Storytelling

10 Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Books to Read Ahead of Their Upcoming Adaptations

Check out (or revisit!) these new and classic titles before they're transformed into movies and TV series.

The Gaming Shelf Is Not a Demon… Yet

Cezar Capacle's newest game confronts supernatural superstitions and utilizes a rules-lite, no-prep TTRPG engine.

Three Thousand Years of Longing Tells Stories About Stories

Starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, George Miller's newest film combines the fantastic and the mundane but the results are muddled.

Inu-Oh Belts Out a Glam Rock Ballad Speaking Truth to Power

Masaaki Yuasa's latest film is a gloriously irreverent and transgressive movie about art, authority, and the power of performance.

Delroy Lindo Will Spin a Web as Anansi Boys‘ Mr. Nancy

Amazon and Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys series has tapped Da 5 Bloods ' Delroy Lindo to play a legendary trickster.

Twenty Years Later, StarCraft‘s Story is Still an Engrossing Take on Space Opera

StarCraft was unveiled to the world twenty years ago, and in the time since it’s become a legendary fixture of the competitive gaming scene. Which makes it easy to forget that it’s also a fantastic space opera. Earlier this month, Blizzard, StarCraft’s developers, released StarCraft Remastered, a face lift to the original title meant to…

Minnesota-based We Are All Criminals shares the anonymous stories of people who’ve committed crimes (vandalism, robbery, drugs, etc.) but were never caught, and contrasts them with similar stories of those who were. In doing so, the project “seeks to challenge society’s perception of what it means to be a criminal.” If you’re not able to…

Spider-Man Is The One Hero Who Can Tie All The Marvel Movies Together

We finally have our new, Marvel-Cinematic-Universe-approved Spider-Man. But aside from the obvious benefits of having Marvel’s most popular (and most lucrative) hero join their cinematic fold, there’s a far more crucial aspect of Spider-Man that the MCU needs right now: his ability to tie this ever-expanding universe together. https://gizmodo.com/we-officially-have-a-new-spider-man-actor-and-director-1713375604 The Age of SHIELD is Over…

Why Space Is The Scariest Place To Encounter The Supernatural

A wise tagline once said “In Space, no one can hear you scream”. And it’s no surprise that space horror is a popular genre, since space is already kind of terrifying by itself. Space madness! But you know what’s really scary? Encountering a supernatural force in space, where there’s no place to run. Above: The…

How To Raise The Stakes In Your Story Without Wrecking Your Characters

The best science fiction and fantasy stories are impossible to tear yourself away from — and often, that thrilling sense of momentum comes from the sense that the danger to the world keeps getting bigger and scarier. But how do you raise the stakes without sacrificing your characters? All images by Mateusz Orzminski (More at…

Here’s One Brilliant Recipe For A Story That Will Kick Anyone’s Ass

There’s no one secret formula for a great story, even if Pixar has its rules and other people have their own ideas. There are as many great shapes for a story to take as there are stories. But Chuck Wendig, author of the Blackbirds series, has a pretty great example of how to structure a…

Why are we so fascinated by Origin stories?

Hollywood loves an Origin story – we’re constantly getting remakes and reboots so we can re-experience them, we’re even mining as many characters as we can for origin tales, as per the crazy trailer for Pan we saw yesterday. It can be a tiring trend sometimes, but why do we yearn to learn where our…

What Offensive Storytelling Trope Should We Finally Retire?

Sometimes, a narrative convention is so ingrained in literature that writers reach for it even after it becomes clear that it’s not so much “classic” as “offensive.” What trope do you see time and time again that simply makes you cringe? A big one that bothers us is the convention that has become known as…

I’m sick of saving the world: The case for smaller-scale stories

Sometimes it feels like the genre tales I love are in a storytelling arms race to constantly raise the stakes. We can’t even just have the world under threat – it’s the solar system, it’s the galaxy, hell, throw in the whole damn universe while you’re at it. What’s happened to the small-scale hero in…

Is It Time To Retire The Word “Epic”?

You’ll see lots of rants on the internet claiming the word “epic” is overused. It’s become a blanket synonym for “fun,” and people say “I had an epic bath” with zero irony. But maybe this is just a symptom of a larger problem. Maybe the word “epic” in general has lost all meaning, including when…

Adobe Voice: A Free iPad App For Pitching Brilliant Ideas to the World

Everyone with a cool new idea or vision wants a concise and beautiful video to illustrate their story and broadcast it to the world. But oh, right—you suck at all things visual and just learned how to make something move in After Effects. Adobe’s new iPad app, Voice, is there to hold your hand in…

In Defense Of Low-Stakes Storytelling

Just when did saving the world get so boring? We’re living through an age of big movies with big plots, that throw the fate of the world into the mix about as regularly as most people mop their floors — and sometimes it seems just as dull. After reading our review of Transcendence, a suggestion…

Anthropomorphic Animals Make It Harder To Learn Science

“Yum, these grass and plants are delicious!” Mother cavy thinks as she eats her breakfast. “I will feed some to my baby cavies too!” she says. The baby cavies love to play in the grass! But they’ve gotten all dirty! “Time for your bath,” Mother cavy says. Mother cavy and her babies like to spend…

Let This Periodic Table Of Storytelling Destroy Your Writer’s Block

Writing is many things: a job, a hobby, a personal imperative, an act, an art, a gigantic pain in the ass. But is it a science? The Periodic Table of Storytelling breaks down narrative elements into a familiar form—though one that liberal artsy folks probably haven’t thought about since high school. Here’s how it works.…

Has Creepypasta Reinvented Classic Folklore?

If you ever read a story online about a haunted TV episode, you’ve already eaten the creepypasta. Scary viral stories, images, and vids, often very short, are creepypasta — some will scare you so much that they’ve been nicknamed “shitbrix.” And they could be the closest thing we have to folklore in the twenty-first century.…