Janet Stilson

We should all be forgiven if we long for magic in the world. The kind that can change the course of wars, so that expansionist rulers are driven to their knees. That fights against a mad manipulator who binds innocent people with dark enchantments. That causes a tiny stone statue in a cathedral to speak out against the murder of a girl that it witnessed.

Those are just a three of a great many stories and events that fill Susanna Clarke’s fantasy novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. 

A friend of mine has been watching the highly charged love affair of a young vocalist whom he’s mentoring with avid attention. He doesn’t think the singer’s romance is going to last for a variety of reasons. “But think how much better he’s going to sing after they breakup!” my friend said, alluding to the heartache. Yes, he has a black sense of humor, but he wasn’t entirely joking.

There’s an episode deep in the series The Beauty that features two friends who feel like their lives are completely blocked. As they work in a research lab, the duo talk about their loneliness and desire for love. The friends discover by accident that the secret chemical substance the lab is working on could be the answer to all their dreams. After injecting the substance and undergoing terrible pain, they become younger and extraordinarily attractive — so transformed that they don’t even resemble their former selves. And yet, monstrous forces don’t take kindly to their “illegal” use of the substance.

(Image courtesy of FX)

Finding some relief from the relentlessly disturbing news cycle has been key to my sanity of late. Which means that reading fiction is, more than ever, essential. So a book about an underground labyrinth filled with books — where there’s nothing much to do but read all day long — recently became an ultimate form of literary catnip for me. Especially because there are cats in it, too.

Alix Harrow has advice for anyone who is in the early stages of writing a time travel story: think again! “You can turn back. You don’t have to do this,” she said during an interview on the SFF Addicts podcast to the laughing delight of the hosts. I’m glad that she didn’t turn back herself. Amazon’s editors have picked her new fantasy book, The Everlasting, as one of the best books of 2025 in the science fiction and fantasy category. It grabbed me at the get-go and never lost my attention.

(Yew tree Photo Credit: JamesB on Adobe Stock)

There’s nothing like a well-crafted crime thriller that keeps you glued to your seat with a twisting tale that won’t let you go until the final climax. That sums up my reaction to Black Rabbit, the eight-part limited series now playing on Netflix. It spins out a series of increasingly perilous situations for two brothers played by Jude Law and Justin Bateman. While they fight against outside forces, the brothers are continually jolted (and often enraged) by the really bad choices that they have both made with mostly good intentions.

(Photo by Chris Turgeon on Unsplash)

There’s no stopping the passion that a whole lot of readers feel towards the romantasy book genre right now. The combo of romance and fantasy drives the epic fantasy bestseller list, more so than novels by authors like JRR Tolkien and Brandon Sanderson, as publishing guru Jane Friedman discussed with Alex Newton at K-lytics in her The Bottom Line newsletter recently. According to Newton, the trend shows no sign of slowing anytime soon.

(Photo by Jodie O’Connor on Unsplash)

The Hugo awards will be announced in August during the annual sci-fi and fantasy fan convention, Worldcon, which takes place in Seattle. And I’ve been madly reading all the nominated novels before I travel there. So far, the nominated novel that has blown my hair back the most is The Tainted Cup, a murder mystery by Robert Jackson Bennett.

(Smoke background: Photo by Corina Rainer on Unsplash)

One of the foremost questions that we all face today relates to whether artificial forms of intelligence are more of a curse than a blessing. Not surprisingly, that’s been reflected in many fictional stories. Two recent standouts, for me, fall into a category I like to call “bots with a heart of gold” (mechanical though their hearts may be). The stories take that “golden heart” concept and run with it in decidedly different directions. Yet they both use humor to great advantage.

In order to save his father, a sexy French chef is caught up in an espionage scheme to undermine Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. That’s one way to describe the opening episodes of the new Apple TV+ show Carême. Will that be enough to keep me coming back through the entire series? I’m not entirely sure. One of the deciding factors for me and lots of other people can be summed up by the question: “Do I really care about the characters?”

(Lyna Khoudri and Benjamin Voisin in ‘Carême.’ Photo couresy of Apple TV+)