Tag: Television

10 Books to Chase Those The Last of Us Vibes

~ Alex Brown ~ Leave a comment

I can’t help it, I have The Last of Us on the brain! Specifically the side story of Bill and Frank living their happy little gay lives together in the post-apocalypse. But also the zombies. Because who doesn’t love stories about the end of times and parasitic possession? Here are 10 young adult and adult science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels to keep you going until season 2.

For the rest of this listicle, head over to Tor.com.

Queer Slice-of-Life Episodes of SFF Television

~ Alex Brown ~ Leave a comment

How are we feeling, cannibal fungus fans? Still floating in the cozy feels of the third episode of The Last of Us? Episodes like that where we spend time watching people exist in the world largely outside bigger plot dynamics don’t happen often—less so in the age of “diverse” shows getting canceled after a single season. When you narrow the field down to just speculative shows and just queer characters, that slice gets thinner and thinner. So let’s take this opportunity to celebrate queer life, queer joy, and queer people just being themselves.

Read the rest of this spotlight at Tor.com.

Kindred Adaptation Falls Short of Octavia Butler’s Original Novel

~ Alex Brown ~ Leave a comment

My Thoughts

The novel delves into a lot despite its fairly straightforward plot. The complexity is in the subtext and the themes, such as the large and small acts of resistance, the lengths people go to survive, how anti-Blackness is built into the fabric of American society, the ways enslaved people maintained some semblance of agency in a world designed to strip them of it, and the “pick the best of bad options”-type choices enslaved and free Black people made (and still make). In the novel, Dana is the character around which everyone else orbits. In the show, everyone orbits around Tom in the past while in the present Dana is constantly pulled into the gravity wells of other people, like her white neighbors and her aunt. Because the show spends so much time away from Dana and the enslaved Africans on the Weylin plantation, we don’t explore those themes very deeply, but I hope we’ll get into them more as the series progresses.

For the rest of my review, head over to Tor.com.