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Dec 11, 2024 | 
reactormag.com | Jonathan Thornton |Christina Orlando |Jo Lindsay Walton |Ada Palmer
It’s time once again to look back at some of our favorite non-fiction articles from the past year! Today, we’re highlighting many of our favorite essays about books, reading, writing, and storytelling—there will be a separate list of articles discussing TV, movies, and other media coming soon.
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Sep 9, 2024 | 
reactormag.com | Jonathan Thornton
“Of course you changed nothing. The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied. Nobody can persuade owners to share with makers when makers won’t shift for themselves.” —Lanark, 554Alasdair Gray was a key figure of Scottish literature in the late 20th century, a socialist, and a talented visual artist, some of whose murals can still be seen around Glasgow today.
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May 15, 2024 | 
reactormag.com | A.S. Byatt |Jonathan Thornton
“In this misty land the borderline between myth, legend and fact is not decisive, my father says, as a stone arch might be between this world and another, but more like a series of moving veils or woven webs between one room and another.” —Possession, p. 400When A.S. Byatt passed away in November last year, the world lost a great fantasist as well as a Booker Prize-winning author.
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
reactormag.com | Robert Bennett |Chris Lough |Charlie Jane Anders |Jonathan Thornton
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett, a fantasy novel with a mystery twist out from Del Rey on February 6. In Daretana’s greatest mansion, a high imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree erupted from his body. Even here at the Empire’s borders, where contagions abound and the blood of the leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death both terrifying and impossible.
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
reactormag.com | Premee Mohamed |Chris Lough |Charlie Jane Anders |Jonathan Thornton
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed, out from Solaris on March 12. The Empires of Varkal and Med’ariz have always been at war. Alefret, the founder of Varkal’s pacifist resistance, was bombed and maimed by his own government, locked up in a secret prison and tortured by a ‘visionary’ scientist. But now they’re offering him a chance of freedom.
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
reactormag.com | Molly Templeton |Chris Lough |Charlie Jane Anders |Jonathan Thornton
If you, like me, were very excited when The Expanse’s Wes Chatham was cast on Ahsoka, and then somewhat let down by his relatively small role in the show—you may have reason to get your hopes up again. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Chatham mentioned a detail about Enoch’s appearance that may turn out to be very meaningful. That gold mask of his is not, as it turns out, just a weird-looking metal stormtrooper faceplate.
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
reactormag.com | Tobias Carroll |Chris Lough |Charlie Jane Anders |Jonathan Thornton
Half a life ago, I read the first part of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves for the first time. I was doing so inside my bedroom, the door closed, while my then-roommate watched television in the other room. After reading 70 or so pages of Danielewski’s novel, I became deeply unsettled, terrified that if I went to open the door, the rest of the apartment wouldn’t be there and instead something completely unexpected would be.
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
reactormag.com | James Davis Nicoll |Chris Lough |Charlie Jane Anders |Jonathan Thornton
Few challenges are as vexing to ardent space colonization fans as the continued existence of Earth. Earth possesses a notoriously socialistic biosphere, one where even peons can breathe unmetered air, where food literally grows out of the ground, where the magnetosphere and a thick blanket of air protects even the undeserving poor from an endless sleet of radiation.
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
reactormag.com | Molly Templeton |Chris Lough |Charlie Jane Anders |Jonathan Thornton
We are barely a month into a fresh new year and already I have far too many feelings about how we talk about books, about reading, and about our relationship, as readers, to books, and to the having and shelving and displaying of them. It started with The Washington Post, reporting on a recent poll about reading. Polls about reading are, as far as I can tell, always depressing, either because of the results, or because of the way people discuss the results. This is maybe both.
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
reactormag.com | Vanessa Armstrong |Chris Lough |Charlie Jane Anders |Jonathan Thornton
Looking for a haunted house story set in a near-dystopian-future? If so, History of Evil has got you covered.
