Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2019 i SFX

Sci-fi and fantasy have always been about the need for escapism. So at a time when the news is dishing up plenty of things to be pessimistic about, we’re giving you 116 excellent reasons to forget about all the bad things in the world, and get excited about the next 12 months – after all, there’s never been a better time to be a genre fan. In our Ultimate 2019 Preview, we’ve explored every corner of the sci-fi and fantasy universe to pick out the movies, TV shows, books and comics you’ll be hunting down next year. Not only do we tell you everything you need to know about live-action Star Wars TV show The Mandalorian (p30), there’s interviews galore as we engage our spore drive for the return of…

With the death of Stan Lee on 12 November, aged 95, the world lost its modern Shakespeare. Highbrow critics may shudder at the comparison, but it’s hardly a ludicrous claim. Lee didn’t create the superhero genre, but neither did the Bard invent drama. They did, however, reinvent their art forms, introducing enduring new tropes, injecting them with a humanity and social conscience and making them crowdpleasers. In Spider-Man, the Hulk and Black Panther, Lee has created iconic characters every bit as resonant as Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello. The hugely successful “shared world” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a live-action extension of the groundwork he laid in the early ’60s, making superheroes more relatable. Spider-Man was just as worried about finding a girlfriend, drug abuse and the Vietnam war as…

FALSE FACE FACTS! BIRDS OF PREY → It’s official: Ewan McGregor will be the special guest villain in this femme-powered Batman spin-off. He’s signed to play Black Mask, alias Roman Sionis, the Gotham City mob boss who leads the False Face Society, a gang of reprobates who hide their identities behind disguises. Created as the anti-Bruce Wayne, the wealthy but unhinged Sionis’s own ebony mask was permanently welded to his face in a fire, which may account for some of his more anti-social tendencies. Directed by Cathy Yan, Birds Of Prey stars Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Huntress, Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Black Canary and Rosie Perez as GCPD detective Renee Montoya. “I could not put the script down,” says Yan of the script by Christina Hodson…

RICHARD EDWARDS EDITOR RAVES → Had a fantastic time at SFX Book Con 2. Thanks to Foyles, the authors and the audience! → Excited that Being Human creator Toby Whithouse is writing the Neil Gaiman-produced Gormenghast adap. RANTS → No Who on Christmas? Let’s skip straight to Boxing Day! NICK SETCHFIELD FEATURES EDITOR RIP → Goodbye, Stan Lee. It’s impossible to overstate his impact on my imagination. Yes, Kirby and Ditko were vital, but it was his voice that unified the Marvel Universe. RAVES → Just finished writing the sequel to The War In The Dark. Free evenings feel very weird… IAN BERRIMAN REVIEWS EDITOR RAVES → Listening to the scores to Possum and Doctor Who: The Invasion. Both wonderfully spooky. → Was delighted to hear on 6 Music that…

INFINITE DETAIL by TIM MAUGHAN (MCD/FSG Originals) Eight years on from his acclaimed collection Paintworks, nouveaucyberpunk’s brightest name finally has a debut novel to his name. Set in Bristol, it imagines what might happen if somebody turned off the internet. Think worldwide hard Brexit, plus-plus. Bad, very bad. ETA March DAVID MOGO: GODHUNTER by SUYI DAVIES OKUNGBOWA (Abaddon Books) In the wake of the Orisha War that rained gods on Lagos, David Mogo is a godhunter. He’s good at what he does. And he needs to be when confronted with a legion of taboos – feral godling-child hybrids. Nigerian writer Okungbowa’s richly promising debut urban fantasy. THE TRUE QUEEN by ZEN CHO (Macmillan) Witches abroad. In a novel that ranges across Regency London, Fairyland and an enchanted island in the…

PRODIGY ETA December 2018 | Publisher Image/Netflix Mark Millar’s latest collaboration with Netflix, Prodigy follows Edison Crane – a polymath who has mastered everything from the occult to big business, and uses his skills to solve problems that others can’t. Millar has described Crane as “by far the best character I’ve created” and with art from his Huck collaborator, Rafael Albuquerque, it will certainly look great. Expect a Netflix show to follow sometime soon… DIE ETA December 2018 | Publisher Image Comics The Wicked + Divine and Darth Vader’s Kieron Gillen teams up with Stephanie Hans for a dark fantasy adventure that pits a bunch of 40-somethings against a terrifying horror that they encountered as teenage role-players. Sounds a bit Stephen King’s IT, but Gillen has tagged it with the…

How did you come on board as the voice of Miles Morales? I did an audition on my phone! And I sent it to Bob [Persichetti] and yeah, it took a few months but they were going through their process and ultimately I got the call one day that I was Miles Morales, and I was happy, I was thankful. I even wrote it in my journal maybe two years earlier while filming the movie Dope. I wrote: “I am Spider-Man, I am Miles Morales.” So you already had a special relationship with Miles and Spider-Man? There was some Disney show where Miles makes an appearance and I just remember looking at the Spider-Man up there and saying, “Wait a second, is he black?” There’s a lot of parallels with…

WHEN IT WAS FIRST RELEASED IN 1968, WITH A running time of almost two and a half hours, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was one of a few theatrical films to include an interval. It comes just before the car takes flight for the first time, as Caractacus, Truly and the children pursue the unsavoury Baron Bomburst, in a bid to rescue their beloved Grandpa. They reach the edge of the cliff – distracted in their chase, realising their mistake a minute too late – and bang (pardon the pun): it cuts straight to the intermission, complete with the film’s catchy, thematic overture. It had been done with musicals before – Oklahoma!, The Sound Of Music, West Side Story – but it had been done with adventure epics, too: Ben-Hur, Spartacus,…

Gerry Anderson’s mid-’90s live-action show SPACE PRECINCT (out now, DVD) leaked out in a dozen volumes in the early noughties, but now there’s finally a complete box set. Following a former NYC cop on the planet Altor as he investigates crimes both human and alien, it plays very much like a gritty ’70s police show, but with the addition of criminals with ESP, robots and flying police cars. Action-packed and surprisingly dark at times (but silly at others), it’s reasonably good fun, but some of the rubbery-looking creatures have not aged well. Anyone who, back in April, shelled out for the remastered Special Edition DVD of THREADS (17 December, Blu-ray) is likely to get the hump now the BBC’s 1984 one-off about the outbreak (and aftermath) of nuclear war is…

Chapter One – Seventeen Shillings. Solvgarad, Eastern Europe Today was Davey Warner’s eighteenth birthday and finally his age exceeded his salary. Seventeen shillings was a good salary for a squire, but since joining the Illuminata’s ranks a year ago he had become a superstitious young man and the number seventeen gave him the shivers. His first knight had been killed on April 17th, his first battle injury required seventeen stitches, and his first flogging was seventeen lashes. Yes, it was fair to say seventeen was an unlucky number. Many of the Illuminata Knighthood’s squires were superstitious, but with good reason perhaps. Theirs was the only military order in the world created to fight witches. In the last year he had ridden alongside his knight, or sometimes under his huge metal…

→ BBC confirms rumours that there’ll be no Doctor Who Christmas special for the first time since 2005 – though the TARDIS will materialise on New Year’s Day. → Terry Pratchett adaptation The Watch gets series order from BBC America. → New Disney+ streaming service developing Star Wars series featuring Rogue One’s Cassian Andor… → …and an MCU show featuring Falcon and the Winter Soldier. → Game Of Thrones’ final season will air in April, HBO confirms. → Greg Kinnear to star in modernday take on The War Of The Worlds from Misfits writer Howard Overman. → Andrew Lincoln may have left The Walking Dead, but Rick Grimes will return in three spin-off movies. → Being Human creator Toby Whithouse will write the Neil Gaiman-produced Gormenghast. → Grant Morrison developing…

Tell us about your protagonists. → Carillon’s the last survivor of a once-great family of Guerdon, who sent her away to the countryside shortly before they were murdered. Spar’s the son of a firebrand dissident; a Stone Man dying of a magical plague. Rat’s a ghoul, an eater of the dead. How does magic work in this world? → The gods are creatures of magic – “self-sustaining thaumic constructs”, as an academic might put it. Humans must risk physical or psychic backlash (sorcery) or use the inherent magic in various rare substances (alchemy). Or channel the power of the gods, as a saint. None of these options is safe. What sparked the idea? → Wondering about magical surveillance systems. And the BBC’s Seven Wonders Of The Industrial World. Is Guerdon…

→ Alice Eve joining future Earth anthology WarningWarning… Chris McKay helming Jonny Quest Jonny Quest for Warner Bros… Common and Jonny Lee Miller joining Ursula K Le Guin adap Nine LivesNine Lives… Akiva Goldsman adapting Marcus Sakey’s Brilliance Brilliance trilogy… Legendary bringing Jeff Lemire’s comic book Black Hammer Black Hammer to the screen… Kate Bosworth producing and starring in post-apocalyptic thriller GenesisGenesis… Malcolm McDowell joining colony starship tale PersephonePersephone… New Line scoring rights to Adam Ellis’s viral ghost story Dear DavidDear David… Ubisoft planning a Werewolves Within Werewolves Within movie… The Meg 2 The Meg 2 in the works… Anna Kendrick starring in SF thriller StowawayStowaway… New Regency adapting Norman Partridge’s Dark HarvestDark Harvest… Deadpool Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick in talks to reboot Pirates Of The CaribbeanPirates…

“FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ARE WALKING, TALKING MEMES” A meme is essentially a distilled nugget of meaning, originally conceived as a piece of information that could spread virus-like through a population. Today, we have graphic memes, photos, cartoons or illustrations usually plugging a bit of satire or mockery, like the Willy Wonka pic, or that still of the Joker from the Batman movie. To my mind, books, films and episodes of TV sci-fi/fantasy/horror likewise possess meme-like qualities, cargos of meaning and (now and then) illumination. Meaning is the thing. It’s why I and many others write SF/fantasy. One of the main brickbats aimed at science fiction and fantasy is that it’s just escapism, just a gaudy trip carrying readers/viewers away from the real world, away from reality, away from meaning. I say…

STARDATE: 6 OCTOBER 2018. SFX is backstage at Madison Square Garden. Moments ago, cast members and producers of Star Trek: Discovery left the stage with the cheers of New York Comic Con attendees ringing in their ears. Now they’ve gathered in a catering room to explain how, after a debut season boasting breathtaking twists and turns, Star Trek’s newest iteration can shock and surprise all over again. Like the first run, season two will tell an ongoing story, focused on seven signals spread right across the galaxy and their connection to a mysterious winged figure dubbed the Red Angel. In Discovery’s command chair: Christopher Pike, James T Kirk’s predecessor as Enterprise captain. He’s played by Anson Mount, previously superhero patriarch Black Bolt in Inhumans. “They wanted somebody very much the…

8 MAR CAPTAIN MARVEL If the apocalypse comes, beep her Welcome to 1995! Arriving just over a month before Avengers 4, this adventure set in the 1990s finally introduces Brie Larson as the titular space-hopper – lest we forget, the first Marvel female to headline her own movie. “She’s so sassy, she’s such a smartass, she won’t take shit from anyone,” says the film’s writer Geneva Robertson-Dworet of the character, an Air Force pilot who acquires superhuman abilities, gets caught up in a war between alien races, and teams up with a young Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson). Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Mississippi Grind), it’s been described as an “action comedy”. We’re ready to Marvel. 26 APR AVENGERS 4 This is the end… of the beginning? Are…

MARK GATISS IS THE culmination of his passions. Volcanically so. “Like a spot!” he laughs, relishing the simile before giving it a gleeful squeeze. “Like a great big boil! All the pus has reached the bursting point in me!” Actor. Writer. Strangler. Gatiss’s Twitter bio omits the word enthusiast, possibly because it scarcely needs stating. From The League Of Gentlemen to Sherlock, his trilogy of Lucifer Box novels to acclaimed documentaries on painter John Minton and the history of screen horror, it’s a career powered by infatuations. “I’ve been lucky enough to pursue my passions,” he tells SFX as he chooses a mere seven of his touchstones ahead of Christmas ghost tale The Dead Room, which he’s written and directed for BBC Four. “The challenge always is that you don’t…

FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD Jude V Obscurial ▶ RELEASED OUT NOW! 12A | 134 minutes ▶ Director David Yates ▶ Cast Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Ezra Miller, Jude Law, Johnny Depp, Alison Sudol JK Rowling’s Wizarding World is a remarkable accomplishment, up there with the MCU and the Star Wars galaxy in terms of imagination and mind-boggling complexity. So it’s almost a given that The Crimes Of Grindelwald is packed with spellbinding creatures, magical backdrops and clever Easter eggs that add plenty to the saga’s lore. The problem is that this second instalment of Rowling’s Potter prequel doesn’t really have a story to speak of. Instead it’s a bridging device, whose main function seems to be setting up the third entry in a five-movie arc, rather better at…

THE DOUCHEBAG STRIKES BACK Lloyd admits that Peter Quayle, director of strategy at the Office of Interchange, was introduced in the show as a “smug, public school-educated douchebag” who wanted the prestige of his cushy job but “wasn’t interested in the moral implications of all this espionage”. But now Quayle is “deep in the shit. There’s nowhere he can turn. Whatever happens, he’s going to lose either his job, his wife, his baby, or everything. So he’s forced to make decisions, and you find out what he’s actually made of, which is surprising.” EVERYONE KNOWS THEIR COUNTERPART Lloyd stays tight-lipped about whether we’ll meet Peter Quayle Prime from the other side this season but does reveal that the regular cast members do know who their characters’ doppelgängers are. “We are…

Whatever you do, don’t call Alastair Reynolds’ Shadow Captain a YA novel. “That kind of crept into the marketing at some point,” he says of Revenger, the first volume in this space-pirate trilogy. “I wanted to write a book that you could read if you were 15 or 16, but I didn’t consciously write down to a particular audience. It has a young adult protagonist, but then so does Dune.” What we can say is that, picking up the tale of the spacefaring Ness sisters, it’s a rollicking adventure that offers clues about the nature of “some big, underlying mysteries” that underpin the solar system. “I had a blast,” says Reynolds. “I got really into that high-Victorian adventure mode that I was hoping to hit.” This gives the book a…

At a time when people are celebrating female icons, many are looking back at Xena as a groundbreaking show for female empowerment. “The #MeToo era is the perfect time to bring back Xena and Gabrielle to set the world to rights!” says Lucy Lawless, who played Xena from 1995 to 2001 and has starred in Battlestar Galactica and Ash V Evil Dead. Now Lawless is about to produce and star in new Australian TV drama My Life Is Murder where, she happily reveals, “there will be no blood and guts” – for once! Would you like to play the role of Xena again? I would in a one-off. I wouldn’t do the lifestyle again – I couldn’t! That’s for someone young and hungry. I’m always rolling my eyes when there’s…

MAKING FRIENDS → “I think in this day and age, people need a show that is uplifting, that’s about helping each other out, and getting through this crazy thing we call life. So, when I read this script, I absolutely noticed that. I also loved that [my character] Cara has a voice of her own and speaks up for herself.” HIGH SPIRITS → “Faith and spirituality are incredibly interesting and explorative, so it makes sense that television creators like to write about them. [God Friended Me and The Leftovers] are so different in tone – like faith itself. But I’m so grateful that I’ve been able to be a part of shows that are so inclusive to different perspectives.” CLICK LIKE → “Cara is on a roll with her stories…

→ Legendary screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride, The Stepford Wives) has died aged 87. → Douglas Rain, voice of HAL 9000, has passed away at 90. → Georgia Moffett to return as Jenny opposite real-life dad Peter Davison in Big Finish’s The Legacy Of Time. → Will Patton, Derek Mears and Andy Bean join cast of DC Universe’s Swamp Thing show. → Pacific Rim and Altered Carbon anime series on the way from Netflix. → Kumail Nanjiani and Adam Scott sign up for Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone reboot. → Legion and Fargo’s Jean Smart signs up for HBO’s Watchmen. Meanwhile, Jeremy Irons is reportedly playing an older version of Ozymandias. → Agents Of SHIELD gets seventh season order – before the sixth…

HOT TOPIC Your views on the month’s big issue → Gary Mancini, Facebook As a huge fan of the original I was hoping/expecting that Michael would behave as he did in the original film – stealth stalking, a smart set-up of scares before he attacks his victims. Instead we got a Rob Zombie-style brutal Myers. The original didn’t need the gore, relying on suspense instead. I wish this film had followed its lead and been the true sequel that I was expecting. → David Chapman, Facebook H2018 is a very good slasher movie in its own right, but it doesn’t quite measure up to the original. → Rob Perry, Facebook Great stuff. Restored Myers to the terrifyingly unknowable force of nature he was in Carpenter’s original. Jamie Lee Curtis was…

“Three thousand years is a long time, Gil. You’re a historian – can you tell me, with any accuracy, what happened three thousand years ago?” When I was 10 or 11 years old, I read a book review column in White Dwarf magazine that mentioned a novel by Barbara Hambly, where the woman becomes a sword-wielding warrior and the man became a wizard. This was 36 years ago, when that wasn’t as frequent a character configuration as it is now. But when I actually read the book, it was so much more than that. Two people from our world – a history graduate student and an airbrush painter and mechanic – try to help a wizard escaping with a baby, and find themselves swept into a crumbling kingdom under siege…

PICARD’S RETURN CBS Television President David Stapf is keen to have “a Star Trek something on all the time”, and a return for Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard was first out of the traps. A writers’ room that includes novelist Michael Chabon is at work. All we know about the show so far is that it’ll be set about 20 years after the events of Nemesis; judging by comments from Chabon, though, it definitely won’t be dystopian. LOWER DECKS This half-hour animated comedy show will centre on the support crew on an unimportant Starfleet vessel; showrunner Mike McMahan pitched the idea as, “about the people who put the yellow cartridge in the food replicator so a banana can come out the other end.” The head writer on Rick And…

ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL 6 FEBRUARY Two decades in the making, James Cameron’s passion project finally hits screens, with Rosa Salazar mo-capping the titular cyborg hero. BORDER 8 FEBRUARY This critically acclaimed Swedish fantasy has been selected as the country’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at next year’s Academy Awards. HAPPY DEATH DAY 2U 15 FEBRUARY More nightmares for Theresa “Tree” Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) as she re-enters the time loop she thought she’d escaped from. DUMBO 29 MARCH Tim Burton directs this live-action remake of the animated Disney classic, reuniting him with actor Michael Keaton for the first time since 1991’s Batman Returns. PET SEMATARY 5 APRIL Stephen King’s novel gets a fresh adap courtesy of directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer. Jason Clarke’s the dad haunted by the…

CHUCKY One of the most infamous creations in film history, this bad toy is a “Good Guy” doll possessed by the spirit of a serial killer. Voiced (usually) by actor Brad Dourif across seven increasingly gory/crazy entries, he’s acquired a wife and child along the way. It’s good to have goals. ANNABELLE Another horror character, this porcelain princess of pain was introduced in James Wan’s The Conjuring as an early nemesis for supernatural investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren. She’s proved popular enough to spawn two spin-offs charting her history, with a third on the way. PINOCCHIO Let’s lighten things up shall we? Even if the story of the puppet lad who dreamed of being a real boy has shades of morality lesson darkness in Carlo Collodi’s…

Spider-Man first made his big swing from comics to cartoons in 1967, with a cheaply made animated series that aired for three seasons on ABC. Premiering five years after his comic book debut, the series not only introduced the character to a wider audience, but gave us his enduring “Spider-Man! Spider-Man!” theme tune. Having flirted dubiously with a live-action series during the ’70s, Spidey returned to animation in earnest in 1981 with two shows that aired simultaneously: a lesser-remembered solo series simply called Spider-Man, and the much more popular Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends, which saw him in an unlikely flatshare with fellow heroes Iceman and Firestar. Perhaps Spider-Man’s most popular animated show however came in the ’90s, with the eponymous 1994 Fox Kids series proving the longest-running Spider-Man TV…

As a child, Katherine Arden had a book of Russian fairytales. She loved the stories, so much so that when she came to write her first novel, The Bear And The Nightingale, she returned to them for inspiration. “I was really struggling to figure out how to begin my book. I had never written a book before, and finally, lacking better ideas, I decided to take the first chapter of my novel to retell a Russian fairytale,” she says. “I didn’t know where I was going with it or anything, but at least retelling the story would allow me to keep putting words down while I figured out how to tell my story.” This “accidental plot device” worked so well that not only did the chapter survive “relatively unchanged from…

How would you describe Credence’s relationship with Nagini? It’s complicated and multifaceted. These are two human beings who do not really have any other human beings who they even remotely trust, so the fact that they’ve found that in each other is something special. They feel protective of each other in different ways. And there’s commonalities between what we’re going through in terms of our magical afflictions. How do they feel about the non-magical world? I think our characters just don’t mess with any of it. We’ve been betrayed by both – repeatedly. I don’t think they have any reason to trust wizards, witches, muggles, anybody. They’ve only been survivors of abuse and exploitation at every turn. Do you think Paris gives this one a different vibe? We know very…

THE ATOM A year before Hank Pym debuted in Tales To Astonish, university professor Ray Palmer used white dwarf star matter that had fallen to Earth to create a lens that could shrink him to subatomic size. Later, he fashioned a costume from the material. ULTRAMAN This Japanese TV hero was a fusion of an alien from Nebula M78 and Shin Hayata, an agent for the Science Special Search Party. When giant monsters attacked, Hayata had only to press a capsule on his Beta Capsule to transform to 40 feet in height. THE PROTEUS CREW In Richard Fleischer’s 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, a crew of six mans a US Navy sub that’s miniaturised and injected into a scientist’s body to remove a blood clot. The makers of Doctor Who’s “The…

There’s lots more titles we couldn’t fit in, with a host of continuing series getting additional instalments. We gave to Frank Owen’s South (2016), set in an America where the civil war ended with the country split in two, devastated by viruses. Follow-up NORTH (6 December, Corvus) sees heroes Dyce and Vida setting out to eliminate the vicious Northern dictator. There’s also a fifth book in Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library series (we called the first “delightful”). Set in a steampunk fantasy version of 1890s Paris, THE MORTAL WORD (out now, Tor) sees librarian-spy Irene investigating the stabbing of a diplomat at a dragon/Fae summit. And Josiah Bancroft’s Books Of Babel, set in a vast, labyrinthine tower, has hit book three, THE HOD KING (6 December, Orbit). New titles, meanwhile, include…

QUESTION 1 Spider-Man made his first appearance in which 1962 comic, sold in auction in 2016 for a whopping $454,100? QUESTION 2 PICTURE QUESTION Which star from The Sound Of Music is behind the mask in the ’70s TV show? QUESTION 3 What was the name of the high school that Peter Parker attended in the comics? QUESTION 4 Which rock stars wrote the music and lyrics for Broadway show Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark? QUESTION 5 Which big-name Hollywood director wrote a “scriptment” for a Spider-Man movie in 1991 before the studio went bankrupt? QUESTION 6 PICTURE QUESTION Give the full real name of this multi-tentacled menace who first appeared in the comics in 1963. QUESTION 7 On which alien planet did Spidey acquire his black costume? Clue: he…

According to Bruce Willis, “Die Hard is not a Christmas movie.” Sorry, but I’m going to have to disagree with you there, Bruce – it’s set during the festive season, John McClane travelling home for Christmas is key to the plot, and now he has a machine gun: “Ho ho ho”. Okay, Hans Gruber and his cronies don’t go round singing carols on a crazed mulled wine binge, but Christmas runs through Nakatomi Plaza like sage and onion through a turkey. The same can be said of Gremlins. Like Die Hard, Joe Dante’s anarchic comedy-horror was released in the summer months and does little to celebrate peace on Earth and good will to all men. Yet it overflows with Christmas spirit. The creature that starts all the carnage, the implausibly…