Martha Wells on MURDERBOT, Weird Science, the 12 Best Time Loop Movies, and More!
Hello, my little squirrel-cicles! In today’s round-up of recent sci-fi and fantasy links, I have stuff to share with you about the best time loop movies (I totally agree with the top pick), interviews with Vajra Chandrasekera and Martha Wells, weird science, and more!
Bring on the 2025 books!
One of the SFF books I am excited to read in 2025 is the romantic fantasy The Witch Who Trades with Death by C.M. Alongi. The description sounds quite dark, but the reviews I have read make it sound like a great story of found family and healing. It’s about a young witch who escapes a brutal emperor after she learns he has been gaining his powers by making deals with Death. So she decides, “Hey, why can’t I do that too?” From the publisher description: “All witches must serve the cruel and immortal Emperor Yacatl. But after four years of terror and abuse, Khana not only kills one of his favorite courtiers with her magic, but also discovers the secret of his power and immortality: he’s been making deals with Death. And now, so is she.” I know it says the witch is making deals with Death, but the title says trades with Death, so I was kinda hoping the witch and Death got together to swap Garbage Pail Kids cards, or marbles, or something. The Witch Who Trades with Death is out March 11, 2025 from Angry Robot.
The Year in (Weird) Science
In a post after my own heart, the Wall Street Journal made a quiz about some of the weird science stories of 2024. They include a new dinosaur named after a Marvel character, a search for Amelia Earhart’s lost plane, and unusual animals in Florida after a storm. There are eight questions, and I got three correct, but really just by luck. I hadn’t heard about any of these stories before. (But I don’t know that I would label any of these as “weird.” They are interesting, though.) What has been weird is all the drone sightings recently, and Lit Hub has some ideas about who could be behind them.
The 12 Best Time Loop Movies of All Time
Don’t drive angry: In lists this time around (ha!), I have the 12 best time loop movies of all time. I was thrilled to find this list, because I love a time loop story and had somehow not seen many of these. (But more than the zero movies I have seen from this list of the best sci-fi movies of 2024.) And I was even more excited to see my favorite movie of the last few years, Palm Springs, sitting at the top spot. It’s so weird and fun, and has Cristin Milioti, who is amazing in everything, and J.K. Simmons, who I am pretty sure has been in everything. Other than Palm Springs, the only other films on this list I have seen are Groundhog Day (natch) and Source Code. And Koko-di Koko-da sounds amazing! (If you love time loop stories, check out the “Monday” episode of The X-Files, and these time loop reads!)
An Interview with Vajra Chandrasekera
Author Vajra Chandrasekera has had two of the most successful SFF novels of the last two years. His debut novel The Saint of Bright Doors, won the Crawford, Ignyte, Locus, and Nebula awards, and was a finalist for the Dragon, Hugo, and Lammy awards, and Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. His 2024 release, Rakesfall, has landed on many of the best of the year lists. He recently talked with Locus Magazine about SFF and his novels, and being a human:
“A hazard of the way that fantasy is often written is that you have these stories that make grand claims about the world: The world was made in this way, there are specific magics in the world, and so forth. These are definitive answers in ways that feel very alien to me—I think to most people, really, but we’re trained by the genre not to find that certainty as alienating as we should. Uncertainty makes for a richer world, as a reading experience, and it also makes for a more relatable kind of protagonist. I find it very hard to relate to the kind of people who are absolutely sure, not only of what is right and wrong, but about what their options even are, because that is not anything like what it’s like to be a person in the world.”
And It’s Never a Bad Time to Talk About Murderbot
Ending today with an interview I just recently came across with Martha Wells, author of one of the greatest science fiction series, The Murderbot Diaries. (I would definitely want Murderbot at my dinner with fictional characters, even though I know they wouldn’t want to be there.) Wired talked to Wells about everyone’s favorite self-aware security bot, writing a bazillion books, her newfound fame, cats, and her existential crisis:
“What’s also annoying is when people who’ve just discovered Murderbot wonder if she can write anything else. Wells, who is 60 years old, has averaged almost a book a year for more than three decades, ranging from palace intrigues to excursions into distant worlds populated by shapeshifters. But until Murderbot, Wells tended to fly just under the radar. One reason for that, I suspect, is location. Far from the usual literary enclaves of New York or Los Angeles, Wells has lived for all this time in College Station—which is where the nearly 100-year-old library we’re at today resides. Housed on the campus of Texas A&M, her alma mater, the library contains one of the largest collections of science fiction and fantasy in the world.
It’s from this cradle that Wells’ career sprang forth. But post-Murderbot, things have changed. Wells now counts among her friends literary superstars like N. K. Jemisin and Kate Elliott, to say nothing of her fiercely loyal fandom. And it turns out that she’d need all of it—the support, the community, even Murderbot—when, at the pinnacle of her newfound, later-in-life fame, everything threatened to come to an end.”
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.
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