Let’s not delude ourselves. Once Upon a Time was never a good show. But it was fun. At a time when television was about breaking bads and gaming thrones, it was nice to have a goofy fantasy where Little Bo Peep was a mob boss and King Arthur ruled the Underworld. Now, the series is over and you won’t find anyone …
It’s been about 15 to 20 years since I’ve read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I’ve carried the 1962 novel with me throughout my entire life. It’s traveled across four state moves, from coast to coast, forever a reminder of the girl I once was and the person I became. Now, as director Ava DuVernay defines her…
Once Upon a Time is, for the most part, a pretty harmless show. It’s about a group of fairytale characters who are taken away from the Enchanted Forest and forced to live in our modern world, regaining the memory of who they were and struggling to balance their old lives with their new ones. Also, Anna from Frozen…
Legendary writer Chuck Palahniuk is known for works like Fight Club, Choke, and Invisible Monsters. But his latest long-form fiction is perhaps one of his strangest, wise: a novella that’s also a coloring book. It’s a tale as darkly humorous as an anecdote Palahniuk has of another beloved writer, horror maestro Clive…
Maxine Mayfield, also known as Mad Max, was a much-needed addition to the second season of Stranger Things. The show was lacking in young female representation, apart from Nancy and Eleven, and after “Justice for Barb,” adding a female co-star seemed like a smart and calculated choice. Only, what was supposed to be …
At New York Comic Con, during the Star Trek: Discovery panel, Alex Kurtzman said something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. He said that you couldn’t do “City on the Edge of Forever” now, because Kirk would have to spend a whole season mourning Edith Keeler.
Ready Player One, the best-selling ode to virtual reality and nerd-dom, is finally becoming a movie, but not everybody is a fan. The first teaser trailer has gotten some backlash for how it glorifies nostalgia. However, a bigger issue comes from the book itself in how it treats women—namely, its trophy love interest.
Recently, I was engaging in one of my favorite pastimes: rewatching TV shows I loved when I was a kid. Thanks to the various streaming websites, it’s really, really easy to relive old passions without breaking the bank on DVD sets. (My god was it expensive to watch every episode of a show back when a season cost…
The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is obnoxiously overpriced, small, and pretty gimmicky. And yet it is a much better experience for a Harry Potter fan than Fantastic Beasts, Cursed Child, or any of J.K. Rowling’s endless Pottermore essays.
Before Iron Fist was made, there were calls to make the character an Asian-American (including from us). A lot of arguments about the character revolved around his ’70s backstory being kind of, well, racist in the 21st century. But, having seen the show, something else is clear: the character of Danny Rand would have…
Finn Jones, star of Marvel and Netflix’s Iron Fist, keeps blaming outside factors for the poor reviews of his show. He’s already trotted out the old and rotted “this is for the fans not critics” argument, but now he’s added an argument as baffling as it is new: Danny Rand is too much like Trump and that is why people…
When The Girl With All The Gifts first hit theaters in the U.K. last September, the world was a different place. The film has recently opened in the United States, which is a much scarier place now.
And Alice in Wonderland, now that I think about it. And fairy tales. We’ve seen enough versions of these stories, so maybe everyone should take a break for a bit.
I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say today. I had no plan for this.
After you’ve spent enough time in the company of geeks and nerds, someone will eventually ask the inevitable question: Star Wars or Star Trek? And I always give the same answer: Star Wars was my first love, but Star Trek is my best love.
This past Tuesday night saw the season finale of Person of Interest, a show that premiered in 2011 as basically just a high-concept vigilante show. By the time it ended, it had transformed the one of the best science fiction series ever broadcast. And it did it without ever losing its primetime, network-friendly…
Over the last couple of seasons of television, critics and audiences have begun to pay a considerable amount of attention to the role of women and racial diversity on their favorite shows. Despite being set in the future, science fiction television has often been stubbornly stuck in the past. With its latest lineup,…
One of the latest Marvel casting rumors making the rounds is that Michael Barbieri’s Spider-Man: Homecoming character is based on Ganke Lee, who, in the comics, is the best friend of Miles Morales. Not regular Spider-Man, better known as Peter Parker. In the comics, Ganke Lee is a pudgy Korean-American who looks like…
Hello, I’m Rob Bricken. Some of you may know me as the guy who writes the FAQs, or the guy who hates everything, or a deluded SJW, or perhaps the person who will shortly be turning io9 into a garbage fire. I would like to present myself as something else—the new editor of io9.
When I started working on io9 in 2007, we didn’t have a name for the site yet. We hadn’t come up with any real plans for how we were going to cover science fiction, science and futurism. But there was already a central idea that the site was based around: That science fiction is for absolutely everybody who enjoys it.
