The film adaptation of the immensely popular sci-fi novel Mickey7 has been in the works for years, but now we finally have a trailer and it’s filled with surprises. For one thing, it’s now called Mickey17 and, well, fans of the book know exactly what that implies. It means they’re in for an even crazier experience than what’s written on the page.
The movie is written and directed by one of the modern masters, Bong Joon Ho, who seems to have taken some liberties with the source material. Light spoilers, but the book follows a series of clones of the titular Mickey as they perform the grunt work of colonizing an exoplanet. The book chronicles seven (ish) Mickey variants, but the movie is amping this up to at least 17. This will give us plenty more darkly hilarious clone deaths, which the trailer shows quite a lot of.
The novel is right up Bong Joon Ho’s alley. Clones are basically second-class citizens who exist to die for their corporate overlords. This leaves plenty of room for social satire in the vein of both Snowpiercer and Parasite. The trailer leans into this stuff and the results look truly entertaining and, believe it or not, really funny. We love to see unique IPs in the cinema, don’t we folks?
The various Mickeys are played by Robert Pattinson, so that’ll get some butts in the seats. The cast also includes Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette and Mark Ruffalo. As a book reader, I know who everyone is playing except for Ruffalo. That looks like a brand-new character, though he could be an amalgamation of a couple of minor players. Adaptations require some dark alchemy at times.
This could be the first big hit of 2025. It arrives in theaters on January 31. There’s also some franchise potential here, as the book already has one sequel and author Edward Ashton has been toying with ideas for a third entry.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/bong-joon-hos-mickey17-trailer-is-even-crazier-than-the-book-170004844.html?src=rss
New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.
The Night Guest by Hildur Knútsdóttir
Anyone who lives with a difficult-to-diagnose chronic illness and has endured the demoralizing process of trying to get proper treatment can tell you it is, at times, a living nightmare. Advocating for yourself, fighting to be taken seriously; it’s something I’ve dealt with most of my life as a person with autoimmune diseases. So when I read the description of Hildur Knútsdóttir’s psychological horror novel, The Night Guest, it resonated with me immediately:
Iðunn is in yet another doctor's office. She knows her constant fatigue is a sign that something's not right, but practitioners dismiss her symptoms and blood tests haven't revealed any cause. When she talks to friends and family about it, the refrain is the same ― have you tried eating better? exercising more? establishing a nighttime routine? She tries to follow their advice, buying everything from vitamins to sleeping pills to a step-counting watch. Nothing helps. Until one night Iðunn falls asleep with the watch on, and wakes up to find she’s walked over 40,000 steps in the night . . . What is happening when she’s asleep?
The Night Guest is a short, compelling read that puts an unsettling spin on an issue that a lot of people — especially women — can relate to. I pretty much inhaled it.
Is Earth Exceptional? The Quest for Cosmic Life by Mario Livio and Jack Szostak
The origin of life and the question of whether it exists elsewhere is a topic I find to be endlessly interesting (as evidenced by how regularly books about it land among these recommendations). In their new book Is Earth Exceptional? The Quest for Cosmic Life, astrophysicist Mario Livio and Nobel Prize winning biologist Jack Szostak examine what we know about the things that make life possible — the building blocks of life — and explore how they could have emerged on Earth and, hypothetically, elsewhere. At the heart of the mystery is the as yet unanswered question of whether or not life came to be as the result of a freak accident.
As the authors write in their introduction, “Even with the enormous scientific progress we have witnessed in the past few decades, we still don’t know whether life is an extremely rare chemical accident, in which case we may be alone in our galaxy, or a chemical inevitability, which would potentially make us part of a huge galactic ensemble.”
Into the Unbeing by Zac Thompson, Hayden Sherman
In 2034 as imagined by Into the Unbeing, Earth is well past the tipping point of climate change. The planet has been devastated by natural disasters and species have died off in the masses. Looking for anything that can help improve the world’s situation, a team of climate scientists with the Scientific Institute for Nascent Ecology and Worlds (SINEW) ventures out to explore what appears to be an entirely new environment that has popped up out of nowhere near their camp in the Australian outback. But they’re not prepared for what they find.
Into the Unbeing is a new gripping science-fiction series that weaves in cosmic horror. The first issue came out at the beginning of the summer, and Part One just wrapped up this week with issue number four. If you were into Scavengers Reign or The Southern Reach Trilogy, you’ll probably enjoy Into the Unbeing. The art alone will suck you right in.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/what-to-read-this-weekend-the-night-guest-is-earth-exceptional-and-into-the-unbeing-194524310.html?src=rss
In case the many books and films from the Twilight universe haven't provided enough fodder for your fandom, there's a new TV project in the works about the love-em-or-hate-em sparkly vampires of the Pacific Northwest. An animated series adaptation of Midnight Sun is currently in development at Netflix. Published in 2020, Midnight Sun is a companion to the original Twilight novel, telling the same events of that book from the perspective of Edward Cullen. Yes, the sick, masochistic lion gets to share his side of the story of how he falls for the stupid lamb known as Bella Swan.
The announcement from Netflix doesn't share much beyond the show's existence and the production team. Author Stephanie Meyer will be an executive producer for the series, as she has been for most other projects in the Twilight realm. The only other notable behind-the-scenes news is that Sinead Daly will be the series' writer as well as an executive producer. Daly's past writing credits include Tell Me Lies, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency andThe Get Down.
The art team can make or break an animated show's success, so I'm very curious to find out what studio will be brave enough to try recapturing the classic image of Robert Pattinson nearly losing his lunch at his first contact with Kristen Stewart and her intoxicating blood. That and other details about cast and release date will be revealed closer to the show's debut.
Netflix has been putting a lot of resources into its animated programming slate. The streaming service has picked up several series inspired by video game franchises, such as Arcane,Tomb Raider and Minecraft.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/netflix-is-working-on-an-animated-twilight-tv-show-based-on-midnight-sun-204052491.html?src=rss
The Internet Archive is starting to run out of legal options. Wired reports that the non-profit internet cataloguer of videos, games and books lost its appeal in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The court rejected Archive.org’s claim in its ongoing lawsuit with several high profile book publishers that its virtual library of books can legally operate under the fair use doctrine.
The lawsuit stems from the online archive’s National Emergency Library (NEL) that launched in March 2020. The NEL helped readers access library materials during the COVID pandemic with digitized copies of books that users could check out one at a time. Sometime later, the Internet Archive allowed users to check out an unlimited number of e-books and authors like Colson Whitehead and Neil Gaiman as well as the Authors Guild condemned the NEL, according to NPR.
The website reinstated the book borrowing caps but it didn’t stop publishers like Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Random House from filing a lawsuit the following June. Less than three years later, a federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs declaring the non-profit website violated the publishers’ copyright protections.
The only upside for Archive.org’s appeal is the court’s recognition of the Internet Archive as a non-commercial entity. The Internet Archive still faces a separate copyright infringement lawsuit over its music digitization projects brought by Universal Music Group and Sony last year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/the-internet-archive-loses-its-appeal-of-ebook-copyright-case-ruling-202452279.html?src=rss
Connections, the daily word game from The New York Times, isn’t exactly easy. In fact, the solve rate dips below 50 percent some days. To help highlight where players are going wrong, a new bot is employing AI to guess the thought process they’re using for the most common mistakes every day.
For the uninitiated, Connections is a word/logic game that the paper of record debuted last year. Every day, you're presented with a grid of 16 words that you have to split into four categories. There’s only one solution and after four mistakes, the game is over. However, there’s some trickiness afoot. There are often red herrings galore and frequently at least five viable answers for a group.
After you win or lose each day’s game, you can saunter over to the Connections Bot. As with the bot for Wordle, you’ll see how well you did compared with other players and receive a skill score out of 99. This is primarily based on how few mistakes you make, but you’ll get extra credit for solving the more difficult purple and blue categories first.
After you see the skill score and other details (such as whether a red herring caught you out), the AI feature comes into play. This will highlight the most common incorrect guesses from that day. It will also try to guess a description for the group that players had in mind. So, for a failed guess of gutter, bowl, alley and lane, the bot might believe you were looking for a list of bowling-related terms. This is a real example from a recent game in which I made that exact mistake. Alley and lane were actually types of streets.
New York Times
Your own failed guesses might not show up in the bot, though. That’s because there are around 2.6 million different ways to group each grid together. Bear in mind that while you don’t need a Times account to play Connections, you’ll need to be logged into one to use the bot and track your scores.
One other interesting thing about the bot is that it marks the first time that the Times’ newsroom will regularly publish AI-generated English text. Before publication, the paper’s editors will review all AI-generated responses and may edit them for style and clarity. That said, the Times notes that “there’s no way to use math or even artificial intelligence to reliably solve the game,” so you can’t really use the likes of ChatGPT to cheat at it quite yet.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nyt-connections-bot-uses-ai-to-highlight-each-days-top-mistakes-145242525.html?src=rss
New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.
Sacrificial Animals by Kailee Pedersen
There’s something about the idea of coming home and reawakening dormant familial trauma that just makes for great horror stories, andSacrificial Animalsis no exception. In the novel, brothers Nick and Joshua Morrow return to their family’s farm in Nebraska after many years estranged from their abusive father, reopening old wounds and allowing supernatural forces to take root. Sacrificial Animals bounces between “Then” and “Now” perspectives, painting a picture of the boys’ childhoods under the violent and racist man, and the gravity of returning once they learn he is dying.
The slow burn horror story weaves in Chinese mythology, using flowery language and a Cormac McCarthy-like lack of quotation marks (and McCarthy-like brutality) to really give it a folkloric feel. But do yourself a favor and skip the blurb if you plan on reading this one, as it betrays a bit too much about the direction the story will go.
Trash Talk: An Eye-Opening Exploration of Our Planet's Dirtiest Problem by Iris Gottlieb
Humanity’s trash problem is one so massive and complex it can be difficult to even comprehend, especially for those of us who are more or less removed from the reality of it. I mean, it feels like every other week I learn that an item I’ve long been told is recyclable is, in fact, not recyclable, and garbage is even piling up in space. Iris Gottlieb’s Trash Talk: An Eye-Opening Exploration of Our Planet's Dirtiest Problem breaks the whole issue down, diving into the many facets of global trash production and management, and exploring how we got to where we are.
It’s filled with illustrations and insight to help contextualize a problem that, unfortunately, isn’t going away any time soon, and is a great read for anyone who wants to know more about what really happens to your garbage when you throw it “away.”
Convert by John Arcudi, Savannah Finley
The first thing that popped into my mind when I saw the cover for issue #1 of Convertwas Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy. A man in a space suit — with the helmet removed — stands in a field holding a huge gun, surrounded by strange flora that almost seems like it’s trying to consume him. The mental comparisons to the Area X of VanderMeer’s series only continued as I read through it, but a development its final few panels affirms that Convert has its own unique story to tell.
The first issue of the new science fiction/fantasy series from Image Comics was released this week, and visually, it’s stunning. In the opening pages, “Science Officer Orrin Kutela finds himself stranded on a distant planet, starving and haunted by the ghosts of his dead crew,” per the description. “On the verge of death, he makes an astonishing discovery.” Convert was written by John Arcudi, with art by Savannah Finley, colors by Miguel Co and lettering by Michael Heisler. The second issue drops September 25.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/what-to-read-recommendations-new-horror-sacrificial-animals-trash-talk-science-fiction-comics-convert-173001712.html?src=rss
It feels like The Plucky Squire has been popping up at game events forever. It first came onto my radar during one of publisher Devolver Digital’s bizarre showcases in 2022, and was instantly appealing. Yesterday, Devolver announced it would be coming out in just over a month, on September 17. After playing through a few hours of the game over two sessions, I’m happy to say this is one to keep an eye out for.
The Plucky Squire is the first game from All Possible Futures, a studio founded by Jonathan Biddle and James Turner. Turner is an artist best known for his work on Pokémon at GameFreak — if you know what a Vanillite is, you have Turner to thank for that. Biddle previously created the 2017 ARPG Swords of Ditto, and the pair have brought other developers who worked on Ditto onto the team.
All Possible Future’s debut mixes classic 2D and 3D gameplay styles into a unique whole. You play as Jot, the character in a series of kids’ books who defeats evil and saves the day. When the series’ antagonist figures out that he can change the story, it’s your job to stop him. A large chunk of the game takes place on the 2D plane of the book, from the same classic birds-eye-view as in Ditto. The “cut scenes” are also book pages, and there are a few interstitial side-on platforming segments, à la Mario, thrown in for good measure. There’s a real sense of whimsy weaved through everything, aided by the game’s narrator, who is telling your story with each page turn.
Devolver Digital
Jot is able to slash, jump, roll and everything else you’d expect, and you will unlock more combat skills as you go, such as a sword throw or Zelda-spinny-sword-attack™. There are twists to the formula, though, with a variety of puzzle mechanics thrown in. The first you’ll come across is word puzzles: With a swipe of his sword Jot can dislodge certain words that you can then move around the page. At its most rudimentary, you might swap the words “closed” and “open” from a pair of sentences to make your way past a gate. There are some playful elements to this that reminded me of Scribblenauts — making something “huge” will never not be fun.
The real unique thing here is Jot’s ability to leap out of the flat plane of the storybook and into a fully 3D world. Whenever you come across a green swirly icon, you’re able to jump out of the book and onto its owner’s desk. Often this is a quick hop-out-hop-in move to solve a puzzle, but you’ll also go on longer desktop adventures.
Devolver Digital
While they’re not quite as charming as the in-book segments, I loved exploring the desk and seeing the wider world of the game. The 3D gameplay feels like a throwback, somewhere between the classic mascot games of the PlayStation era and the LittleBigPlanet series. On a high-end gaming PC, the environment of the desk was gorgeous, with hyper-detailed textures and realistic lighting that contrasted against the cartoony figure of Jot. There are also 2D elements within the 3D sections, where you can jump onto a surface to progress, similar to the mechanic in The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds.
The reason for this jump into 3D also plays into the game’s larger story: By breaking the confines of his 2D world, Jot discovers the influence his tales have and will have on the child who owns the storybook. If the game’s antagonist succeeds in changing the story, Jot will no longer inspire the child.
“You’re fighting for your own land, and also fighting for the owner of the book and his future,” Turner explained to me earlier this year at Summer Game Fest.
I’ve played through the first few chapters of the game, as well as a chunk of chapter six, and am starting to get an idea of how its disparate worlds fit together. In one segment, my progress in the book was brought to a halt, and I had to jump out onto the desk and navigate across the clutter to find a single (unbranded) Magic: The Gathering card. This gave me the item I needed to defeat the enemy I was stuck on. Turner said that items later in the game will allow you to modify the book in more ways, which suggested more mechanics and degrees of complexity will be introduces as progresses.
Devolver Digital
Breaking up proceedings further are minigames. These are fairly frequent, and generally pull liberally from well-known properties. My favorites so far were a Punch-Out!-style boxing game and a shoot ‘em up inspired by one of my all-time favorites, Resogun. In a nice accessibility move, these minigames can be skipped if you’re not up for the challenge. I’m sure there are more delightful things to come from the 2D and 3D exploration, but as of right now these minigames are the highpoint of my experience.
None of the individual elements in my playthrough were wild, unique things, but the way they connected and the level of polish to everything made me very excited to play the full game. It felt like, behind each turn of a page, there was a new little surprise just waiting to make me smile. The Plucky Squire was originally slated for a 2023 release, but is now due out on September 17. It's coming to Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, and will be free on PlayStation Plus’ Extra and Premium tiers.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-plucky-squire-expertly-transforms-old-ideas-into-something-new-160012926.html?src=rss
New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.
Hum by Helen Phillips
Robots have become a regular fixture of the workforce, and humans are losing their jobs to AI. Climate change is wreaking havoc on the planet. It’s getting harder and harder for the average person to make ends meet. Facial recognition technology is being used for surveillance. Sound familiar? In her new novel, Hum, author Helen Phillips paints a picture of what our near-future could look like.
Its main character, May, has lost her job after technology made her role obsolete, and, desperate for money to support her family, she agrees to participate in an experiment that alters her face to make her undetectable to facial recognition. With the extra cushion from the payment, she takes her husband and children on a short, technology-free vacation to the Botanical Garden — but things go dangerously awry. Hum is a captivating, unsettling work of dystopian fiction that makes it impossible not to draw parallels with our current reality.
Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence by Sara Imari Walker
There’s so much we don’t know about the origins of life on Earth, and how it could appear on other worlds. Arizona State University theoretical physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker tackles the enduring question, “What is life?” and so much more in her book, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence. It explores assembly theory, which, as Walker explained recently as a guest on the Event Horizon podcast, states that “life is the only mechanism the universe has for generating complexity. So complex objects don’t happen spontaneously, they only happen through evolution and selection.”
It’s an endlessly fascinating topic that’s spurred a lot of debate over the years, and Walker’s book presents its case in a way that is compelling and readable even for us non-scientists. It’ll definitely give your brain a bit of exercise, though... and maybe spark some (friendly) arguments. Kirkus called it, “Ingenious, but not for the faint of heart.
Cruel Universe #1
EC Comics’ comeback continues with the release of another new series, Cruel Universe. The recently resurrected publisher dropped the first issue of the science fiction series this week, featuring stories by Corinna Bechko, Chris Condon, Matt Kindt and Ben H. Winters, with art by Jonathan Case, Kano, Artyom Topilin and Caitlin Yarsky. Cruel Universe #1 takes us to an interstellar battle arena, face-to-face with a black hole, on a quest for eternal life and more.
It’s a great followup to last month’s Epitaphs of the Abyss, the new horror anthology from EC. If you liked the old Weird Science comics and EC’s other science fiction series, this is definitely one to check out.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/what-to-read-this-weekend-near-future-dystopian-fiction-and-a-new-approach-to-explaining-lifes-origin-194355528.html?src=rss
New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.
Toward Eternity by Anton Hur
Toward Eternity does not waste any time in getting to the drama. The novel by Anton Hur begins in the not-so-far-off future, and opens with a moment of crisis: a patient in a nanotherapy research clinic has seemingly vanished into thin air. This patient had been undergoing a new type of treatment that uses android cells (dubbed “nanites”) to cure cancer by replacing the body’s own cells. In doing so, however, it transforms the body entirely into a nanodroid, giving rise to “nano humans” that are no longer subjected to mortality.
The story jumps through time and different perspectives, exploring what it means “to be human in a world where technology is quickly catching up to biology.” From the second I started reading this one, I did not want to put it down.
Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere by Rob Jackson
It can be hard not to get swept up in the doom and gloom of climate change, especially amid reports marking Earth’s hottest years on record and still-rising emissions from fossil fuels. Stanford climate scientist Rob Jackson’s new book Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere aims to foster a more optimistic outlook by calling attention to the courses of action that could lead us to a better future for our planet and its inhabitants.
“I view my book as a home repair manual for the planet,” Jackson said in a recent interview published by the scientific journal ACS Central Science. “It highlights the people and the ideas needed to solve the climate crisis. I want most of all to give people hope, a sense of optimism. Yes, climate change is already bad, but we can still fix this problem.”
Epitaphs from the Abyss #1
Legendary comic book publisher EC Comics, which brought us series like Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science more than 70 years ago, is making a comeback with its first new series in decades: Epitaphs from the Abyss. The first issue of the horror series was released at the end of July and features four tales — which are introduced by a ghoulish narrator dubbed The Grave-Digger.
Epitaphs from the Abyss #1 has stories by Brian Azzarello, J. Holtham, Stephanie Phillips and Chris Condon, with art by Lee Bermejo, Phil Hester, Peter Krause and Jorge Fornés. There’s something about those old EC Comics that just hits different, and Epitaphs faithfully slips back into that vibe to deliver spooky new stories that have a classic feel.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/what-to-read-books-existential-sci-fi-ai-technology-climate-crisis-solutions-ec-comics-horror-183058573.html?src=rss
New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.
The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville
A few years ago, Keanu Reeves took a dive into the world of comics with a series called BRZRKR, which he wrote with longtime comic creator Matt Kindt. The limited series, which played out over 12 issues, follows a half-mortal, half-God warrior known as B who lives a violent existence but cannot die. And after 80,000 years of being alive, he really wants to. Eventually, he ends up working as a killing machine for the US government.
Netflix has plans for a film and anime spinoff of the series, and the BRZRKR universe is still growing even beyond that. This week, Reeves and author China Miéville — known for his works of “weird fiction” that blend sci-fi, fantasy and other genres — released The Book of Elsewhere, a novel that returns to the story of B in a pulpy, blood-soaked epic. It’s written with a unique style, starting off choppy in the prologue before shifting into something else entirely. If there’s one thing reviewers seem to agree on, it’s that this book is not afraid to get weird.
Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI by Anil Ananthaswamy
AI is all around us, and these days, conversations about the Big Tech race to build better and better systems sometimes feel almost escapable. But how often do we on the outside stop and take a look at how we got here in the technical sense, down to the math that made it all possible?
In Anil Ananthaswamy’s new book, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, the award-winning science journalist and author explains the history and mathematics underlying machine learning as we know it today. It’s not exactly light reading, but sometimes it’s nice to put your brain to work a little. You don’t need to be a math whiz to keep up with it — Ananthaswamy has said a basic understanding of calculus should be enough.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2024) #1 by Jason Aaron, Joëlle Jones
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are back in another new comic series from IDW, written by Jason Aaron (Batman: Off-World, Thor, Scalped), with art by Joëlle Jones (Lady Killer, Catwoman). The first issue was released this week — and it finds Raphael behind bars.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2024) celebrates the 40th anniversary of the franchise that we as a society just cannot seem to get enough of (no complaints here). In it, the turtles have all split off on their own and left New York, and it looks like the first few issues will each focus on one of the brothers. But, they’ll eventually be brought back together to do what they do best — fight bad guys and eat pizza. It’s meant to be something that even people who haven’t kept up with the many series over the years will be able to get into without feeling lost.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/what-to-read-this-weekend-keanu-reeves-book-of-elsewhere-ai-math-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-173909519.html?src=rss