Remember me
You can check out an excerpt up on Reactor now, and take a teeny peek below!
The narrow overhang jutting out from the New York City apartment building did little to protect from the downpour. Pok’s back pressed against hard brick as he scanned the gray skies, his augmented reality glasses made pedestrian by the weather. The whir of an ambulance rose and dissipated, leaving behind the hum of rolling traffic. Directly above him, solid lines of rain ran from the air-conditioning unit hanging from their third-story window and cascaded off the fire escape. Where is it? The decision drone should have arrived ten minutes ago.
After acquiring twelve of the country’s top medical institutions, the Shepherd Organization made clear their confidence in their state-of-the-art AI-centered medical curriculum by waiting until all other schools had sent out decisions before deploying theirs. It was a ballsy move. The stunt had paid off. According to the message boards, hardly anyone had accepted offers from non-shepherd schools even though most semesters started within the next month. Everyone was waiting on “The Prestigious Twelve.”
“Decision day?” Skip James called above the rain and traffic as he stepped out of the small shop directly under Pok’s apartment. The longtime owner of Park Avenue Market, one of the last human-staffed brick-and-mortar stores in Manhattan, chucked two black bags into the garbage. Rainwater fell in sheets from the lid. “It’s all over my feed!”
“They’re late,” Pok said.
“Don’t catch a cold, kid.”
The Hospital at the End of the World by Justin C. Key is out February 3, 2026, from Harper.
Neuromancer by William Gibson is Getting a New Look and an Adaptation
Neuromancer, the seminal debut sci-fi novel from William Gibson, will have a chance to influence a whole new generation of sci-fi fans and writers when the Apple TV series is released. The story of a computer hacker enlisted to help in a heist introduced such now-widely-used word “cyberspace,” and influenced such movies as The Matrix. It is the only novel ever to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the Philip K. Dick Award for original paperback fiction.
“The longer I write novels, the more Neuromancer feels like something else entirely: compact, propulsive, its momentum owing as much to the interaction of the words in each sentence as to the storyline itself,” Gibson says in a statement shared with PEOPLE.
PEOPLE has more about the upcoming series and deluxe edition!
Mother of No More Dragons: Emilia Clarke Is Done With the Fantasy GenreWhile on press tour for her new espionage series Ponies, which is now streaming on Peacock, the Mother of Dragons said she is done with dragons. Emilia Clarke, who played Daenerys Targaryen in the hit HBO show Game of Thrones, told The New York Times that there’s very little chance she’ll return to fantasy.
“You’re highly unlikely to see me get on a dragon, or even in the same frame as a dragon, ever again,” Clarke told the publication.
Clarke also talked about what it was like to learn of her character’s fate when Game of Thrones came to an end, and how she understands why some people were upset about it. You can read more here, and then watch her telling Seth Meyers how people often didn’t recognize her out of her Game of Thrones costume.
And, To Close, a List of 5 Dark Fantasy Movies From The 1980s That Still Terrify Kids
Looper has an article up about 5 dark fantasy movies from the 1980s that are still scary. This list is funny because it’s true! When people wonder what is wrong with Gen X, I always say we were allowed to run around unsupervised as kids, and watch movies at a time when there was no PG-13 rating. All of these movies listed here creeped me out at one point or another, and they were on cable all. the. time.
The Secret of NIMH upset me the most, for sure. And I would also add Time Bandits, which freaked me out when I was six, and Solar Babies, which actually got a PG-13 rating in 1986 but still gave me nightmares.
Which one of these movies freaked you out?
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.