Hey, hey, hey! I’ve returned from my trip to Korea to visit family, and I have to give many kudos to Shara for taking the reins on my editing duties and all the Weekly Roundups while I was out. Thanks for your awesome work! And now I get to state my disbelief that we’ve made it to 2020, the decade that always sounded futuristic with a capital F. We’re already into its second week, so let’s review what happened here at Speculative Chic!
Monday
Author Gemma Files is our guest this week for My Favorite Things, and we’re celebrating two of her short fiction collections — Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up from Deep Places — both available now! So what are the speculative goodies that float her boat? We’re talking dark and gothic playlists, malicious monsters and snarky swordfighting, foreign horror flicks, and more! Take a look!
Tuesday
Shara reviews Rebecca Roanhorse’s offering to the Star Wars universe: Resistance Reborn, which bridges the gap between The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker and features the dazzling trio that is Finn, Rey, and Poe. How does this book serve the new trilogy? Does it stand on its own or do double-duty enriching the movies? The droid you’re looking for is here.
Wednesday
As you recover from the holiday season, why not jump into some tabletop RPG? Andrea‘s got the tips you need to start your Dungeons and Dragons campaign! From session zero to worldbuilding to engaging your players, she’s got solid advice here.
Thursday
Venessa reviews HBO’s latest foray into fantasy, the adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. She’s coming in with fresh eyes to the world and its characters as she breaks down what works and what doesn’t in this eight-episode adaptation. For all the delicious details, look no further!
Friday
Nicole reviews John Scalzi’s second book in the Interdependency Series, The Consuming Fire (and if you need a recap of the first one, here you go!). The Interdependency is the name of humanity’s interstellar empire, and it’s being threatened by the collapse of the conduit that allows the possibility for space travel. With favorite characters making their return and new threats in the fold, is this book a worthy successor? Find out here!
Book Club
We’ve officially launched the revamped Book Club! It’s time to dive in with Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s epistolary sci-fi romantic masterpiece, This is How You Lose the Time War. Shara will host the discussion — slated January 31 — and we’re looking forward to seeing you there!
You can also get cracking on the February and March Book Club titles! For February, we’re sampling some horror with Jeremy C. Shipp’s The Atrocities, and I‘ll be your host! Then in March, Kendra will be leading the book club discussion of Cate Glass’s fantasy, An Illusion of Thieves. We’ve got something for every reader’s tastes in this year’s relaunch of the Book Club!
I remember around 1991 or 1992, teachers asked us to write about what life would be like in the year 2000 for a locally published book. It was full of elementary school children all writing about the future with a capital “F.” Mine was something about water fountains at the school having buttons you can press to drink soda and chocolate milk. Wow, revolutionary! But if you would’ve asked me at that age to imagine what 2020 would be like, I would’ve gone all out with the flying cars and interstellar travel. Because guess what? Children have no sense of time. 😂
On the other hand, scientists thought by 2020 we’d have mastered breeding apes to perform menial tasks just in case we didn’t like robots doing it (really!), and that we’d be in a “nanomobility era” where we all have telepathy and teleportation (yup). It’s difficult to measure human progress in progress, so it’s been hilarious seeing how much everyone’s overshot their predictions. What about you? Did you ever stop and imagine 2020 through the eyes of a child (or a misguided scientist)? Feel free to share your past predictions below in the comments, and see you next week!
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