Marvel Comics is leaving New York City. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news Thursday that Marvel’s entire comics and franchise division, roughly 100 employees, is being asked to relocate to Burbank, California by July 2027, ending a run in New York that stretches back almost 90 years to Timely Comics and Atlas Comics on 42nd Street. The move leaves New York without a single major comic book publisher, since DC made the same move to Burbank back in 2015.

Read more

DC Comics used its San Diego Comic-Con presence to kick off a decade-long countdown to its own 100th anniversary in 2035, with a booth campaign that will spend the next several years revisiting each decade of the publisher’s history in ten-year chunks. Buried inside that nostalgia campaign is a harder deadline DC can’t spin away: Superman and Lois Lane enter the public domain in 2034, Batman follows in 2035, the Joker in 2036, and Wonder Woman in 2037.

Subscribe now

Here’s what that actually means, because the term gets misunderstood constantly. Under the Copyright Term Extension Act, a published work loses copyright protection 95 years after publication. Action Comics #1, which introduced Superman in 1938, crosses that line in 2034. Detective Comics #27, Batman’s 1939 debut, follows in 2035. Once a comic enters the public domain, anyone can legally reprint it, adapt it, or build new stories from it without paying DC or asking permission, the same process that recently put Steamboat Willie-era Mickey Mouse into two separate horror movies within 24 hours of his copyright lapsing.

But copyright and trademark are different protections, and DC still holds the second one. The “S” shield, the name “Superman,” the title “Action Comics,” and Batman’s bat-symbol remain DC’s trademarks indefinitely, protected as long as the company keeps using them commercially. That means a 2034 public domain Superman story can legally use the character as he existed in his 1938 debut, no flight, no heat vision, no Kryptonite, no Lex Luthor, since those elements arrived in later, still-copyrighted issues, but it can’t slap DC’s trademarked logo or title on the cover without inviting a lawsuit. DC’s own deputy general counsel, Jay Kogan, laid out the company’s defense strategy years ago in blunt terms: keep updating the characters so the modern version stays the “de facto standard” in the public’s mind, no matter what the 1938 original loses.

Comic writer Mark Millar isn’t waiting to find out how that plays out in court. The Kick-Ass and Kingsman creator has spent the past two years building an actual production pipeline around the 2034 deadline. In a recent interview with Thinking Critical, Millar laid out a launch plan for a self-published Superman series starting January 2034, followed by his own Batman book the year after. He’s already put artists under contract years in advance, telling the outlet one collaborator is locked in for a twelve-issue run with a quarter-million-dollar advance, paid before a single issue publishes. “2034 to 2039, I’m going to completely exploit all the DC characters with the best artists,” Millar said. “I’m going to steal the best artists from Marvel and DC and do the DC characters with them. I just like causing trouble.” He’s also eyeing film adaptations built on the same public domain footing, telling the outlet, “I’ve got an entirely new way of doing Superman... I’ve got the whole thing planned. And I want to do movies of it as well, coz it’ll be public domain. So there’s no reason we can’t do it at another studio.”

Millar won’t be alone. Comics historian Chris Sims has predicted a flood of unauthorized Batman titles ready to print the moment the clock runs out, and once the characters open up, DC will be competing against Marvel, Valiant, Todd McFarlane, Robert Kirkman, and anyone else with a printing budget and an idea, not just the small-press operators the public domain usually attracts.

DC’s SDCC nostalgia campaign reads differently against that backdrop. A publisher spending the next nine years walking its own history decade by decade, right up to the exact year its founding character stops belonging exclusively to it, isn’t just celebrating an anniversary. It’s building a case, in the court of public opinion and possibly in an actual courtroom, for why the Superman everyone still recognizes is the version DC kept building after 1938, not the one anyone will legally be allowed to publish for free.

Subscribe now

First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: DC Comics’ New “Anti-Price-Gouging” Rules Punish Retailers While Scarcity Stays DC’s Choice

Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie reboot has already been covered here for what it changed. What’s worth a second look is how showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine talks about those changes, because she isn’t playing defense. Across three separate interviews in the past week, with TheWrap, Variety, and ComingSoon, she’s made the case that turning Little House “woke” wasn’t an accident she’s explaining away. It was the plan.

Subscribe now

Start with the word itself. Megyn Kelly warned Netflix in January that if the show got “woke-ified,” she’d “make it my singular mission to absolutely ruin your project.” Sonnenshine’s answer wasn’t to distance herself from the label. It was to reclaim it. “The standard definition of ‘woke,’ as it had been for many years, was to be aware of social justice and inequality, I think that is a good thing,” she told TheWrap. “Any show that I would ever do would have those feelings, because I believe that those are important human qualities that we should all aspire to.” That’s not a showrunner insisting the criticism is unfounded. That’s a showrunner confirming the criticism is correct and telling you she considers it a compliment.

She went further with Variety, framing the entire backlash as something beneath her to take seriously. “I’m not even sure what ‘woke’ means to people anymore, to be honest,” she said, adding that if it just means caring about injustice and prejudice, she doesn’t understand why anyone would be upset by it. Per Variety’s reporting, she’s characterized the objections as not really political at all, but rooted in people being scared their childhood is changing into something they don’t recognize. She’s repeated some version of “people are worried for no reason” more than once, and told the outlet she’s noticed conservative viewers tend to enjoy the Native American storylines once they actually sit down and watch, a line that treats her own audience’s objections as something they’ll grow out of once she’s had a chance to correct them.

The clearest admission came back in TheWrap, and the word choice itself is worth sitting with. Asked about reworking material from Wilder’s books, Sonnenshine didn’t call it modernization or expansion. She called it correction, using a specific word that shows up constantly in these conversations for a reason: “problematic” isn’t a neutral description, it’s activist shorthand for “content that needs to be flagged, contextualized, or removed before an audience can be trusted with it.” “It’s 2026, it’s time to reckon with some of the things that are in the books that have been problematic for people,” Sonnenshine said. “I don’t want people to throw away these books... They’re amazing books. It’s OK to reckon with them a little bit and also tell a really good story about people being able to change... changing your mind is a good thing.” She’s not the only one on the production reaching for that exact word. Producer Joy Gorman Wettels told Vulture separately that the show’s entire intent was “to face the problematic nature of the historical text head-on,” which means this isn’t Sonnenshine improvising a defense in one interview. It’s the show’s actual internal talking point, repeated by two different people, about a set of childhood novels most of America grew up reading without anyone flagging them for reeducation.

She extended that same logic to the American frontier as a concept. Sonnenshine told TheWrap she wanted to spotlight the “myth of America” the government used to sell westward expansion, and said the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” individualism at the center of Wilder’s books doesn’t “cut it” for the real dangers of pioneer life, adding she doesn’t think Wilder believed that either, a claim about the author’s own intent that Wilder never made and can’t confirm or deny. Even Caroline Ingalls’ character arc got the same framing. Sonnenshine confirmed Caroline’s initial wariness toward the Osage family is faithful to the books, but says the show exists specifically to let her “change,” turning a supporting character’s private growth into the show’s explicit thesis statement.

None of this is a showrunner caught off guard by a culture war she didn’t ask for. It’s a showrunner who picked the fight in her own words, called her critics confused about a term she’s confident she understands better than they do, and told two separate outlets in the same week that the books she loved as a child needed her generation’s correction before they were fit to air. Fans spent January bracing for a show that might quietly lean left. What they got instead is a showrunner who’s spent July explaining, on the record, exactly why she thinks that was the right call.

Subscribe now

The second book of The Secret Scrolls of Naruto shifts the action from the open roads and waterways of the Kamigata to the warren of Tokugawa-era Tokyo, where the conspiracy runs deeper, the villains are closer, and nobody can be trusted. Two killers strike a deal over saké: one will murder the swordsman-monk Gennojō, the other will claim the woman he has been hunting since Osaka. Underground chambers, a great urban fire, a swordfight in total darkness on a plum-scented path, a deathbed confession that transforms a pickpocket, and a midnight ambush at Sensō-ji temple — this is the book where Yoshikawa Eiji earns his reputation as the Alexandre Dumas of Japan.

NEXT: Netflix’s Little House On The Prairie Premiere Plays It Safer Than Advertised, But Slower Too

Magic: The Gathering is adding Star Trek to its collaboration lineup, with Wizards of the Coast confirming a full Universes Beyond set built around the franchise’s 60th anniversary. The set launches on MTG Arena November 10 and hits tabletops worldwide November 13, following a prerelease window at local game stores from November 6-12.

Subscribe now

The product line covers nearly every price tier Magic offers. Play Boosters run $6.99, Collector Boosters $37.99, standard Commander Decks $74.99, and a Collector’s Edition Commander Deck $159.99. A “Beam Me Up Bundle” runs $99.99 and includes two randomly selected promo cards from an eight-card set. Four Commander decks anchor the release, alongside a Beginner Box aimed at Star Trek fans who’ve never touched a Magic card.

The chase cards are seven hand-signed collector cards pulled from Collector Boosters, limited to 250 printings each, featuring actors who played the characters on screen. Wizards has confirmed Captain Kirk and Captain Janeway so far, with five more to be revealed. Thirty Stardate cards reprint powerful existing Magic cards under Star Trek branding, including Sheoldred, the Apocalypse reissued as “Khan, Engineered Evil,” styled after the Kelvin-timeline Khan. Twenty-nine LCARS frame cards and ten LCARS shock lands recreate Starfleet’s interface styling directly on the cardboard, and twenty-four Classic Enterprise cards borrow the painted look of vintage Star Trek movie posters.

Three new mechanics arrive alongside two returning ones. Assimilate lets a player seize an opposing creature, slap a +1/+1 counter on it, and turn it into a Borg artifact creature that loses its other creature types. Federation rewards players for fielding a wide spread of non-Borg creature types. And Face a Dilemma names something Magic has done for years, spells and abilities that force a player to choose between multiple modes, on cards like Set Phasers to... and Seven of Nine. Whether Wizards intended it or not, longtime Star Trek fans will recognize the name. Decipher’s original Star Trek Customizable Card Game, which ran from 1994 through 2007, built an entire card category called Dilemmas around away teams having to face obstacles before completing a mission. The overlap in name and concept sits close enough that it’s worth noting, even without confirmation from Wizards that it’s a deliberate homage.

This is Magic’s fourth major outside-IP crossover in as many years, following Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, and Marvel, with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles already announced for later release. Wizards’ own head designer has been public about leaning on outside franchises to keep the game’s card pool and player base growing, and Star Trek fills a demographic gap the previous crossovers hadn’t fully reached. A company built on twenty planeswalkers and its own multiverse increasingly finds its biggest sales moments come from licensing someone else’s.

Whatever the reason behind the strategy, there’s something to it as a product on its own terms. Signed Kirk and Janeway cards, a Borg mechanic that actually turns your opponent’s creature into a Borg, and a nod to a twenty-year-old license game’s card category are the kind of details built for people who grew up on both franchises at once. Wizards is borrowing other people’s universes because Magic’s own well has run dry of surprises. That doesn’t mean the result isn’t worth a look on November 13.

Subscribe now

First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: How Star Trek: The Customizable Card Game Went From Brilliant Innovation To Complete Failure

The Odyssey opens July 17, and with three days left before release, its two most talked-about supporting cast members have doubled down instead of dialing back.

Elliot Page, a woman who pretends to be a man, escalated first. In a June 24 Democracy Now interview that resurfaced this week as Breitbart reported on it July 14, Page went beyond defending his casting and argued against the concept of binary gender itself. “In terms of looking at nature as if it’s some sort of cis hetero patriarchal structure is absurd, and that this, you know, gender binary that we’ve created is nothing but a quaint little myth,” Page said. She went further, telling the same interview that traditional teachings about “men being superior, women being inferior... it being this heterosexual existence is just completely false,” and that this view has been “suppressed” from wider acceptance. Page plays Sinon, a Greek soldier, and also narrates the film.

Subscribe now

Lupita Nyong’o kept pace on a different track. In a new interview published July 15, an interviewer told her “the women run this,” and Nyong’o agreed with a simple “Yeah,” before adding that Nolan “chooses to linger with them and tells the story also from their perspective,” giving audiences “a whole new appreciation” of the epic. It’s at least the third time she’s made a version of this argument in the weeks before release. She previously said Homer spent “very little time” on women’s perspectives and joked about wanting to confront the poet directly and ask, “Remember us?” Geeks + Gamers noted the obvious rebuttal: Penelope anchors the entire emotional structure of the poem, Athena drives the plot from the first page to the last, and Circe and Calypso each reroute Odysseus’ entire journey. Women aren’t absent from Homer’s Odyssey. They’re driving it.

What makes both campaigns strange is that neither actor is playing a role built for this kind of spotlight. Nyong’o described her own parts in the film, plural, as “small in terms of how much screen time I have,” telling Collider, “They’re small but mighty.” Page’s role as Sinon is similarly minor, enough that most of the pre-release confusion over her casting came from a single short clip in the trailer rather than any substantial role reveal. Two performers with limited screen time have become the two most quoted voices of the entire press tour, while actors in the film’s largest roles, Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, have stayed almost entirely out of the ideological conversation.

That imbalance is the real story here. A three-hour, IMAX-format retelling of one of the oldest stories in Western literature is entering theaters with its cultural conversation dominated not by its leads or its director’s filmmaking, but by two supporting actors relitigating gender theory and feminist reinterpretation days before anyone outside a premiere audience has seen the finished film. Nolan has called the surrounding backlash “irrelevant” and says viewers can’t judge a film they haven’t seen. Fair enough. But if the film’s own supporting cast keeps making the case that gender is a myth and Homer shortchanged women before a single ticket sells, audiences aren’t being given much choice about what conversation they’re walking into.

Why are the actors with the least screen time doing the most to define what this movie is supposed to be about?

Subscribe now

When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: Moana Got Cultural Consultants, Yet The Odyssey Got Mocked For Fans Wanting Greek Actors

Hello from the beach in El Salvador! I had a beautiful sunset yesterday evening forgot to send out the daily briefing because I was outside. Still have been working to bring the news to you as best as possible. Thanks for reading, everyone!

We’re getting near the end of the Reclaiming The Shire deep dive into Tolkien’s impact on cutlure. I’m going to format that into a book later this summer and release it because I think it was very much worth people’s reads. Only a couple of more chapters left. I hope you’ve been enjoying. The latest is lower in this email!

This Substack is a full-time job and more, and needs your support. Please consider a paid subscription because it all rests on you!

Subscribe now

Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie premiered July 9 with an eight-episode first season already renewed for a second, and the opening episode spends its hour on the Ingalls family’s wagon journey from Wisconsin to Kansas. This review covers episode one only. A lot of the ideological content that critics have flagged in advance coverage of the series simply isn’t here yet.

Subscribe now

Showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine, previously a writer and executive producer on Eric Kripke’s The Boys, opens with a detail the original 1974 NBC series never touched: the Ingalls family didn’t just decide to move west, they burned bridges with friends and family back in Wisconsin badly enough that going back isn’t an option. That’s new. The old version framed the move as opportunity. This one frames it as a family with nowhere else to go.

The journey itself carries the episode’s best material. A river crossing turns into the hour’s central set piece, the wagon gets stuck, and there’s a real threat of drowning as the family fights the current. Genre-savvy viewers will clock the Oregon Trail echoes immediately. In the middle of the chaos, the family dog jumps out of the wagon and disappears downriver, a beat that exists purely to make the audience worry about a family pet in danger, a trope so common in prestige TV at this point that it barely needs the tension it’s reaching for.

Once the family reaches Kansas, the episode settles into its real conflict: the promised land isn’t one. Money is tight, the town thinks the Ingalls were foolish to arrive without family or friends already established to help them build, wolves are a real threat, and a Kansas winter can kill people who aren’t ready for it. Charles Ingalls spends the back half of the episode searching for someone to help him raise a cabin before the cold sets in. He finds a man who lost his own daughter, and the conversation goes badly, the man doesn’t want to be reminded of his loss and the two end up in a fight. He comes back at the end to apologize, offers to help build the cabin, and brings the family dog back with him. That’s the whole arc: hope restored through another person’s willingness to show up.

The show reaches for faith as a companion theme without fully committing to it. There’s a brief shot of Laura appearing to pray as wolves close in, and word is the series leans further into faith elements as it continues. Given how much weight the episode puts on hope as the explicit moral, faith and prayer would have made a more grounded anchor for that theme than they currently do.

The wolves themselves are a problem. The animal CGI is bad enough to pull the viewer out of what is otherwise a fairly grounded, realistic frontier setting, and the show leans on those effects at exactly the moments it’s trying hardest to build tension. Combined with long stretches of slow, melodramatic back-and-forth about whether the family even wants to be in Kansas, the episode has real pacing problems. Caroline’s pregnancy announcement, paired with the reveal that she’s lost previous pregnancies, reads like a modern prestige-drama device grafted onto a story that didn’t need it to generate stakes.

The episode does lay groundwork for a bigger conflict to come. The cabin sits on land that will put the family in direct conflict with the Osage, and the episode gestures at that tension without saying much about it directly. Reports on the season suggest that storyline, along with the feminist themes, the marriage friction, and an emasculated father figure that advance coverage has flagged, escalates significantly as the season progresses. None of it is prominent in episode one. Neither is the “white settlers as villains” framing some critics expected going in.

For a single episode judged on its own, this lands as a 5 out of 10. The dog-in-peril trope and the modern-melodrama pregnancy reveal feel imported from a different kind of show, the CGI wolves undercut the tension they’re supposed to build, and the pacing drags through most of the middle. The apology and cabin-building setup at the end at least gives the season somewhere to go.

Given that Sonnenshine’s other credit is The Boys, does the restraint in episode one hold, or is this the calm before the show leans into everything its advance press promised?

Subscribe now

Epic Fantasy hasn’t been this hard-hitting since Tolkien. In a world where humanity is akin to a Roman legion, a great darkness arises. Read A Throne Of Bones today.

NEXT: Little House On The Prairie Returns To Netflix, And The Real Story Isn’t The One Critics Are Selling

Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery hit its biggest legal obstacle yet on July 13, when a coalition of 12 state attorneys general filed suit to block the merger before it closes. California Attorney General Rob Bonta led the filing, joined by Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington.

Every one of those 12 states voted Democrat in the last presidential election.

Subscribe now

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues the merger would let a combined Paramount-Warner Bros. control nearly a third of wide-release theatrical film distribution and nearly a third of basic cable programming. Bonta’s office says the deal would leave three distributors controlling 75 percent of theatrical films nationwide. The states asked Paramount and Warner Bros. to pause the deal voluntarily while the case proceeds. If the companies refuse, the coalition says it will seek a temporary restraining order.

Here’s the part that undercuts the “we’re just enforcing the law” framing: the U.S. Department of Justice, under the Trump administration, already reviewed and cleared this merger. So did multiple foreign regulators. Bonta’s lawsuit isn’t stepping into a regulatory vacuum. It’s trying to override a decision the federal government already made.

Bonta made the political angle explicit himself at a press conference near the Hollywood sign. “Antitrust enforcement is a check on billionaires currying favor with the president so he’ll do their bidding,” he said. He also repeatedly cited the Ellison family’s ties to President Trump, noting that Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison attended Trump’s State of the Union address and that his father, Larry Ellison, has donated tens of millions of dollars to pro-Trump groups.

Paramount’s response was blunt. A company spokesperson said the lawsuit “in the most generous light, reflects a fundamentally flawed application of the antitrust laws and is wrong on both the facts and the law.”

This fight has been running since last year. Warner Bros. Discovery originally had a competing, all-cash merger agreement with Netflix, amended in January to sweeten the terms after Paramount’s unsolicited bid put pressure on the board. Paramount ultimately won out. Now Netflix, having lost the bidding war, is reportedly exploring adding live TV channels to shore up its own declining viewership, a retreat toward the linear-cable model streaming was supposed to replace.

The financial stakes for Paramount are steep regardless of how the lawsuit plays out. The company has agreed to pay shareholders a 25-cent-per-share “ticking fee,” roughly $650 million per quarter, if the deal doesn’t close by its self-imposed September 30 deadline. A federal judge granting even a temporary restraining order could push the timeline past that date.

For a publication that covers what happens to DC Comics, HBO, and Warner IP, the outcome of this case determines who is actually setting creative direction at Warner Bros. for the next decade. Twelve Democrat attorneys general are asking a federal court to reverse a merger decision the Trump DOJ already made. If they win, on what legal theory do 12 state officials override a federal antitrust clearance, and what happens to Paramount’s deal with Warner Bros. shareholders if they do?

Subscribe now

When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: Moana Got Cultural Consultants, Yet The Odyssey Got Mocked For Fans Wanting Greek Actors

DC Comics issued new terms and conditions for retailer exclusive variant covers this week, giving itself the power to ban any comic shop that charges too much for an Absolute Batman exclusive. Bleeding Cool broke the terms first: DC “strongly encourages” retailers to cap unsigned variants at five times cover price and signed variants at ten times, and reserves the right to cut off future variant access to any shop that goes higher.

Read more

Decipher, Inc. built the second-biggest trading card game business in America on the back of Star Trek and Star Wars, then watched a company vice president siphon millions out of the register while the games he was supposed to be steering grew too complicated for their own players to track. The Star Trek Customizable Card Game outlived its publisher by nearly two decades because a volunteer fan committee refused to let it die. Getting to that ending means walking through where Decipher came from, how it built the game, and how the company fell apart around it.

Subscribe now

From Puzzle Boxes to Pente

Warren Holland founded Decipher in Norfolk, Virginia in 1983 as a puzzle company. The first product carried the company’s own name: a jigsaw puzzle called Decipher, built around four embedded cryptograms and a cash prize for solving them. A sequel followed. The final puzzle in that line, Decipher III, has never been solved. From puzzles, Holland moved the company into party games with the How to Host a Murder line, then picked up the Pente license from Parker Brothers. By the early 1990s, Decipher was a small, established name in party and abstract strategy games with no card game pedigree at all.

That changed because of two former Pente world champions. Tom Braunlich and Rollie Tesh had watched Magic: The Gathering take off and pitched Decipher on a new idea: a customizable card game built on licensed media instead of an invented fantasy setting. Decipher approached Paramount, and in December 1993 acquired the rights to Star Trek: The Next Generation. The game previewed at Gen Con in August 1994 and released that November as Star Trek: The Next Generation Customizable Card Game.

Expansion, Success, and the Seeds of Bloat

The TNG game was supposed to run three years and five sets. It did well enough that Paramount renegotiated in November 1996, handing Decipher the rights to every live-action Star Trek property: the Original Series, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and the films. The card game’s name shrank to match its new scope: Star Trek Customizable Card Game. A month later Decipher had already applied the same formula to Star Wars, licensing the property from Lucasfilm in December 1995. Both games ranked among the top five CCGs on the market for most of their runs, with Star Wars regularly trailing only Magic itself.

Growth on this scale came without a governor. Star Trek CCG launched with three factions (the Federation, the Klingons, and the Romulans) plus a catch-all Non-Aligned slot, and nine card types. Within a few years that had grown past seventeen card types, spread across new affiliations for the Kazon, Vidiians, and Hirogen introduced through Voyager. There was no unified point-cost system governing what a card was allowed to do relative to its price. Instead, Decipher patched the rules set after set, layering fix on top of fix rather than rebuilding the foundation. The community’s own oral history of the era, preserved on fan wikis, names the Voyager expansion as the start of what players still call “the Time of Breaking,” when specific cards (the Holy Hexany and Vic Fontaine among them) broke the game’s balance badly enough that organized play never fully recovered from the memory of it. Sales dipped through the final sets built around the films and holodeck scenarios, and Decipher itself took note.

Chasing Younger Players, Losing the Big One

1999 brought two moves in opposite directions. The Phantom Menace convinced Decipher its two flagship games were too dense for younger players chasing Pokémon, so it built the simpler Young Jedi Collectible Card Game around the prequel era. In the same year, Decipher tried to extend its card-game brand into party-game territory with an Austin Powers Collectible Card Game tied to The Spy Who Shagged Me. The property never found its footing as a card game and production stopped after the initial release.

Then came the loss that mattered. Star Wars was Decipher’s biggest earner, and at the end of 2001 the license came up for renewal. Wizards of the Coast, freshly folded into Hasbro alongside Hasbro’s existing Lucasfilm relationship, took the rights out from under Decipher. All three Star Wars card lines Decipher had built stopped cold. Decipher had already hedged by picking up the Lord of the Rings film license that same year, timed to release one month ahead of Peter Jackson’s first movie in November 2001, but the loss of Star Wars was still the loss of the company’s flagship product.

The Reboot, the RPGs, and the Kids’ Market Again

2002 brought Decipher’s attempt to fix what seven years of unmanaged growth had done to Star Trek. The company relaunched the game as Second Edition, keeping the mechanics that had made the original popular while adding the point-cost system the first version never had. The same year, Decipher bought most of the design staff from the collapsed Last Unicorn Games and used them to build licensed Star Trek and Lord of the Rings roleplaying games on a new system called CODA. 2003 saw another swing at the youth market that Yu-Gi-Oh! now dominated, with card games built on .hack and Beyblade. The Beyblade line died quickly. The .hack//Enemy game lasted years and won an Origins Award. 2004 added a Mega Man NT Warrior card game and Decipher’s first original, non-licensed card game, WARS, built on the same underlying system that had made the original Star Wars CCG work.

The Rot Nobody Could See

None of that diversification could offset what had already happened inside the company’s own finance office. Rick Eddleman, Warren Holland’s brother-in-law, had been Decipher’s Vice President of Finance since 1993, the same year Braunlich and Tesh first pitched the Star Trek game. Beginning in 2000, Eddleman began writing company checks to himself and running personal expenses through company credit cards. The theft continued until his resignation in 2001, and by the time it was fully accounted for in a civil suit, Decipher’s claim against him totaled $8.9 million. Eddleman pleaded guilty to twelve counts of embezzlement covering more than $1.5 million of that total and was sentenced in July 2009 to six years and five months in federal prison.

The money was gone years before anyone outside the company knew it. Decipher’s fan community has long pointed to the embezzlement as the root cause of the company’s collapse, and Holland himself built a public accounting of the fraud after the fact. The mechanics of the fraud are less important here than the timing: a company burning through licensing fees, print runs, and payroll on the belief that its books were sound had a multimillion-dollar hole in exactly the accounts it needed to weather a shrinking hobby market.

2005: The Year It Broke

2005 delivered every remaining problem at once. The .hack and Mega Man cartoons lost their audience, forcing Decipher to cancel both card lines. WARS never found players without a built-in media brand behind it and went on indefinite hold. Decipher shut down its roleplaying game division. The broader collectible card game industry was contracting on its own, and layered on top of an embezzlement loss the company was only now fully reckoning with, Decipher laid off as many as 40 employees. Warren Holland kept the company out of bankruptcy, but the staff left behind could not keep pace with the release schedule for the two properties still generating revenue: Star Trek and Lord of the Rings.

The result was a death spiral with a name among Lord of the Rings TCG players: the Hunters block, originally due in November 2005, arrived seven months late with what the game’s own community still calls the least playtested, least balanced set Decipher ever printed, full of overpowered cards and combinations nobody had time to catch before print. Delays fed retailer distrust, distrust fed falling sales, and falling sales fed more layoffs, in a loop that left a single employee doing the work of an entire studio to finish out the final sets.

Two Licenses, Two Endings

The Lord of the Rings license expired on schedule in 2007, and Decipher released its last expansion, Age’s End, rather than losing the property outright. Star Trek ended differently. On December 12, 2007, Decipher announced the current expansion, What You Leave Behind, would be the Star Trek CCG’s final set. The company spent that holiday season teasing a “player revolution coming in 2008” on its homepage, which turned out to be Fight Klub, a combat card game licensed across disparate action-movie properties like Rambo and Chuck Norris. It released in February 2009 and did not revive the company’s fortunes.

The Fans Who Refused to Let It End

What happened next is the part of this story that gives it a different shape than most dead trading card games. Within days of Decipher’s December 2007 announcement, a group of players organized the Star Trek CCG Continuing Committee to keep producing new content on a volunteer, non-profit basis. By the account of the game’s own longtime players, the Committee has since released more sets of cards than Decipher ever did, distributed as free print-and-play files. In 2010 the Committee issued a set of Modern Rules, including a ban list, specifically to correct the balance failures that had accumulated across the original run, the same power creep and rules bloat that had made the game harder to learn with each passing set. Star Wars got the same treatment years earlier: after losing that license in 2001, Decipher donated more than a million dollars in product and financial backing to help fans form the Star Wars Customizable Card Game Players Committee, which still runs tournaments today.

The game Decipher built in 1994 introduced ideas that no card game before it had tried: missions instead of an open-ended win condition, an away-team structure that made every card in the deck function as a role rather than just a stat block, a dilemma pile that punished careless deck-building as much as it rewarded clever construction. Two volunteer committees have now kept that design alive for longer than the company that built it managed to keep it running honestly. Was the game undone by its own ambition, by a corporate parent that never controlled its own bloat, or by the man inside the building who was stealing from it the whole time?

Subscribe now

First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Tired of What They Did to Your Favorite Franchise? Here’s the Fix!

Dua Lipa opened a library on June 27, inside the 120-year-old Livraria Lello bookshop in Porto, Portugal, stocked with 100 books hand-picked by her media brand Service95. She’s calling it the Manifesto Library, and she wants you to know it’s a monument to books the establishment tried to erase. The problem starts with the name.

Read more

Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering Arena development team voted 79 to 16 on June 23 to certify United Wizards of the Coast, the first union in the company’s history. The National Labor Relations Board tally covered 102 eligible workers across animation, art, design, engineering, and QA at the company’s Renton, Washington office. It also arrived under a shadow the Hasbro-owned publisher built for itself three years earlier, when it sent Pinkerton agents to a fan’s front door over a leaked pack of cards.

Subscribe now

The organizing drive began in late April, when Arena senior software engineer Damien Wilson announced the effort on behalf of the Communications Workers of America. “At Wizards, we’re organizing for a say in layoffs, accountability that runs up and down the chain, and a living wage that actually lets people build a life,” Wilson said in a statement to press. The union asked Hasbro for voluntary recognition by May 1. Wizards let the deadline pass. The company’s public statement said it was “committed to fostering a workplace where every person feels heard, valued, and supported” and pointed to its “direct relationship” with employees as the reason a union was unnecessary.

Behind that statement, the NLRB case filing showed Wizards had retained Fisher Phillips, a law firm that markets an “interactive union organizing activity map” to clients and has built a national practice advising companies on how to defeat organizing campaigns. Arena team members later told reporters the company followed up with mandatory meetings, letters sent to employees’ homes, and a daily email campaign aimed at the bargaining unit before the vote. None of it moved the needle. The election closed 79 to 16 in the union’s favor.

For workers watching the fight, the company’s history made the tactics land differently than a standard anti-union playbook. In April 2023, a YouTuber known as oldschoolmtg posted unboxing videos of an unreleased Magic set, March of the Machine: The Aftermath, after unknowingly buying the product early from a reseller. Pinkerton agents showed up at his home the following Saturday morning, demanded the cards back, and raised the subject of jail time to him and his wife. Wizards confirmed to Polygon and Kotaku that the agents were part of its investigation into the leak. Gizmodo reporter Linda Codega found the 2023 incident was not the company’s first recourse to the firm: a source described a similar Pinkerton deployment in 2017 over a leaked Ixalan foil sheet.

Pinkerton’s name carries a specific weight in American labor history that has nothing to do with card games. Founded in 1850, the agency spent the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the enforcement arm of choice for industrialists fighting organized labor. Henry Clay Frick hired 300 Pinkerton agents to break the 1892 Homestead Strike at Andrew Carnegie’s steel mill; the ensuing gun battle killed several strikers and agents and triggered a national outcry that led Congress to pass the Anti-Pinkerton Act the following year, barring the federal government from hiring the firm. Pinkerton agents were also deployed against striking coal miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. The company has spent decades since rebranding into corporate risk management, but the union-busting reputation followed it into the present: Amazon hired Pinkerton to monitor warehouse workers for union activity in 2020, and Starbucks brought on a former Pinkerton employee for its own anti-union effort in 2022.

Wizards never had to invoke Pinkerton by name during the Arena union drive. The company didn’t need to. A publisher that had already sent private investigators to a fan’s home over cardboard packaging chose Fisher Phillips and a saturation email campaign instead, and workers who had followed the 2023 story took the pattern as confirmation of where the company’s instincts sit when it feels ownership of something threatened, whether that something is a leaked rare or a bargaining unit. The vote count suggests it didn’t work.

United Wizards of the Coast now moves to contract negotiations, the stage where voluntary recognition fights and certification elections stop being symbolic. Wizards will have to bargain in good faith under federal law, though the timeline and substance of that bargaining remain open questions the company controls as much as the union does. Does a company with three documented decades of anti-union legal strategy behind it approach that table any differently than it approached the leak, or does Fisher Phillips simply become this year’s Pinkerton?

Subscribe now

When genetic engineering nearly doomed the species, humanity made a desperate bargain: let the frontier do what nature intended. In a harsh universe, these cadets have to make impossible decisions. Read Space Fleet Academy today.

NEXT: BoardGameGeek’s Activist Crowd Tries to Cancel Kingdom Come: Deliverance: The Board Game Over Gamergate

Microsoft’s July 6 announcement of 3,200 Xbox job cuts and five divested studios did not stay contained to a single press release. Across Bethesda, id Software, ZeniMax, and the wider Communications Workers of America membership inside Microsoft, the reaction has turned into a running record of an industry watching itself get gutted in real time.

Subscribe now

The Bethesda Game Studios union put it bluntly, “In what is becoming a stressful annual routine, Microsoft has decided to lay off thousands, including MANY of us at Bethesda Games Studios,” the union posted. “With over 10k developers already cut from previous rounds, those at the top have deemed that insufficient in fixing their mistakes.” Reports to IGN said the cuts hit “key, high-performing people in the trenches” on The Elder Scrolls VI specifically, while ZeniMax as a whole lost 379 positions, with the Elder Scrolls Online team alone down more than 60 percent of its staff over the past year.

Id Software took a similar hit, losing roughly half its headcount at 136 roles. Studio co-founder John Carmack, who left id in 2013, addressed the cuts directly on X. “My ‘Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand’ statement isn’t aging well,” Carmack wrote, “and this is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month.” He added that he could not “muster anger or outrage” without access to the studio’s books, but said he believed reports that Minecraft revenue had been propping up other Xbox studios for years. A laid-off id VFX artist named Best was less measured on LinkedIn: “Great job Microsoft. Nothing says business success like nuking a team into the dirt and relegating them to support studio size while also throwing out massive technological achievements.” Former id animator Skai Chow’s message was shorter: “I hope our pain was worth it.”

Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported that the cuts have left surviving staff in a holding pattern rather than relief. “Knowing that a second wave of job cuts could come at any time has led to panic and anxiety among the thousands of people who work for the company,” Schreier wrote, adding that remaining employees are “being asked to do more with less” and fear that failing to do so “could be used as a reason to be fired in the next round.” Blizzard staff were reportedly told they would not learn how the reorganization affects them until “further communications,” according to Schreier’s reporting.

The union side of Microsoft’s workforce, which has organized more than 3,500 employees across the company since 2022, says the pattern predates this specific round of layoffs. ZeniMax Online union representative Morgan Goin told a press call that Microsoft’s own bargaining commitments have collapsed alongside its headcount. “I have been entrusted with the responsibility to advocate for my coworkers. I cannot do my job when Microsoft refuses to do theirs,” Goin said. “We’re being treated as expendable, valued one week and cut the next.” CWA District 9 vice president Frank Arce said bargaining hours with the union had dropped from around 12 hours a month to around four. Another union member, Veneto, described being moved into the office of a laid-off coworker and finding a child’s name bracelet left behind among ten years of packed-up belongings.

Reaction outside the company has run from bleak to sardonic. Screenwriter Craig Robert Cargill posted that Xbox executives “believe most of us will be out of work in the next 5 years, drawing from UBI. What will we do with all that time? XBox hopes we’ll spend our time and money with them.” One laid-off Xbox commerce and AI product manager, Kevin Flynn, had told LinkedIn followers weeks earlier that he had raised “PM AI adoption from 12% to 91% in 3 months” before he was cut alongside everyone else.

Xbox Gaming CEO Asha Sharma framed the cuts in a memo titled “Resetting Xbox,” writing bluntly, “Our business today is not healthy. We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses. We must reset Xbox.” That statement arrived from a division that, per PC Gamer’s reporting, spent more than $80 billion on AI investment last year while cutting a fifth of its own workforce. Community response has organized around the United Videogames Union’s Game Worker Hardship Fund, open to any US or Canadian worker laid off from Xbox since January 2024 regardless of union membership, alongside an itch.io charity bundle organized by Necrosoft Games.

Five studios changed hands or shut down in the process: Ninja Theory, told its Hellblade franchise was ending just nine days after showing new footage at the Xbox Games Showcase; Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions, both released to find new ownership; Undead Labs, placed under review mid-development on State of Decay 3; and Arkane Lyon, facing closure alongside the cancellation of its Marvel’s Blade game. When the people who make the games and the people who fund them can’t agree on whether the business is healthy, unhealthy, or simply mismanaged, who is actually supposed to trust Microsoft’s numbers?

Subscribe now

Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

NEXT: Sony Just Ended Physical Game Discs

We started a retrospective on Tolkien’s rise to superstardom, which began with a left-wing movement in the 1970s appropriating his work and has slowly migrated over time to people realizing how right-wing and Christian Lord of the Rings is. Now, we continue.

Part 12:

Part 11:

Part 10:

Part 9:

Part 8:

Part 7:

Part 6:

Part 5:

Part 4:

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

“I’m a big Lord of the Rings guy, and I think, not realizing it at the time, but a lot of my conservative worldview was influenced by Tolkien growing up.”

JD Vance said this on a podcast in 2021, three years before Donald Trump chose him as his running mate. Nobody outside conservative media noticed. Three years later, the sentence detonated.

Read more

Disney’s live-action “Moana” arrived in theaters with a team of Polynesian consultants attached to nearly every department. Dr. Grant Muāgututiʻa led the effort as lead consultant for the Cultural Trust, working alongside choreographer and associate producer Tiana Nonosina Liufau and songwriter Opetaia Foaʻi. The consultants worked to ensure the tradition of respect within the culture was accurately reflected, down to how the film’s heroine walks into a room, addresses her father, and serves her elders. Every department head answered to the Cultural Trust before a scene made it to screen.

Subscribe now

Variety framed the arrangement as a triumph of representation. Countless artisans, consultants, experts, advisors, and department heads worked closely with the Cultural Trust to make sure Māori tribal tattoos, dance, and generations of Polynesian tradition were handled with authenticity. Cast member Owen made the standard explicit: every person on screen needed to be of Polynesian descent, and she credited Dwayne Johnson’s Samoan heritage with opening the door for the rest of the cast.

Compare that standard to Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” a $250 million adaptation of the foundational Greek epic, opening July 17. Not one lead actor in the cast is of Greek or Mediterranean descent. Lupita Nyong’o plays both Helen of Troy and her half sister Clytemnestra. Elliot Page plays the soldier Sinon. Travis Scott, a rapper with two acting credits, plays a bard. Fans have pointed out repeatedly that no actor of Greek or Mediterranean descent was cast in the film at all.

Nolan has an explanation for the Scott casting, at least. He told Time magazine he wanted to pay tribute to the idea that this story has been handed down as oral poetry, comparing that tradition to rap. When Musk and other critics pushed on the broader casting pattern, Nyong’o dismissed the backlash by calling the Odyssey a mythological story and describing the cast as representative of the world. She added that she wasn’t spending her time on a defense because the criticism would exist whether she engaged with it or not.

That is the opposite of how Variety covered “Moana.” There, matching the cast to the culture was the entire point, and getting it wrong would have been treated as a betrayal of the people the story belongs to. Here, matching the cast to the culture gets treated as an outdated demand from people who supposedly don’t understand mythology. Outkick laid out the contradiction directly: Variety ran a feature celebrating the “Moana” consultant process the same month one of its own columnists labeled Musk and his followers “trolls” for raising the identical concern about “The Odyssey.”

The historical liberties don’t stop at casting. Critics have flagged Nolan’s armor design, which some viewers compared to Batman’s suit, along with the modern American dialogue, including Tom Holland’s Telemachus calling Odysseus “dad.” Nolan defended the armor by pointing to blackened bronze Mycenaean daggers as precedent, and defended the dialogue as an attempt to give the language emotional rather than intellectual weight for a modern audience.

None of that controversy has slowed ticket sales. Tickets for opening weekend IMAX 70mm screenings went on sale a full year before release, an unprecedented move for a major distributor, and several theaters sold out within twelve hours. Tracking data placed the film ahead of “Oppenheimer” as the first choice among male audiences over 25, with projections putting the opening between eighty and one hundred million dollars.

“Moana” got no such benefit of the doubt, despite doing everything Hollywood claims it wants from a cultural adaptation. The live-action remake opened to $43 million domestically against a $250 million budget, a global weekend haul of just $95 million, and projections that Disney will lose roughly $100 million on the film by the end of its run. The 2016 animated original opened bigger. “Moana 2” outgrossed the live-action remake’s entire opening weekend three times over in a single Thanksgiving frame two years earlier.

The two films share a budget, a summer release window, and a year of pre-release cultural commentary. What they don’t share is a media standard. One production spent years being praised for cultural fidelity and still flopped at the box office. The other spent a year being mocked in the press for casting decisions its own critics called ahistorical, and it’s tracking toward the biggest opening of Nolan’s career. What does that gap say about how much cultural authenticity actually drives ticket sales, versus how much of it is a story the trade press tells itself?

Subscribe now

Epic Fantasy hasn’t been this hard-hitting since Tolkien. In a world where humanity is akin to a Roman legion, a great darkness arises. Read A Throne Of Bones today.

NEXT: The Odyssey’s Press Tour Has Become A Political Campaign, And Elliot Page Just Escalated It

Apex Magazine posted a statement this week announcing it had removed a story from Issue 153 over suspicion of AI assistance, and the editors admit in the same statement they have no way to confirm it. The story, “Vigil of the Tenth Air,” is gone from the website. Amended copies of the issue are going out to every subscriber free of charge. Here is the statement in full, as posted by the magazine:

Read more

Flew to El Salvador over the weekend and yet we still keep the content rolling for you! It’s beautiful here and I’m having a great time so far. Hope you’re having a wonderful start to your week as well. Disney, meanwhile, isn’t…

This Substack is a full-time job and more, and needs your support. Please consider a paid subscription because it all rests on you!

Subscribe now

Disney’s live-action “Moana” opened to $43 million domestically and $95 million worldwide this past weekend, a number that barely clears the $42.2 million domestic and $87.3 million global debut of last year’s “Snow White” bomb. Against a reported $250 million production budget before marketing, the film is now projected to lose Disney roughly $100 million by the end of its theatrical run. The original 2016 animated “Moana” opened bigger. “Moana 2” outgrossed this entire opening weekend in a single day of its Thanksgiving debut two years ago.

Subscribe now

“Moana” did not fail in isolation. It capped a summer where nearly every big-budget franchise title aimed at nostalgia or brand recognition collapsed at the box office.

Warner Bros.’ “Supergirl” opened June 26 to $37.1 million domestically and $62 to $68 million worldwide, well under its own $55 million tracking projection. Against a production budget reported between $170 and $186 million, plus a $120 million marketing spend, the film needed roughly $300 million in theatrical revenue just to break even. It never got close. The second weekend brought a 74 to 77 percent drop to under $9 million domestic, one of the steepest falloffs in superhero movie history, leaving the DC Universe’s second theatrical entry stalled around $100 to $107 million worldwide and projected losses between $85 million and $125 million.

Amazon MGM’s “Masters of the Universe” opened June 5 to $29.3 million domestic and $54 million worldwide on a budget reported between $170 and $200 million. The film needed three full weekends just to crawl past the $100 million global mark, a fraction of what a movie at that budget requires to turn a profit.

Disney’s own “The Mandalorian and Grogu” fared little better over Memorial Day weekend, opening to $82 million domestic on a $165 million budget. The film cleared its production cost in the opening frame, then fell 70 to 72 percent in its second weekend to roughly $24 million, a collapse steep enough that it got outgrossed domestically by two microbudget horror films directed by YouTubers within weeks of its release.

None of this is new. Disney’s live-action “Snow White” bombed the same way in spring 2025, opening to $42.2 million domestic and finishing at just $205.6 million worldwide against its own $250 million budget. Even “The Little Mermaid” in 2023, often cited as a modest success with a $569.6 million global total, actually lost Disney money once the true production cost, revealed in later filings to have ballooned past $355 million before marketing, got factored in. The pattern spans three straight years of nostalgia remakes and legacy franchise sequels landing short of their budgets, regardless of studio.

The films that did work this summer share nothing with “Moana,” “Supergirl,” or “Masters of the Universe” except a release calendar. “Obsession,” a $750,000 horror film from 26-year-old YouTuber and TikTok creator Curry Barker, opened to $26.4 million and has since crossed $206 million worldwide. “Backrooms,” a $10 million film from 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons, opened to $81.4 million, nearly matching “The Mandalorian and Grogu’s” opening weekend on a budget less than one-sixteenth the size, and has since topped $168 million. Universal and Illumination’s “Minions & Monsters” held steady through its run on an $85 million budget, crossing $280 million worldwide without the benefit of a single recognizable movie star.

The gap is not about audiences rejecting big spectacle. It is about audiences rejecting the same handful of studios recycling the same IP with the same visual template and calling it a release slate. Two first-time YouTube directors made films for less combined than the marketing budget alone on “Supergirl,” and both films outearned or nearly matched films that cost twenty to thirty times as much.

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” opens July 17 into this exact environment, carrying a $250 million budget, a cast already at war with critics over its treatment of Homer’s source material, and IMAX exclusivity that has driven a year of advance ticket sales. Universal is betting that the pre-sale numbers and Nolan’s box office track record insulate the film from the pattern above. Given what happened to Moana, Supergirl, and Masters of the Universe this summer, is a $250 million budget and a built-in fanbase enough to guarantee “The Odyssey” avoids the same fate, or has that formula already stopped working?

Subscribe now

First contact with the Oridians was supposed to be humanity’s proudest moment. Instead, their chief engineer is dead, their ship is sabotaged, and an ancient alien technology is stealing souls. Book one of the Valiant Frontiers series delivers exploration, mystery, and the kind of crew you’ll want to follow across the galaxy. Read The Soul Catcher on Amazon and start the adventure.

NEXT: Little House On The Prairie Returns To Netflix, And The Real Story Isn’t The One Critics Are Selling

The Safe Place, book two of my Valiant Frontiers series, came out last week, and the trilogy’s third and final volume is on track to follow before summer ends. That puts a full three-book arc in readers’ hands inside a few months, a pace closer to serialized web fiction than the multi-year gaps traditional science fiction publishing usually forces on a series.

That’s part of the point. Traditional publishers and Hollywood have mostly stepped back from crew-driven, planet-of-the-week space opera, the kind of story that built the genre’s mainstream audience in the first place. The stuff of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Doctor Who, and more doesn’t exist anymore. I aim to fill that gap, setting out to prove that real science fiction with a sense of wonder still works.

The Safe Place picks up the crew of the AES Valiant shortly after the events of The Soul Catcher, book one in the series. Captain Christopher Conley vanishes from the ship without warning, followed by a string of other crew members, each disappearance marked by an energy spike traced back to the surface of a planet the Valiant’s sensors had read as dead. Dr. Elaine Morgana and the science team determine that whatever hit the ship came from below, not from anywhere in orbit.

The missing crew don’t stay lost for long, but where they end up raises more questions than it answers: a hidden pocket of reality guarded by a species called the Onathi, who call it their “safe place” for reasons that become clear fast. What they’re hiding from left its mark on the Onathi themselves, and Security Chief Verelan has to decide how far she’s willing to push before that same threat notices the Valiant crew too.

Getting everyone out falls partly to Engineer Kelim, whose bond with a dead crewman’s soul (a thread that started in The Soul Catcher) turns out to be more useful here than anyone expected. He’s not just fixing engines this time. Whatever he pulls off with the Onathi’s own technology is one of the book’s better payoffs for readers who’ve been with the series since book one.

The full trilogy, starting with The Soul Catcher and closing with Time Bomb, will be out before summer ends. New readers can start the series and finish it inside a single season instead of waiting years between installments the way most trilogies require.

Have you started reading yet?

Catch up on the series:

• The Soul Catcher (Book 1): where Kelim’s bond with the soul catcher begins

• The Safe Place (Book 2): out now

• Time Bomb (Book 3): releasing next month

All three land before summer’s end. Start with The Soul Catcher now to be caught up before the trilogy closes. If you have read the first book — please leave a rating or review on Amazon! It’s so helpful!

Subscribe now

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opens July 17, and its cast has spent the weeks before release turning promotional interviews into a sustained defense of the film’s politics rather than its story.

Subscribe now

Elliot Page, a woman pretending to be a man, plays the Greek soldier Sinon in the film, just gave the clearest example. In a June 24 interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, discussing his broader work and public role rather than the film specifically, Page addressed critics of transgender identity directly. “I hope for anyone who’s sort of, you know, struggling in this time, and the headlines, and just to know, like, that you’re, you know, not alone, and loved and celebrated by so many, and try and block out the noise from, you know, absolute vile losers, who must just be so profoundly uncomfortable with themselves, they can’t handle that someone could get to a place that, I think, you know, that, you know, trans people do get to, which is a level of self-acceptance and understanding that I think is really beautiful and profound.” Page has spent the weeks before The Odyssey’s release describing her transition in similar terms across multiple platforms, telling Out magazine there is “absolutely nothing wrong with you” for anyone struggling with their identity. The interview predates the film’s premiere by three weeks, but outlets covering The Odyssey’s press cycle have folded it into the same conversation, since Page’s presence in the cast is itself one of the film’s most-discussed casting choices.

Nolan has been just as direct about his own intentions, if less combative in tone. Speaking to Channel 4 News, he explained why the film swaps Homer’s language for contemporary English. “When you look at the ancient world, people tend to view the ancient world in weird ways and there’s a lot of cultural prejudice, elevating it just because it’s old,” Nolan said. “When you go to the poem, what you find is something that’s really earthy, grounded and accessible. So, for me, in building the world of the film, what I talk to all the actors about is, I want to center it on that and make it feel very fresh for modern audiences and do away with some of those assumptions.” Nolan has confirmed the film draws on Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the Odyssey, a version explicitly marketed as using contemporary language to strip away what its publisher calls “archaic, patriarchal interpretations” of the original text. Nolan calling the backlash “irrelevant” in a separate Telegraph interview did not stop him from building the film’s entire linguistic approach around a translation chosen specifically for its break from the poem’s traditional reading.

Lupita Nyong’o, who plays both Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, rounded out the pattern days before the London premiere. Asked on the YouTube channel Jake’s Takes what she would say to Homer if she could watch the film beside him, Nyong’o answered: “So, Homer, how do you feel about the screen time given to these women, considering how little you spent with them?” She expanded on the same point to DC Film Girl, saying Nolan’s film “takes time to really consider things from the female perspective” in contrast to a story she says is “told from a very masculine side of things.” Nyong’o has separately said she “went in quite blind” on the material, telling Elle in May that she “had no idea what the Odyssey was” before joining the production and used the film as a “crash course” in the mythology.

When it comes to three interviews, it becomes a pattern with one consistent message: the frontier being defended isn’t Homer’s text. It’s the idea that the text needed correcting before a modern audience could be trusted with it. Nolan frames the ancient world as a place full of “cultural prejudice” his film exists to strip away. Nyong’o frames Homer himself as a source that shortchanged its women and needs her generation to answer for it. Page frames anyone questioning the cultural moment around gender identity as too “uncomfortable with themselves” to be worth engaging.

None of these figures are simply doing press for a movie. They’re each making the same argument in different registers, that the original material and the audience raised on it got something wrong, and that this adaptation exists to fix it.

This is an uncanny correlation to how Supergirl just conducted its press tour, leaning heavily into feminism and identity politics, even though it wasn’t as heavily present in the film as this one appears to be. Supergirl bombed, but we’ve yet to see the impact on The Odyssey.

Homer’s epic has survived nearly three thousand years without needing that kind of defense. The question worth asking as the film opens is whether audiences are being sold Homer’s story, or a corrective to it.

Subscribe now

Return to the World of John Carter with this pulpy action epic by Batman writer Chuck Dixon. What happens to Barsoom a thousand years after John Carter? Find out by reading today.

NEXT: Little House On The Prairie Returns To Netflix, And The Real Story Isn’t The One Critics Are Selling