact that movie greats John Sayles and Douglas Trumbull volunteered to help with Robert D Krzykowski’s debut speaks volumes. That title, suggestive of exploitation trash, belies a sincere film with a huge heart. Yes, a man kills Hitler, then Bigfoot, but neither mission – carried out by Calvin Barr, played by Poldark’s Aidan Turner (’40s flashbacks) and veteran Sam Elliott (’70s present) – is particularly developed. They exist to give Barr things to regretfully reflect upon, for this is a character piece about the effect killing has on a man’s soul. Elliott is exceptional as the world-weary older Barr, and Krzykowski’s script takes its…

Don’t be misled by the title of THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR (out now, Blu-ray). This 1969 effort from British studio Tigon toys with the possibility of the supernatural, but ultimately proves to be a guess-the-killer proto-slasher. It’s good fun though, thanks to its young characters’ swinging ’60s lifestyles, and their lack of common sense – you’ll soon be wishing them dead. Normally we’d splash more space on a Stephen King movie, but being all about a rabid St Bernard, 1983’s CUJO (out now, Blu-ray) isn’t quite our bag. The opening half’s domestic drama isn’t exactly gripping, but once Cujo goes loco there’s a decent amount of tension, with Dee Wallace impressive as the mother trapped inside a brokendown car by the foam-faced mutt. Speaking of King, there’s a new…

RELEASED 30 APRIL 352 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Chen Qiufan Publisher Head Of Zeus Until 2017, when local laws changed, the UK was exporting half a million tons of plastic waste per year to China. (That’s equivalent to the annual amount of plastic packaging recycled by every household in the country put together.) A smaller volume of electronic waste goes to China – earning much less media coverage – but its effects on the local environment are huge, with deadly toxins building up in water, soil, and food chains. Chen Qiufan’s 2013 novel, newly translated into English by Ken Liu, is an sfnal melodrama with echoes of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, set in a grim fictional e-waste centre. Silicon Isle is a hellhole of pollution and exploited labour, in which a…

RELEASED 1 MAY 194 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Mark Lawrence Publisher 47North RELEASED 1 MAY 194 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Mark Lawrence Publisher 47North But actually it’s nothing like Stranger Things at all. Nick Hayes, a 15-year-old with an extraordinary gift for maths, has leukaemia. He has a 50/50 chance of making it out of his teens. But then a stranger approaches him. By manipulating the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics, he may have a way to guarantee Nick’s survival – but more importantly, they have a chance to save the girl, Mia, who’s in terrible danger. Mark Lawrence balances big ideas with small, personal stakes very skilfully. The novel pitches a clever and well-considered take on time travel against the concerns of a teenage boy with cancer: will…

RELEASED OUT NOW! 448 pages | Paperback/ebook Author Kesia Lupo Publisher Bloomsbury There’s a surprise at the end of this book: it’s a standalone. Weird, huh? Most YA fantasy novels are the first in a trilogy, and while Kesia Lupo plans to write more in this universe, We Are Blood And Thunder is a self-contained tale. It benefits from this brevity, too, whipping up a smart, compelling story with a solid, enclosed plot, nuanced characters and some rather delicious twists, with none of that “killer cliffhanger” nonsense that can so often get on your tits. It begins in the bewitched town of Duke’s Forest, where a magical toxic cloud has been making lives difficult for years. A young cryptling (think: mortician) named Lena escapes with her life after being accused…

RELEASED 2 MAY 444 pages | Hardback/ebook Author Tim Clare Publisher Canongate There’s a touch of the New Weird about The Ice House. At the start it darts between two narratives, that of Delphine, an old woman living in our world but aware of another one connected to it, and Hagar, undying servant to an immortal lord in that other place. Delphine’s narrative moves forwards chronologically, her human story anchoring the human reader; Hagar’s moves backwards towards the event which set everything in the book in motion – after which, both stories move to their conclusion. Our world is rapidly left behind, with most of the action taking place in Hagar’s. Tim Clare’s Avalonia is a heady, memorable place, ripe with tropical greenery and populated with bull-people, bat-people and even…

RELEASED OUT NOW! Publisher DC Comics Writer Brian Michael Bendis Artists Various ISSUES 1-3 Arguably better known as an animated TV series, Young Justice has always lived in the shadow of DC’s other junior super-team, Teen Titans. That’s something Brian Michael Bendis gets laughs out of in this latest relaunch, such as when bystanders cannot distinguish Cassie Sandsmark’s Wonder Girl from her more illustrious forebears. The flagship title of new teen imprint Wonder Comics, Young Justice doesn’t have the heart or intrigue of Naomi, Bendis’s other contribution to the line. Three issues in, the fractured narrative and need to introduce the various members leads to an uneven pace. With her fantastical homeland crashing into Metropolis in opening arc “Seven Crises”, the underrated Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld makes a welcome return.…