An Excerpt from WHERE SHADOWS MEET by Patrice Caldwell—and More SFF Links
Hello, my little baby armadillos! In today’s round-up of recent sci-fi and fantasy links, I have stuff to share with you about an unusual snowy owl, a conversation between Silvia Park and Kelly Link, a look at Ken Liu’s animated series Pantheon, and more!
Here’s a Peek at WHERE SHADOWS MEET by Patrice Caldwell!
Reactor recently shared an excerpt from one of the year’s most highly anticipated YA debuts. Where Shadows Meet by Patrice Caldwell is the epic tale of betrayed angels, gods, and vampires. There’s an angel doomed to the darkness who has been waiting a long time to get revenge and a princess from a vampire nation who must travel to the island of the dead to rescue her friend. It’s sounds wild and fantastic!”
Where Shadows Meet by Patrice Caldwell is out April 1, 2025, from Wednesday Books.
Who-hoo-hoo Can Solve the Mystery of This Snowy Owl?
Snowy owls are majestic birds with big yellow eyes and white plumage. It’s always exciting to see one. But recently, residents of Huron County, Michigan spotted a snowy owl that really stood out: Its feathers are tinged with orange. And scientists are having a hard time explaining how that happened. Is the owl’s unusual orange coloring caused by diet, a mutation, an environmental issue, or a human prank? Or maybe it’s an owl from an alternate universe! Whatever the reason, the owl, nicknamed Rusty and Creamsicle by observers, is getting a lot of attention.
“Scientists who have studied owls for years struggled to explain the bird’s curious plumage.
‘In over 35 years of study, we have found over 300 nests and banded over 800 chicks,’ Denver Holt, director of the Owl Research Institute in Charlo, Mont., said in an email. ‘We have never seen any plumage aberration, or anything like what is in the photos of the owl.’”
A Conversation with Silvia Park and Kelly Link
To celebrate the release of Silvia Park’s speculative debut, Luminous, Reactor hosted a conversation between Park and the legendary Kelly Link (whose amazing debut novel The Book of Love recently came out in paperback.) The two discussed writing speculative fiction, their craft, and more.
“Kelly Link: Are there novels that you think of as literary antecedents or close cousins to what you wrote? And what was your approach to research?
Silvia Park: Definitely your work. It’s had such a huge influence on me, especially how you write the speculative with this really twisty, clever playfulness, but there’s also this profound grief found in many of your stories, including The Book of Love. I love how you write childhood. I can always feel a quivering hum, of the uncertainty and possibilities, like a shot of magic through the veins when you write children.”
(I mean, how can you not tell Kelly Link how important she is when she is such a huge influence?)
Transform your reading experience! Become an All Access member and unlock a treasure trove of exclusive content—must-read articles, deep dives, and curated recommendations—with unlimited access to 20+ members-only newsletters, community features, and more. Sign up now for only $6/month!
All of Ken Liu’s Animated Series PANTHEON is Now Available
The entire animated adaptation of stories from Ken Liu’s award-winning collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories is now available to stream! The show has had quite a journey, with production starting and stopping a couple of times and its release originally on a different platform.
According to its original release, Pantheon is the story of a bullied teen who “receives mysterious help from someone online: a stranger soon revealed to be her recently deceased father, David, whose consciousness has been uploaded to the Cloud following an experimental destructive brain scan. David is the first of a new kind of being – an ‘Uploaded Intelligence’ or ‘UI’ – but he will not be the last, as a global conspiracy unfolds that threatens to trigger a new kind of world war.”
Liu recently spoke to Bleeding Cool about the show, including how the stories were chosen, the Singularity, and more.
“I found the experience extraordinarily rewarding as it taught me a lot about how a TV show is made. It really was a case where the sum was far greater than the individual participants. Later, Craig and the writers would occasionally have me participate remotely as well. I was very happy to see some of my contributions during these later sessions make their way into the show as well (for example, the hack to break into the data center in Svalbard.)”
Pantheon is currently streaming on Netflix.
10 Sci-Fi Movies From the ’80s That Will Never Get Old
And let’s end things with a list! I thought I would disagree with more on this list from Collider of 10 sci-fi movies from the ’80s that will never get old, but it’s a surprisingly good round-up of films. And possibly the first list of movies I’ve shared where I have even seen every single one. Which movies on the list did you love?
In thinking about the prompt, I thought of a few sci-fi films from the ’80s I would put on my own list, but they are in no way great cinema, like Solar Babies and Killer Klowns from Outer Space. And now I need to go back and watch Flight of the Navigator and The Last Starfighter to see if they still hold up.
Okay, star bits, now take the knowledge you have learned here today and use it for good, not evil. If you want to know more about books, I talk about books pretty much nonstop (when I’m not reading them), and you can hear me say lots of adjectives about them on the BR podcast All the Books! and on Bluesky and Instagram.
If an SFF fan forwarded this newsletter to you or you read it on bookriot.com and you’d like to get it right in your inbox, you can sign up here.
