Jay Bendt is a Minnesota-based illustrator who has been making art and telling stories her entire life. In addition to colorful-yet-spooky works like these four—created for the Month of Fear challenge in October 2015—she co-authors the supernatural-themed webcomic Nightshade with writer Jacob Mandell.

Sabbath

Blink

I Will Have Order

Red, with the artist’s explanation:

A reimagining of the ending of well-known fairytale Little Red Riding Hood, in which Red becomes the hunter instead of the hunted, ultimately wearing the wolf as a cape.

Check out more of Jay Bendt’s art at her website and Tumblr blog; and follow webcomic Nightshade, which posts new updates on Tuesdays, right here (and if you like what you see, check out the Nightshade Patreon, too).

Set 7,900 ft above sea level, on the outskirts of the Atacama Desert, the La Silla Observatory has an amazing view of the night sky. So good, in fact, that it’s possible to capture other-worldly photos like this, where space and Earth seem to exist as one.

This image shows the Geminid meteor as it whistles through the sky above the cool vista of the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla telescope domes. It’s difficult to believe that it’s not two separate images. If you don’t believe your eyes either, just read the original caption:

A colourful meteor photographed above La Silla telescope domes and inversion layer in the southern outskirts of the Atacama desert, Chile. The close-up view of the meteor shows a stumbling path which is the actual aerodynamic flight path of the meteoroid, due to the shape of the object as it spins and spirals through the atmosphere. This European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) site has telescopes which observe at optical and infrared. The largest optical telescope has a mirror with a diameter of 3.6 metres. The high altitude of La Silla (2400 metres), the dark sky, and the clear air above it (reducing atmospheric distortions of incoming light), make the site an ideal location for astronomical observations.

Here is the full image:

[ESO/B. Tafreshi (twanight.org)]

Dwarf planet Ceres’ bright spots are perhaps the strangest of all its features. Now we’re finally in a low-enough altitude to get an unprecedented close-up look—and what we’re seeing may only have deepened the mystery.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft swung into its lowest orbit yet—a cool cruising height of 240 miles and started snapping pictures of a variety of features of the dwarf planet. Most of the shots are detailed images of things we’d already caught in broad-stroke versions, but there’s also a clue to something perhaps bigger.

So what’s the big surprise? It’s that researchers are not sure that the glowing areas of the Kupalo Crater (pictured above) are caused by the same process as the ones they identified on the Occator Crater late last year.

In that case, the likely cause was salt. But in this one, researchers are not yet ready to make a final call. It could be salt, they say, but it could also be a different, as yet unknown, cause.

Here’s the full slate of new snaps:

Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

In case you were worried that Heroes Reborn would continue after its January 21 finale—and lord knows I was—you may now breathe a sigh of relief that Tommy the Teleporting Boy, Chuck on Fire, Rejected ‘90s Sega Mascot Samurai Girl will no longer darken your TV screen.

Not that anyone had ever said the dread words “Heroes Reborn season 2" out loud, but NBC confirmed the franchise is done yet again. Via TV Line:

“As far as I know there are no more incarnations of Heroes coming,” NBC entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt told reporters Wednesday at the Television Critics Assoc. winter press tour in Pasadena, adding that it was “always the plan” to do just one season “unless [series creator] Tim [Kring] woke up one day and said, ‘Oh, I have another chapter to tell.’

In Heroes Reborn’s defense, I will say that the show was, on occasion, inoffensively mediocre. On the other hand, it also occasionally wasn’t.

Contact the author at rob@io9.com.

When Kurt Vonnegut was working as a PR flak at General Electric, his older brother Bernard was a famous scientist. And Kurt was there when Bernard demonstrated his incredible new invention: a way to seed clouds with dry ice and silver iodide and make it rain. Could this be used as a weapon?

At the time, Bernard Vonnegut really believed that we had the means to control the weather and reshape the climate. And the U.S. military was very interested in using this to attack enemy forces by redirecting hurricanes and other natural disasters towards them. It wasn’t until later that we discovered cloud-seeding was much less powerful than Bernard had believed

But this dramatic demonstration had a powerful effect on Kurt Vonnegut, as author Ginger Strand explains to the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Vonnegut believed he was seeing a science-fictional scenario coming to life—weather manipulation, along with weather-based weapons! Strand has written a new book about this time in the author’s life, called The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic.

http://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Vonne...

[via SFSignal]

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming Jan 26 from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

It looks like Megalyn Echikunwoke’s appearance on Arrow next week is only the first step for Vixen. According to CW president Mark Pedowitz, the hope is to use a series of small appearances by the character to jumpstart a spinoff.

At the network’s Television Critics Association Panel, Pedowitz said that, although there are no plans for a female-led superhero show right now, “Hopefully, that character could actually spin itself out, if not, maybe join as one of the Legends [of Tomorrow].”

Well, first of all, Legends of Tomorrow is rapidly becoming DC TV’s Island of Misfit toys. It hasn’t even aired yet, but they’re putting every homeless DC character they can find on it.

Second, the CW is playing a fascinating game with Vixen. Right now, Vixen lives as an animated series online. The CW’s streaming network is called “Seed,” which is indicative of it’s place as an workshop for potential ideas. It’s similar to the way that Amazon makes its pilots available to the public. It absolves the company of having to make decisions without already knowing how audiences feel. So if Vixen’s second season (and her live action appearance) do well, the CW won’t leave that money on the table. Basically, Pedowitz is saying that if we come, they will build it.

[Collider via Comic Book Movie]

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

Amber Heard is in talks to join the DC cinematic universe as Mera, the aquatic love interest of Aquaman. THR says her character would first appear in the Justice League movie before starring in Aquaman with Jason Momoa.

If you don’t know Mera, she’s noteworthy for a few reasons: 1) she’s no damsel-in-distress, as she’s at least as much a warrior as Aquaman. 2) She can control water telekinetically, making her more useful than Aquaman on many occasions. 3) She’s not exactly an Atlantean in the comics, but comes from someplace called Dimension Aqua (although to be fair I’m not sure what her status is in the New 52). 4) She was Queen of Atlantis, having married Aquaman back in the early ‘80s until... 5) the marriage was annulled when DC switched to the New 52. (They’re still romantic partners, but they’re fornicating out of wedlock now, thanks to DC’s new “no marriage for heroes” policy.)

I gotta admit, if the DC movies turned regular old Aquaman’s costume into this:

Then I’m super-excited to see what they do with this.

Contact the author at rob@io9.com.

This was one of the two greatest moments in “Method Head.” We usually see Liv’s visions from her perspective, and they’re usually dramatic or funny or plot-related. But this time we see how it looks from the outside. And Liv looks like her brain broke.

Spoilers follow.

The other greatest moment of last night?

Steven Weber is a national treasure. I don’t care that he’s playing a villain in this show, I hope they never defeat him. I want him and his elastic face and superb line delivery to stay forever. Like this exchange:

Gilda: You know what Mom used to say about you?

Vaughn: “I should have gotten that man’s name”?

He’s great working out with Major, he’s great wearing the bug Major gave him, and he’s especially great testing Major’s resolve in a new and terrifying way. Major’s decided the best way to defeat Vaughn is by cozying up to him and gathering info. Since Gilda figured out he was buttering Vaughn up, Vaughn arranged for one of his scientists to “betray” him. Major turned him in, and Vaughn came inches away from feeding his patsy to some zombies. More great faces from Weber when he pretends he can’t hear the scientist’s cries for help, by the way.

Vaughn saves the dude in the nick of time and Major’s in.

In murder news, Babineaux lets Liv back on the inside when there’s a murder on the set of her favorite show, Zombie High. And that bit of writing is a masterpiece. For one thing, the bits we see of the show are almost exactly the kind of sexy teen apocalypse that lives on the CW with iZombie. For another, they get to say things about how a show with a zombie main character would be stupid. And about sketchy zombie science.

Combined with Ravi and Major making fun of Liv’s vision face and Liv and Clive playacting their last rift for the sake of a confession, we’ve got an episode shaped like an ouroboros. It’s all very meta and, like so much about this show, perfectly executed.

On any other show, this could get precious and twee fast. On iZombie, it’s perfection.

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

Fantastic Four was a huge mess in every way. Even its marketing wasn’t exactly dynamic and exciting, its posters full of a sullen Fantastic Four glaring out at you. But oh, what might have been, if we take a look at the art of Dave Rapoza, who helped plan Fox’s original ideas for the film’s posters.

Rapoza—who you might remember from his recent comic kickstarter Steve Lichman—recently shared these pictures of his work on his Tumblr, explaining that he’d been hired by 20th Century Fox marketing in 2014 to previsualize a series of posters for the then-upcoming film. “Well, initially I was approached by Neri Rivas, my Art Director, because of a small series of X-Men portraits I had done in a comic book style,” Rapoza told io9. “They were throwbacks to my old favorite versions of all the X-Men from the early 90s and the posters were done with retro colors and were sort of made to look old.”

“At the time, Neri was looking for someone to help on X-Men: Days of Future Past, he wanted to have a more traditional retro comic vibe for the marketing. So, we worked together for a few weeks and I was able to use the style I had done previous in hopes that they’d use it for the campaign. Unfortunately it didn’t work out, although some small elements did make it through to final photo manipulated posters.”

But although his work didn’t make the cut for Days of Future Past, Rivas returned to Rapoza when Fox was preparing for Fantastic Four. At the stage he was brought on, barely anything about the film’s visual aesthetic, or even the appearances of the cast, were nailed down. “ At the time, everyone already knew that Michael B. Jordan would be cast as Johnny Storm. Outside of that, I only really knew that the tone was going to be more serious than the previous Fantastic 4 movies,” Rapoza added. “I don’t know if Neri knew, I don’t think he did, but I certainly didn’t know what the costumes would look like. But that’s ok when you’re doing the work I’m doing because really all I need to nail down is the composition and the vibe of the marketing campaign. Everything else can be plugged in afterward.”

As time went on, though, Rapoza started learning a little more about the movie—for example, the surprising fact that the team would spend most of the film not in their classic uniforms. “We learned as the job went on that they would most likely be in regular street clothes for most of the movie, but I also wanted to have fun so I just designed whatever I thought they should look like,” Rapoza joked. He also chose to highlight the Thing’s transformation in each poster. “I had a feeling that the Thing might want to show his face in the final movie, I’m glad they didn’t go for that, but that’s why in mine I wanted to show the actor’s face in mid-transformation. Basically, it’s mostly guess work on my part for the outfits and their appearance.”

Although Rapoza had to design both team posters and individual character ones, his main goal was to emphasis the Fantastic Four as a unit—something the movie itself ended up diverging from. “The first thing I really wanted to focus on, outside of the single character shots, was the team coming at us as a unit. I never liked when teams of characters like this seemed to function as individual heroes in movies, doing their own thing, so I wanted to make the compositions seem like they were flowing together,” said Rapoza. “I tried to make them feel like they were mixing together as they rushed forward at the viewer, as a team.”

It wasn’t just in that regard that Rapoza’s work started to diverge from what the film would become. “I really wanted to nail down an energy I really hadn’t seen from the Fantastic 4 so far. I don’t have a lot of love for making everything dark and gloomy with the super-serious vibe, so I wanted to counter the aggressive mood with some lighter colors.”

So what makes a good poster concept stand out? Rapoza told us that the key was to establish a vivid sense of mood in every drawing. “Everything is mood to me. I want to show whatever I think is the coolest aspects of the characters, if it is about characters in the movie, and show that above all else. I always think back to when I was a kid and the feeling I had playing with action figures, making my own poses and trying to move them around for different camera angles.”

Ultimately, many of Rapoza’s ideas were left out of the final Fantastic Four marketing campaign—possibly due to the fact that the film strayed far beyond the fantastical scifi of the comic books, to the radically gritty tone Rapoza had pointedly avoided. “I love what I do and I love working with people like Neri, I could never complain,” Rapoza concluded. “I totally understand that my direction did not line up with the movie, and am right there with them that they should not have been used. My posters were more focused on the comic book’s idea of the heroes, while the movie went in a different direction entirely.”

You can see more of Rapoza’s work on his Tumblr, as well as over on his professional site.

Image Credits: Dave Rapoza/20th Century Fox. Used with express permission of the artist.

While watching the latest episode of The Shannara Chronicles, I realized what this show reminded me of: the first time a Dungeons and Dragons campaign sets out, with everyone starting at their first level.

Everyone’s ambitious, but nobody knows what they’re doing, and that’s pretty much where all of our characters are at here, with the exception of Allanon, who’s being played by that one older kid who’s played D&D for years. Wil is just along for the ride, somewhat eager to learn from Allanon, while Amberle just messed things up and doesn’t know how to fix it. Eretria? She’s just messing with people because she doesn’t want to be there, but she’s getting sucked in. At some point, everyone will be a nice, happy band of players, but for the moment? They’re still learning the ropes.

While they’re all getting the hang of it, they’re all rolling critical misses. It’s a bit of a train wreck: Wil and Amberle get captured *again*, get saved by Allanon twice, and get sucked into three or four side adventures as they bumble around.

It’s fun to watch, and pretty, but man, I hope that they get their feet below them soon, because it’s going to get painful before too long.

As you count down the minutes to tonight’s American Horror Story: Hotel finale, feast your peepers on this clip highlighting the work of the show’s talented makeup crew. You’ll get your longest look yet at a character who has thus far has made only brief, yet horrifying, appearances: the Addiction Demon.

Two big takeaways. First, the lanky actor who plays said demon must have zero claustrophobia issues. And second, the monster’s full-body suit is meant to resemble exactly what you thought it does: a clammy, wet, used condom. Eeek!

Every week, we’re bombarded with images of dazzling terrains on Mars and Pluto, but there are still geologic wonders to be discovered right here on Earth. Case in point: a new study suggests there could be a canyon system more than twice as long as the Grand Canyon buried beneath an ice sheet in Antarctica. If confirmed, the frozen chasm would be the world’s longest by a wide margin.

Faint traces of a ravine system stretching across the remote Princess Elizabeth Land in East Antarctica were first spotted by satellite images. A team of geologists then used radio-echo sounding, wherein radio waves are sent through the ice to map the shape of the rock beneath it. The results of this analysis, published recently in the journal Geology, reveal a chain of winding features over 600 miles long and half a mile deep buried beneath miles of ice.

According to the researchers, the scarred landscape was probably carved out by liquid water long before the ice sheet grew. Satellite images also suggest that the canyon might be connected to a previously undiscovered subglacial lake, one that could cover up to 480 square miles.

“It’s astonishing to think that such large features could have avoided detection for so long,” lead study author Steward Jamieson of Durham University said in a statement.

Astonishing, yes—but not quite confirmed. We won’t know for sure that this canyon really exists until Jamieson’s preliminary results are verified by a comprehensive radio-echo sounding analysis of the entire landscape. That airborne survey is scheduled to take place later this year.

If its existence is confirmed, the canyon system will become the world’s longest, handily stealing the title from Greenland’s Grand Canyon, which covers over 460 miles. Astonishingly, that canyon wasn’t discovered until 2013, when remote sensing data allowed scientists to peer through thick ice and reconstruct the rugged topography below. If one thing is clear from this recent spate of geologic finds, it’s that the age of discovery is far from over.

Read the full scientific paper at Geology.

Follow the author @themadstone

“Rock Bottom,” true to its title, basically spent an hour trying to one-up itself in how dark and bad things could get for its characters. The remaining Canterbury survivors get off the lightest. The random characters on the freighter—Mateo and Diogo—have it brutal. But Dawes and Miller get it worst of all.

Spoilers...

The biggest theme from last night’s episode was “making deals with extremists.” Holden’s got it relatively easy because, for all that he and Fred Johnson circle each other warily, Johnson’s a mostly honorable man. So while Holden leverages his crew’s eye witness accounts of the way the Cant and the Donnager died and puts safeguards on the Rocinante, Johnson does eventually send Holden and his crew off to meet a contact of his. A contact which will hopefully provide answers about what happen to the Scopuli. There’s even a lovely moment where the whole crew, even Amos, defy Holden and join him. So they do not get the darkest moment award this week.

Mateo and Diogo’s inclusion is utterly baffling. Unless I missed some clue hidden here, the only purpose they serve is to remind us that everyone hates everyone out in space. Although Mateo chucking Diogo into space and Diogo’s cries for him to stop are chilling, it lacks a bit of weight.

So, on balance, it’s Miller and Dawes that take the cake for a cascade of nightmares. Miller accuses Dawes of sending people—Julie, really—to die for his pointless cause. Dawes makes fun of Miller’s “crush” on Julie. And then tells the story in the above video. Just in case you didn’t get how dire things could get. Jared Harris and Thomas Jane are so, so good every time they have scenes together. It works exactly the way the Mateo and Diogo scenes don’t.

There’s real weight and history for these two, and it’s totally understandable how, despite both being Belters, they ended up on opposite sides. Dawes cares about the big picture of life in the Belt. Miller cares about justice for individuals.

So while Miller’s figured out chunks of the conspiracy behind what happened to Julie—in a way that’s playing out very differently from the book—he’s gotten to the stage in every thriller where what he knows gets his ass handed to him. He’s fired, and since his security job was the only thing protecting him from the OPA, he’s screwed.

Congrats to Miller. He may be the in the worst position of any of our main characters right now, but, in this show, that’s an accomplishment.

Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

I know the third season of Orphan Black ended on a down note for the members of Clone Club in a lot of ways, but it was positively cheery compared to this first season 4 trailer.

It’s clear all the clones are in horrible danger—I mean, they’ve pretty much always been in horrible danger, but this is like extra horrible danger. Cosima collapsing to the ground? Alison attacked? Little girl’s sock monkeys on fire? Yeesh. I swear, though, if Cosima dies I’ll riot. I’ll keep watching because Orphan Black is so good, but I won’t be happy about it.

Contact the author at rob@io9.com.

Diablo III’s long awaited patch 2.4 is now live both in the US and in the EU. It’s quite a big update with new zones, items, game mechanics and small tweaks. The game feels a lot different if you haven’t played in months.

The full patch notes are over here, if you wanna see them. For now, let’s focus on some of the most interesting new additions:

Greyhollow Island

There’s a new area called Greyhollow Island added to the game. It’s accessible through Act V’s map and what’s cool about it is that it’s not just a copy-paste of old tilesets, but a completely new, swampy, dark place with new monsters to kill and events to find.

Set Dungeons

Besides Greyhollow Island the other big new feature in 2.4 are set dungeons. They’re pre-generated dungeons (24 of them) designed around specific set items. Once you’ve collected all six pieces of a chosen set, its set dungeon will unlock somewhere in the map. Finding the entrances might be a bit tricky (you can find clues in Leoric’s Library though), but this clip showing all the locations might help:

Item changes and new legendaries

New patch, new season, and that means your current gear won’t do it anymore. (Check the official patch notes and you’ll see most of it is about item and class changes). But it also means new powerful items are added to the game. One of my favorites is a Barbarian mighty legendary called “Blade of the Tribes” and its earth shattering powers:

There’s a Diablo II Stormshield hidden in the new Royal Quarters zone

It’s purely a cosmetic item, but it’s still worth grabbing it. It looks really good! The item’s inside Leoric’s Manor in the new Royal Quarters zone. You’ll find a secret bookcase with the shield lying on an armor rack. Here’s a small video by GameByNumber showing where exactly it is.

More inventory space

We will need those stash tabs for all the set pieces. A sixth one is now purchasable for 500,000 gold and additional ones can be unlocked by completing Seasonal objectives.

Rebirth

Managing characters can get a bit confusing for veteran players with all the non-seasonal, seasonal, old and fresh characters piling up on an account. This new feature allows us to transform a non-seasonal hero to a fresh level 1 seasonal one, maintaining its name, the character record and the gear (which will be in the mail and can be collected by non-seasonal characters). Basically this is an awesome feature for people who like to play the same character over and over.

Cosmetic pets can now pick up gold

Well, cosmetic pets are no longer cosmetic. They have a function now and it’s pretty useful in the long run.

Good news for Keywarden hunters

An arrow now indicates the location of a Keywarden, if one’s present, in the current zone. Hooray! No more fooling around in Act 1's Fields of Misery.

To contact the author of this post, write to: gergovas@kotaku.com

Cassandra Clare’s YA book series begat the 2013 film The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones—a box-office disappointment that didn’t capture why so many people loved the books. Round two: TV adaptation Shadowhunters, which is actually way better suited to the dark fantasy material.

Episodes one and two of Shadowhunters are available online, and the series debuted on Freeform last night. Spoilers if you haven’t caught up yet!

First, a sidenote on Freeform: If you’ve never heard of it, it’s the jazzed-up new identity of ABC Family. And if there’s any doubt about the direction the network is going, just know that McG—whose films all look like the slick music videos that launched his career—directed the series’ first two installments.

You need not have read a single page of Clare’s writing, nor have seen the film, to get quickly up to speed on the world of Clary Fray. The first two episodes are jam-packed with exposition, as a gobsmacked Clary learns that she’s not just a New York City art student who’s been raised by a single mom, but also part of a mystical race sworn to protect humans from demons.

Shadowhunters thus offers up yet another spin on the “You are secretly special!” trope that’s so prevalent in YA fantasy; think Harry Potter, Bella Swan, Beatrice Prior, the kid from The Giver, etc. In Clary’s case, it means she gets to be part of a secret group that takes its style cues from goth culture and 1990s fashion (lots of black leather and carefully styled hair—but those rune burns sure do look like tribal tattoos). Fortunately, the petite, flame-haired Clary is just as good-looking as the rest of them, because it would sure be awkward if she had to be the only fugly Shadowhunter. (In this world, humans are called “mundanes,” which is even more insulting than “muggles,” no?)

Into this world of glowing weapons and supernatural creatures with ancient beefs (so far, we’ve also met immortal warlocks, shape-shifting demons, vampires, and a werewolf) Clary plunges, as bewildered as you might imagine. Her mother, Jocelyn, has been kidnapped by a bad guy named Valentine (how bad? His HQ is at freakin’ Chernobyl), and everybody wants to get their hands on a long-missing talisman called the “Mortal Cup.”

Thing is, the events of episode one and two could have been entirely avoided, or at least handled way better, if either of these two things had happened:

1) Clary could have paused her 18th birthday celebration to hear her mother out, because sometimes when your mom says “I need to tell you something important,” it’s a life-or-death situation instead of Mom warning you not to text and drive.

2) Jocelyn could have trusted her daughter to fill her in way earlier than, like, the evening of the day she turned 18 and became vulnerable to all this bad magic. Instead, Clary’s been getting Men in Black-style memory wipes since she was 10 years old. “I wish my mom had trusted me enough to tell me abut all this,” she mutters—and we have to agree, especially after the hunkiest Shadowhunter of them all, Jace, tells her “In the shadow world, no planning or training will get you killed.”

Those frustrations aside, which are typical of every fantasy epic, this silly show is actually entertaining. Especially if you don’t take it too seriously. Shadowhunters may not outwardly appear to be a comedy, but lines like “Literally, my brain is about to explode!”—as gasped by Clary as she learns all the truths outlined above—are surely a wink to the audience.

See for yourself:

How could The Winds of Winter get published just three months after George R.R. Martin finishes it? Over at Tor.com, there’s a great breakdown of why book production generally takes a year, and how they might streamline it for A Song of Ice and Fire.

Top image: 2016 Song of Ice and Fire calendar, art by Magali Villeneuve. (More here.)

http://www.amazon.com/Song-Ice-Fire-...

Contact the author at charliejane.anders@gizmodo.com and follow her on Twitter @CharlieJane

Most U.S. readers probably haven’t heard of Leena Krohn, but among connoisseurs of weird fiction like Jeff VanderMeer, she’s a beloved icon. She’s also the winner of the Finlandia Prize, the most prestigious literary honor in her native Finland. And it’s a great time to discover her bizarre stories.

In the New Yorker, there’s a great feature about her by Peter Bebergal, who deconstructs some of her stories in which people begin to glimpse the unspeakable depths below the surface of reality. In one story, a woman who eats poisonous seeds to help treat her asthma starts seeing weird supernatural hallucinations and getting closer to the “sublime secret of existence.” In another, a robot begins to experience fear, and in a third, a city of insects try to light themselves on fire.

Cheeky Frawg Press recently published a book of Krohn’s stories in translation, so her work is more accessible than ever. There’s also a novel, called Datura (Or a Delusion We All See).

http://www.amazon.com/Leena-Krohn-Co...

Bebergal’s interview with Krohn, done via translated emails, contains some great gems, like where she says that “absolute reality is and always will be unknowable to us.” And she points out that human beings aren’t the only ones with language—ants convey very sophisticated information to each other, at great speeds. Also, there’s a lovely passage from one of her stories, about the consciousness of dogs: “Their lives are balancing acts between a humanized being and an older, wilder nature. Dogs are interstitial beings, not yet human, but no longer wolves. That is the unresolved paradox of doghood.”

You can read one of Krohn’s stories, translated by Viivi Hyvönen, over at Electric Literature. In “Lucilia Illustris,” an entomologist is summoned to a dead body that is being consumed by insects, to help figure out the time of death and other information. And this turns into a meditation on insects, decay and death.

Bebergal’s feature on Krohn is also well worth reading in its entirety. (And you can also read our interview with Bebergal from 2014 about his book on rock’n’roll and Satanism.)

Top image: cover art of Datura by Leena Krohn

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming Jan 26 from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

James Patterson hasn’t always written science fantasy or fantasy, apart from his recent young-adult series. But he’s radically changed the whole publishing industry, and especially the way that genre fiction is handled, over the past two decades. The New York Times has a fascinating look at “Patterson, Inc.”

As the Times notes, since 2006, one out of every 17 novels that were bought in the United States was written by Patterson, who has had 51 New York Times bestsellers. And the Times piece is a deep investigation of how Patterson, who has a background in advertising, helped to invent the “blockbuster” novel as we know it with his push for more aggressive promotion and sharper packaging of his incredibly prolific output. Including slick television ads and carefully crafted messages.

And it’s probably no coincidence that the mid-1990s, when Patterson started his push in earnest, was around the same time that you started to hear genre authors bemoan that there was no longer a place for the “midlist” author, the person whose books sold tens of thousands of copies rather than hundreds of thousands.

The Times article gives a pretty good summary of how publishing has changed over the past few decades:

The story of the blockbuster’s explosion is, paradoxically, bound up with that of publishing’s recent troubles. They each began with the wave of consolidation that swept through the industry in the 1980s. Unsatisfied with publishing’s small margins, the new conglomerates that now owned the various publishing houses pressed for bigger best sellers and larger profits. Mass-market fiction had historically been a paperback business, but publishers now put more energy and resources into selling these same books as hardcovers, with their vastly more favorable profit margins. At the same time, large stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders were elbowing out independent booksellers. Their growing dominance of the market gave them the leverage to demand wholesale discounts and charge hefty sums for favorable store placement, forcing publishers to sell still more books. Big-box stores like Costco accelerated the trend by stocking large quantities of books by a small group of authors and offering steep discounts on them. Under pressure from both their parent companies and booksellers, publishers became less and less willing to gamble on undiscovered talent and more inclined to hoard their resources for their most bankable authors. The effect was self-fulfilling. The few books that publishers invested heavily in sold; most of the rest didn’t. And the blockbuster became even bigger.

And there’s a telling quote from the former CEO of the Time Warner Book Group, Larry Kirshbaum, who says the publishing industry had always resisted “the thought that you could mass-merchandise authors,” until Patterson came along. Of course, other authors—like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling—had a lot to do with it as well. But it’s super interesting to get a window into the mindset that shaped the world we live in now.

Image via NeoGAF. [via SFSignal and TeleRead]

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming Jan 26 from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

We may never get another live-action Firefly movie or TV show. So every bit of Firefly media that we do get is precious—and that explains why Browncoats became so excited about Firefly Online, the online role-playing game. But what’s become of this project?

We first heard about Firefly Online at Comic-Con 2013, and there was a cool teaser trailer. Later that year, we saw some pretty amazing concept art and models. And a year after the first announcement, at Comic-Con 2014, we learned the entire cast of the original TV show would reunite for the game. At that time, the game was supposed to launch in spring 2015.

So what’s been going on with Firefly Online? We caught up with John O’Neill, the CEO of Spark Plug Games, which is leading development of the game, and he told us the game is still in Alpha testing, where “we are balancing the remaining features with community feedback and users’ experience.”

So what’s the reason for the delay? Basically, they had done a ton of development work on the game, and then they suddenly got all the original Firefly actors on board, O’Neill says. This was an awesome addition to the game, because “who wouldn’t want to be around Malcolm Reynolds [and] get on his bad side?” But, adds O’Neill, it also meant that most of the work they had done up until that point had to be thrown out because they had planned a game that didn’t include any of the original characters from the TV show and movie. “We’re having to change everything,” O’Neill says.

Spark Plug has also taken on more of a primary role as developer on the game, working with Quantum Mechanix and Fox. Right now, they’re at a point of “looking at how we get the product to a launch state,” O’Neill explains. This includes deciding when to start sharing more of the features of the game—some of which you already glimpsed in the art and teasers that were released in 2013-2014, but many of which have changed completely as a result of the original cast joining the game in the summer of 2014.

O’Neill adds that they’re deliberately keeping quiet about the status of Firefly Online for now, because “we don’t want to let the fans down by saying something that’s wrong again.” From his perspective, he can see how things have “changed for the better,” but he knows that looking at it from the outside, “it’s frustrating.” He adds, “We feel a very strong responsibility to make sure that any information going forward is accurate and doesn’t change.”

In general, when you’re working on a big property like the Firefly game, you don’t want to reveal the major features until it’s close to release, O’Neill adds. But he’s also been impressed with how supportive the show’s fans have been.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming Jan 26 from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.