The leaker behind the ongoing GTA VI breach dropped a new claim alongside its latest clip this week: “This build is actually recent and the game is not ready at all. Sony and Rockstar are killing your right to own and resell your games and Rockstar is killing their own employees...” It’s an unverified statement from an anonymous account running a parallel crypto-token promotion alongside its leaks. There’s no independent confirmation the game is actually behind schedule. But the claim landed instantly, and it landed because gamers have been trained by a decade of industry behavior to assume it’s true before anyone proves otherwise.

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Why “Not Ready” Is the Easiest Sell in Gaming Right Now

Rockstar’s own Wednesday statement chose the word “nearly there” over “done,” on a title less than three months from a November 19 launch that’s already been delayed twice. That phrasing alone was enough to keep the “not finished” narrative alive without Cyberleek’s help. But the deeper reason this specific claim spreads so fast isn’t anything unique to GTA VI. It’s that “buggy at launch, fixed later” has become the default expectation for AAA games, not the exception.

Cyberpunk 2077 is the reference point everyone still reaches for. CD Projekt Red promised a day-one patch would resolve “most bugs.” It didn’t. Players and reviewers ran into animation glitches, texture pop-in, and outright crashes, particularly on last-gen consoles, and the game’s reputation took years to recover despite genuinely substantial fixes down the line. Battlefield 4 launched with server instability so severe it became one of the most cited broken launches in the genre’s history, then spent months getting rebuilt into something closer to what was promised on day one. Halo: The Master Chief Collection shipped in 2014 with a day-one patch north of 20 gigabytes and multiplayer that barely functioned for months afterward, for a franchise that once defined what a polished console launch looked like.

The pattern isn’t a handful of unlucky releases. It’s routine enough that “wait three months before buying any AAA game” has become genuine, widely repeated advice among players who’ve been burned enough times to stop trusting launch day. One industry write-up on the phenomenon put it bluntly: modern players read patch notes, follow developer social accounts, and can tell the difference between a balance hotfix and a “technical improvements” patch that’s quietly covering for something bigger, and they still buy at launch anyway, because the industry has made peace with selling an unfinished product as long as the fix arrives eventually.

What That Costs Players

That’s the part that should bother people more than it does. A day-one patch used to mean a developer fixing something they caught late. Now it functions as a routine part of how games ship, baked into planning from the start rather than treated as an emergency. Publishers know certification and manufacturing lock a disc’s contents weeks or months before release, so the version that reaches a player’s console on day one is already understood, internally, to be behind where development actually stands. The download isn’t a bonus. It’s the studio quietly admitting the boxed or downloaded product wasn’t the finished one, and betting that players will patch it themselves rather than demand a refund.

That’s not a consumer being served. That’s a consumer being used as unpaid quality assurance for a product they already paid full price for, on the assumption that the sting of a rough launch fades faster than the sales figures matter. Corporations across this industry have learned that a broken launch costs less in refunds and reputation than a delayed one costs in missed earnings calls and shareholder pressure, and they’ve built their release calendars around that math instead of around actually finishing the game first.

Why Cyberleek’s Claim Works Even Without Proof

None of that proves Cyberleek is telling the truth about GTA VI specifically. The claim comes from an anonymous source running a token-sale operation on the side, with every incentive to keep the drama alive regardless of what’s actually true. But the reason millions of people are willing to entertain it without evidence is that the industry itself built the premise. When “not ready” has been the honest description of half the biggest launches of the last decade, an unverified leak claiming the same thing about the next one doesn’t need much convincing. Rockstar earned the benefit of the doubt from nobody but its own history, and its own history, like the rest of the industry’s, is full of exactly this pattern.

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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: Lanterns Episode 3 Review: “OutKast” Trades Mystery for a Lecture and Loses the Series’ Momentum

Matt Dinniman, author of the bestselling LitRPG series Dungeon Crawler Carl, announced an immediate ban on all AI-generated content across his subreddit this week. The post, titled “Effective Immediately. AI content ban,” reads in full:

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“Lanterns” hit its third episode, “OutKast,” this week, and the hour does something that has become a habit on nearly every prestige streaming drama: it stops the story cold to spend an entire episode explaining how everyone got here. Two episodes of the Rushville mystery, the militia compound, and Hal Jordan’s murder all disappear. In their place, “OutKast” hands the whole runtime to John Stewart’s backstory, and the choice drains the show of the momentum it had just started building.

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The episode opens with John falling through darkness onto a pile of mattresses inside what looks like an abandoned shopping mall, then following a trail of arrows to a small office where a Guardian of the Universe, played by Laura Linney, conducts something between a job interview and an interrogation. From there, the episode flashes back to explain how John Stewart got to that room in the first place. It turns out Hal Jordan was not the ring’s first choice. Years earlier, a green bubble lifted John’s father, John Stewart Sr., out of bed in the middle of the night and asked him the one question the ring needs answered: are you afraid? He said yes, honestly, and the ring moved on to Hal. That single moment breaks the man. His wife Bernadette does not believe his story about an alien abduction until a Guardian shows up at their door to apologize, and once she does believe it, Bernadette decides her infant son will be the one to finish what her husband could not. John gets raised from childhood to feel nothing when it matters: trained as a marksman, sent to walk home alone through dangerous neighborhoods as a boy, made to stand still while his father shoots an apple off his head in the backyard, all in service of a ring that has not even chosen him yet. The same episode explains John’s dishonorable discharge from the Marines, revealing he took the fall for a mission gone wrong that traces back to Hal’s own reckless decisions years later, a detail that reframes the tension between the two Lanterns established in the first two episodes.

That is, on paper, a lot of story. It also takes the entire hour to unpack it, and watching a show stop dead to explain what should have unfolded as a mystery is one of the most tedious habits streaming television has picked up. Set up a cliffhanger, cut away from it for a full episode of connective tissue, and expect the audience to sit through an hour of throat-clearing before the plot picks back up: every prestige drama does this now, and every time it happens, the show loses whatever tension it had built.

The bigger problem is what the episode chooses to spend that hour saying. When Bernadette finally confronts the Guardian about what happened to her husband, she does not just push back on being lied to. She turns it into a lecture on race in America. “Do you understand how unfair it is to ask a Black man in America if he’s afraid?” she asks the alien, who is played, notably, by a white actress in human form before her true blue-skinned appearance gets revealed later in the episode. It is not an isolated moment. It follows a similar racial framing from episode two, and by the third hour of the season, the pattern is hard to miss: every setback gets filtered through a lesson about how being Black makes a character a victim of forces beyond their control, while whiteness, embodied here by an alien who cannot even grasp the basic concept Bernadette is explaining to her, gets cast as obliviously privileged at best.

The episode also leans hard into the girlboss dynamic the show has already used once with Sheriff Kane in the first two hours. Bernadette becomes the one who drives the entire plan, pushing her broken husband and eventually her son toward a goal neither of them chose for themselves, while John Sr. spends the episode reduced to a man who failed simply because he told the truth about being scared. It does answer one nagging question from the pilot: the scene of a father shooting an apple off his son’s head now makes a twisted kind of sense once the audience understands these are parents who spent years engineering a fearless child on purpose. Knowing the reason behind it does not make the scene less disturbing. If anything, walking through exactly how calculated it was makes it worse.

Visually, nothing changes. The same flat grays and browns that have defined every episode so far carry over into a flashback that spans years and multiple locations, robbing what should be a rich, differentiated visual palette of any distinction. Even the episode’s one genuine reveal, the audience’s first real look at a Guardian’s true form, gets shown only from behind in dim lighting, and it looks about as unconvincing as everything else the show has put on screen.

“OutKast” wants credit for depth it never quite earns. The performances from Jasmine Cephas Jones and J. Alphonse Nicholson carry real weight, and the explanation for John’s fearlessness gives some of the show’s stranger choices a reason to exist. But an hour built entirely around backstory, delivered through a lecture on race dressed up as character work, makes for the weakest episode “Lanterns” has produced yet. Three episodes in, and the mystery that hooked viewers in the first place is nowhere to be found. Call it a four out of ten.

How many more episodes will “Lanterns” spend explaining its characters before it gets back to explaining who put a bullet in Hal Jordan?

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NEXT: Grant Morrison Watches “Lanterns,” Delivers Mixed Verdict After Slamming Damon Lindelof

The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is heading to Amazon Prime Video in the United States on September 1, ending an eight-month wait for American fantasy fans who’ve watched the show succeed everywhere except the one country where its distributor, Daily Wire+, actually operates. Author Stephen R. Lawhead, whose novels the series is based on, confirmed the move himself: “This just in - and confirmed by the producer and one of the actors (see below). For those waiting on Amazon Prime USA, it looks like the wait is soon over.”

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Rise of the Merlin premiered on DailyWire+ in January, a seven-episode adaptation of Lawhead’s Arthurian novels set in post-Roman Britain, following Merlin’s origin decades before Arthur’s birth. Executive producer Jeremy Boreing has said the show ran roughly seven figures per episode, eight figures overall for the season, by some reporting closer to $10 million minimum, making it the most expensive production Daily Wire has ever attempted. Boreing wrote and directed much of it personally, taking a leave from his role atop the company to do it. He has since stepped back from Daily Wire’s CEO chair entirely, exiting the company he co-founded in March 2025 to focus on creative projects, though Pendragon remains the signature work of that chapter.

The pitch behind the show was to prove that big-budget fantasy television doesn’t require the profanity, sexualized content, and grimdark tone that’s defined the genre since Game of Thrones redefined what prestige fantasy was supposed to look like. Critics who actually watched it, even ones skeptical of Daily Wire as a studio, noted the show pulled it off. The Hollywood Reporter, covering the split reaction to the show’s debut, quoted one viewer calling it a series with “a Christian vibe... but it does not hit you on your head with the Good Book,” while praising its production quality outright. The show holds an 88% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and the value-focused review site Worth It or Woke called it “an ambitious and surprisingly solid fantasy series elevated by strong visuals, earnest storytelling, and an excellent Merlin,” pointing to Tom Sharp’s lead performance as a standout.

The show’s problem was never quality. It was reach. Daily Wire+ is a subscription service built primarily around political commentary and podcasts, not scripted drama, and most fantasy audiences simply never had a reason to sign up. Giant Freakin Robot’s coverage of the show’s international expansion put it directly: much of the entertainment press ignored Pendragon entirely because of who made it, and as of that writing the show still carried no critic score on Rotten Tomatoes at all, only an audience score, because critics simply didn’t review it.

That changed once Amazon Prime Video picked the show up internationally earlier this year. Once it reached UK, Irish, Spanish, and Portuguese Prime subscribers outside Daily Wire’s paywall, the show did what word of mouth does when a real audience finally gets access: it climbed. Data shared from the show’s own performance tracking shows Rise of the Merlin hitting No. 3 on Prime Video’s overall TV chart in both the UK and Ireland, sitting in the top five overall in both countries for eight straight days. In Spain it reached No. 4 among TV shows, charting for 18 days. In Portugal it hit No. 6 and was, as of the latest tracking, still climbing after 26 days on the chart. Actor Steve Varnom, part of the cast, posted in July that the show was “SMASHING IT in the UK and Europe.” Colin Cunningham, who plays King Vortigern, won a British Columbia Leo Award, the region’s equivalent of a Golden Globe, for his performance in the show’s third episode.

None of that international success solved the core financial problem: Daily Wire spent eight figures on a season of television and, for eight months, the only way to watch it in America was through a subscription service most fantasy fans had never considered. An American Prime Video release changes that math directly. It puts the show in front of the single largest English-speaking streaming audience in the world, on a platform people already pay for, with zero political friction required to hit play.

The timing lines up with a promotional rollout on Daily Wire’s side too. A new poster for a spinoff titled The Pendragon Cycle, featuring Myles Clohessy as Uther Pendragon, confirms a September 1 Amazon premiere date directly, meaning this isn’t just the original season migrating over. Daily Wire appears to be using the US Prime debut to launch expanded content in the same universe simultaneously, betting that a wider platform means a wider audience willing to follow the story past its first season.

Whether that’s enough to fully recoup an eight-figure investment remains to be seen. But a show that spent eight months proving its numbers only in Europe, while its own creator was locked out of the platform where most of his target audience actually watches TV, finally gets its shot at the audience it was built for.

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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: Randy Quaid Calls Anne Hathaway’s “Days of Thunder 2” Casting “Woke,” Days After Tom Cruise Made It Official

Tom Cruise confirmed Days of Thunder 2 on August 29 with a video posted to his own X account, standing beside a bright yellow and lime-green stock car at Daytona alongside his new co-star, Anne Hathaway. “Now what?” Cruise asks in the clip. Hathaway, visibly pregnant, answers: “Now what? I’m gonna have this baby and then we’re gonna make this movie.” Cruise closes the reel with a direct line to fans: “We’re coming out summer of 2028. Don’t be late.”

Two days later, Randy Quaid, who played team owner Tim Daland in the 1990 original, told his own followers not to be excited about it at all.

The Original’s Numbers, and Why This Sequel Carries Weight

Days of Thunder isn’t a nostalgia play built on a forgotten title. The 1990 film grossed $157.9 million worldwide against a $60 million budget, opening to $29.8 million in ticket sales in its first nine days, a number contemporary sports-business coverage credited with pulling NASCAR itself into mainstream box-office territory for the first time. ESPN and the sport’s own sponsors treated the film’s release as a genuine inflection point for the sport’s television ratings and advertising revenue.

The film has held onto something rarer than box office: a self-sustaining cult following inside NASCAR itself. Teams have run paint schemes inspired by the movie decades after release. Kyle Larson brought back the Mello Yello scheme from the film for a Darlington throwback race, citing the movie by name as part of the reason. Racing writers still describe it as the definitive stock-car movie, the one film that treated the sport’s actual fans as its intended audience rather than outsiders looking in. That’s the property Cruise is stepping back into, 38 years after the original, with Jerry Bruckheimer producing again and Jonathan Levine directing.

Quaid’s Objection

Quaid didn’t hold back. “Anne Hathaway is a leftist, woke, horrible choice for DAYS OF THUNDER NASCAR audience who are MAGA,” he wrote on X. “The sexy older chick for Tom in this film needs to be Nicole. That’s the casting that would sell the idea.” He went further in a follow-up post, telling Cruise: “We need Nicole back. Don’t be a p*ssy, Tom Cruise. You need the original girl. It’s not personal; it’s filmmaking. Anne isn’t sexy, because and if you haven’t noticed, she’s pregnant.”

Quaid also flagged what he called a rushed production timeline, comparing it to the scramble behind the original film’s release: “It’s interesting because when we made the first one there was also a rush to get it out; editors slept in the cutting room on shifts. This is a weird thing, like they want it to come out and tank.”

Nicole Kidman, who played Cruise’s love interest in the original and married him the same year the film released, isn’t attached to the sequel. The two divorced in 2001 and haven’t acted together since. Hathaway’s confirmed role is different from Kidman’s altogether: not a love-interest doctor, but a racecar team owner and engineer, a position of authority inside the sport rather than a romantic subplot running alongside it.

“I Can’t Stop Laughing”

Quaid wasn’t alone in reading Hathaway’s casting through a political lens. Pop culture analyst Byl Holte posted his own reaction to the news, tying it to Hathaway’s earlier 2026 release, End of Oak Street: “Anne Hathaway just joined Tom Cruise in the ‘Days of Thunder’ sequel as (brace yourselves): A TEAM OWNER AND AN ENGINEER! I CAN’T STOP LAUGHING. She just tanked ‘End of Oak Street’ with her bull*** female-empowerment character. Now she’s gonna ruin this one too.”

Not Cruise’s First Legacy Swap

This isn’t the first time Cruise has retooled a decades-old franchise’s female lead for a legacy sequel. Top Gun: Maverick brought in Jennifer Connelly as a new love interest while Kelly McGillis, the original film’s female lead, wasn’t asked back. That decision drew its own round of fan criticism at the time. It didn’t slow the film down: Maverick went on to gross over $1.5 billion worldwide, one of the biggest box-office results of Cruise’s career. Whether Days of Thunder 2 follows that same path with a different cast swap remains the open question heading toward its June 2028 release.

Robert Duvall, who played Cruise’s mentor Harry Hogge in the original, died earlier this year and won’t appear in the sequel. It’s unclear which other original cast members, including Quaid, will have any involvement at all, though Quaid’s public criticism of the studio’s choice makes his own return an unlikely bet.

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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: Steve Urkel Was A Simp; Cucked By His Own Alter Ego

Independent science fiction and fantasy dates back to the 1970s and earlier, and few people have been involved in as many facets of it as Michael Tierney, whose Wild Stars series has spanned novels and comics long before people had access to online print-on-demand tools. He’s kept the series going for a final trilogy, which is on Kickstarter now, and just teamed with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate to put out an official Tarzan novel. He talked with Fandom Pulse about his long-running career.

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Cirsova just announced Wild Stars is entering its final trilogy, with the entire saga now written and in the can. You started this universe in 1972 in the fan pages of Eerie magazine when you were still in high school. That’s fifty-four years from first publication to sticking the landing. What does it feel like to actually get to finish a story that big?

There were times when I wondered if I’d ever see it finished. The story’s origin actually began when I was watching Neil Armstrong take that “Giant leap for mankind” on the moon, and thought about how outer space was about to become the next Wild West—hence the Wild Stars. That first story published in Eerie is actually an element from the final chapter of the grand finale. I always knew how the story would end. An employee once asked me what it would take for me to finish writing the series. My reply was “An editor who wants to publish it.” Found that with Cirsova. Editor Alex Alexander was a little worried about a possible George RR Martin scenario, where I might not finish on time. So he asked me to go ahead and write the concluding novels right away, instead of waiting on the yearly contract. So last year I delivered the final four volumes all at the same time. It felt good to have them completed. Cirsova’s reaction to the finale was very satisfying.

Wild Stars has transcended almost every medium you can name over four decades. Indie black-and-white comics through the 80s and early 2000s. The Book of Circles as a graphic novel. A tabletop RPG through Troll Lord Games. A board game. Novels through Cirsova. Serialization in Cirsova Magazine. Most creators pick a lane and stay in it. You went the opposite direction. What did each of those formats give you that the others couldn’t?

In the 1970s I wrote half a dozen books set in different time periods of the Wild Stars, but had no luck cracking the 5th Avenue publisher market. In the meantime I’d graduated High School and skipped college to develop a trade skill as a journeyman printer. By the age of 22, I was managing my own printing division of International Graphics. With an entire print shop at my disposal, I’d work after hours on different publications and portfolios—doing all the camera work and printing myself. The Wild Stars Volume 2 from 1988, I printed in my garage and used printer’s techniques to turn each copy into a unique art print by fading a mountain in the background of one page. If you’ve got a solid mountain on your copy, it’s from early in the print run. The more faded the mountain is, the later in the run. I’ve never heard of another comic created, illustrated, lettered, and printed by the same person—let alone employing an aspect to make each copy unique. Plus, that issue was the first ever use of foil stamping on a comic cover, the first ever die cutting on the front cover (cutting out a section of the cover to reveal the page beneath), and the first and only die-cut back cover. Making those comics meant using my diverse skill sets to find other ways to get my Wild Stars story to market. In 2002, I decided to collect all the comics together and had several teleconference meetings with Lightning Source about producing what would be their first graphic novel. It was awkward because digital terminology is different from physical printing. In printing, we referred to heavy black ink usage as Heavy Blacks. When I asked if they had any problems printing pages filled with Heavy Blacks, the other end of the phone went silent. Finally, my representative said, “I think he means heavy ink coverage,” which prompted a lot of embarrassed laughter.

The board game is something I’d still like to get made. Spent a whole year playtesting it and had it contracted. But then the manufacturer also wanted to do another Tarzan-based game that I’d designed, called “I am the Apeman,” where players compete to prove that they are the real Tarzan. It was licensed with ERB, Inc., but then they added the need for an insurance policy in the event that a child might choke on a play piece. That, and the rampant I.P. theft happening from the Chinese manufacturers, who had taken over the industry by that time, scared them away from board games altogether. But it would have been a fun game. They said my Wild Stars Celestial Clockwork game basically put a car engine inside a board game.

Wild Stars has always been an indie operation. You’ve been doing this the hard way for four decades and you’re about to close it out on your terms. What does running something for that long teach you that the guys who chase the big publisher check never learn?

At first, I was determined to publish everything myself. When I was circulating my novels, suddenly I’d start to see my ideas pop up in other places. But the books I never submitted stayed fresh. I was approached by one publisher who wanted to do the comics relaunch in 2002, but I didn’t think at the time that they would be bringing anything extra to the table. Then I had another project, the Edgar Rice Burroughs 100 Year Art Chronology, which was a 1200-page set of four books. I had the option to self-publish, but ERB, Inc. generously offered to help me check out the options with other publishers. At first, everyone wanted different parts of it—one wanted only the text, another wanted only the images, and another only wanted the historical aspects. They all said it was not practical to combine all those elements into one book. But I was determined that, should I fail, it would be while taking my best shot. That’s when Chenault & Gray came into the picture and said they’d print it however I made it. Did all the page layouts myself. That kind of control made the final product into something I am very proud of. But what finally sold me on working with other publishers was the advance sales that they achieved. Both the ERB Art Chronology and my follow-up Robert E. Howard Art Chronology, each racked up nearly $100K in advance sales. Once the books were in print, the publisher next learned how high the bay roofs were at the shipping locations when skid-loaded shipments on forklifts collided with them. I doubt that I could have achieved those kinds of sales as an indie publisher of my own work.

The Kickstarter is live. For the fans who have been with you since The Book of Circles and the ones just now discovering Wild Stars through Cirsova, what does this campaign deliver, and why did you decide to bundle Volume 9 with the never-before-published Volume 10 instead of spacing them out over another year?

The contract with Cirsova was for me to create a new Wild Stars novel every year, to be serialized in Cirsova Magazine one year, and then collected in book form the next. Unfortunately, Cirsova Magazine is going away, so last year’s Wild Stars 9: Flight from Reckoning was the last to appear in the magazine. Wild Stars 10: War of the Gods was originally supposed to be running as a serialization right now, and since I didn’t want fans to wait a whole year without new material, when it came time to collect Wild Stars 9 into book form, I pitched the idea about doing a dual release with Wild Stars 10. As a retailer, I know how you need to keep feeding the appetites of fans.

Young Tarzan and the Mysterious She is one of the more remarkable stories in modern pulp publishing. Danton Burroughs gave you an unfinished ERB fragment years ago, Dark Horse allegedly said no because “it needed Alan Moore writing and Frank Miller drawing,” the story sat, Danton died in 2008, all institutional memory of the fragment was lost. You later pitched the 100 Year Art Chronology to Jim Sullos and only then did the Young Tarzan story come back into play. Walk us through what it was like completing a piece of writing that Edgar Rice Burroughs himself started?

I’ve had a relationship with ERB, Inc. since I was a kid back in the 1960s, and was sending them my paper route money to buy books directly. When I once again tried to buy directly from them in the 1990s for inventory to stock in my comic book stores, Danton, ERB’s grandson, called to explain how they didn’t do wholesale with retailers. We struck up a friendship, and Danton liked my Wild Stars comics so much, he suggested that I might want to take a shot at a project that no one else seemed to know what to do with. Titled “Young Tarzan Ponders” at the time, I took one look and instantly knew what to do with it. The first Tarzan novel I’d ever read was Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, where Tarzan suffers a bout of amnesia. As he learned who he was, I was learning right along with him. But then beautiful La of Opar starts throwing herself at him, and the ape-man wanted nothing to do with her. To me, that made no sense. He didn’t even remember Jane at the time. But then, the first time he does see Jane, he charges straight into gunfire to rescue her. As a young reader, I wasn’t buying it. But with “Young Tarzan,” I had an opportunity to explain the reasoning and psychology behind his reactions. I made the story into essential canon that basically serves as a prelude to Jewels of Opar. After I turned it in, that’s when I discovered that, at that time, Dark Horse had an exclusive on the comics, and Del Rey had an exclusive on the text stories. Thomas Yates pitched a comic adaptation to Dark Horse, which drew the response you quoted earlier. So it went on the shelf, and I forgot about it until we were in final editing on the ERB Art Chronology. At first, Jim Sullos, President of ERB, Inc., kept wanting me to take a bigger percentage—thinking this was all my work. But I didn’t realize that at the time. It wasn’t until the final day of working out the contract with Cirsova that everyone understood I was working with a fragment that was forgotten after Danton’s tragic death.

You’ve now written for the Beyond the Farthest Star weekly strip, built the 1200-page 100 Year Art Chronology, and finished a Tarzan fragment. What does Burroughs mean to you as a writer, and what did you learn about your own craft by working inside his sandbox?

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The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association named Nancy Kress its 43rd Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master on Friday, announced during a Fireside Chat at Worldcon in Los Angeles. Kress has six Nebulas and a pair of Hugos to her name, most for novellas on genetic engineering and biotech ethics, but she is hardly the genre-transforming type picked before the 2020s. Her most popular novella, Beggars in Spain, is simply a political argument with Ayn Rand shoehorned into a story, not offering much more than a repudiation of Rand’s ubermensch. More notable is that, by SFWA’s count, she is the eighth consecutive woman to receive the honor in a streak that runs back to Lois McMaster Bujold’s selection in 2020.

Not one man has been named since William Gibson in 2019.

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Rockstar dropped twenty-six minutes of Grand Theft Auto VI on Netflix Thursday, then dumped the same reel onto YouTube for everyone who refused to log into a streaming service to watch a video game. By Friday morning, the conversation was not about mission structure, wanted-level design, or whether Leonida still works if you ignore the yellow paint. It was about Lucia Caminos in a pink dress and a leopard wrap.

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Grummz posted two stills and wrote, “No AAA ugly stick detected.” Endymion quoted the same images against a familiar Western-dev cop-out: We lack the technology to make women attractive. 8-Bit Eric announced that a major studio had finally remembered female characters are allowed to be hot. “She was never ugly. She looked fine in the gameplay. Other studios should take notes.”

Does anyone remember BuzzFeed? Most people still flinch at the name. Before “slop” and “content mill” became the default insults, BuzzFeed wrote the operating manual: find a face that reads as being in touch with the common viewer, attach that face to a product, and let recognition do the work journalism used to do. The personalities were never the point. The association was.

How many of those faces are still around?

That same machine is running on X and YouTube, only now the hosts have better cameras and worse dignity. A footage drop happens, and the accounts that have spent years turning themselves into brands lunge for the most clip-able frame. Mark Kern can post “no ugly stick” to hundreds of thousands of people and never have to answer a single question about whether the gameplay still functions the way it ought to. And the same circuit of influencers will, weeks after November 19, discover some new way the industry has aggrieved you and ride that for even more clicks.

Whatever the future is for gaming, the current pattern is tiresome: attach yourself to the object everyone is already looking at, extract the most algorithmically feasible position from it, and detach when the object cools. Later, rinse, repeat. The knitting circle congratulates itself for being based and correct. Meanwhile, Take-Two gets a week in which two delays, an $80 price, the physical-media bait-and-switch, the Netflix premiere, and another death-march crunch are treated as unimportant because, “Look! They gave us a picture of Lucia in a wrap skirt!”

Unfortunately, there is no magic wand that removes these grifter accounts from social media. Deplatforming them is a fantasy; their audiences are larger than the audiences of the people who want them gone. What will actually happen is a slow repetition of the same dead takes until the bit consumes itself. Too many hosts will post the same stills, take the same victory laps, and then the next host will eat the last one alive for being insufficiently sincere. This is market glut.

And it won’t even feel like a door hitting anyone’s ass when one person cycles out and some new grifter takes his place. Instead, the feed will simply become worse and worse.

The franchise’s durable promise was never its photorealistic skin. It was that the map would still work, even if you declined to follow the script. You could stand on a corner. You could watch a scene play out without directly joining it. You could fail sideways into a better anecdote than the mission designer wrote. San Andreas and the better stretches of IV and V understood that the player was an agent inside a toybox, not a cursor being walked through a story reel.

While a QTE involving a heel is not the death knell of the series, it is a tell. The studio that sold chaos for three decades now needs a prompt to tell you when to stab a man in the face. That tells you how little it trusts the person holding the controller. And the same footage that launched posts about the end of the “woke ugly stick” also showed the industry’s real house style: high graphical quality paired with a UI that does all the thinking for you. Yellow paint. Giant arrows. Objective text that arrives before the player even has a chance to get his bearings. Corridor segments dressed up as cities.

There used to be a basic assumption in game design, especially in immersive sims like Thief, Deus Ex, and the best levels of Dishonored: you were expected to fucking look around. You walked into a room, and the room itself was the instruction manual. Maybe a note on a desk, a guard complaining to another guard in the hallway, or a locked door made you look for a key, a vent, a balcony, a window, a weak wall, a sewer grate, or some other way around. The environment had logic. Objects had relationships. The game trusted you to notice them.

And if you missed something? You missed it. That was part of the experience.

Now Rockstar, Ubisoft, and Bethesda have spent years training audiences to wait for the next pop-up. Various quest systems do the thinking for you. Press a button and follow the glowing line. Investigate the highlighted object. Can’t figure out where to go? Here is a marker. Look at the magic compass. Listen to the NPC repeat the solution in your ear. Maybe your own character will loudly announce what you need to do every thirty seconds, in case the terrifying experience of being alone with your own thoughts for a moment becomes too much.

Players have been trained, over years and years of design, to stop observing and experimenting. Now they’re just consumers waiting for instructions. A streamer with thousands of viewers will stand in front of an environment absolutely packed with information and conclude that the game has “failed to explain” something because no glowing icon appeared above it. It is impossible to watch the GTA VI trailer and not also see a product repeatedly congratulating itself for being accessible to these kinds of players.

Grand Theft Auto is one of the worst possible series in which to implement these kinds of restrictions because freedom of movement and freedom of refusal are definitive features. Otherwise, you’re just playing a story game inside an extremely expensive parking lot.

Unfortunately, the mainstream discourse isn’t about this anymore. All you see is vocabulary spent on whether a single NPC is ugly or not, a question a thumbnail can answer in an instant. Influencers who live on donation ticks and outrage clips aren’t going to spend a week arguing about whether any other element answers the call to be a video game.

What are you complaining about? Look at the numbers!

The most predictable excuse.

None of what this article portends requires predicting that GTA VI will “fail.” It will sell. Take-Two could print the logo on a brick and people would still buy it. The point is to acknowledge what the industry has become: a series of cultural events with audiences already waiting in line before anyone has properly explained what the thing actually is.

Numbers answer a different question. They tell us how many people bought the game, but they do not tell us whether the game expanded the possibilities of its medium. They do not tell us whether its systems became more interesting, whether its missions trust the player, whether its world invites experimentation, or whether the studio took creative risks proportional to the resources at its disposal.

A billion dollars in revenue cannot answer design questions.

This is where contemporary critical language tends to collapse on social media. People have become extraordinarily good at measuring popularity and strangely uncomfortable discussing artistic or mechanical regression in the medium itself. The game is either a masterpiece or a failure. It either wins or loses, and if it loses, that failure is often attributed to being “woke,” even when it isn’t.

What if GTA VI is technically astonishing and commercially historic, but still represents a retreat in game design?

You won’t hear much about that because that’s not what the industry is about anymore. The larger an entertainment property becomes, the more pressures begin accumulating around it. There are more shareholders and more marketing commitments. There are brand expectations to maintain. More money is at risk, and therefore more consumers must be satisfied. With every additional layer of institutional weight, risk-taking becomes that much harder to justify.

So instead, you get slop with Latina cake attached to it for gamers who have been taught to maintain the lowest standards that can possibly be managed.

Funny how success gives a studio the resources to attempt anything while simultaneously giving it every financial incentive to attempt as little as possible. But that is the tension worth watching as GTA VI proceeds. Of course it will make money, but will that money buy any of the cultural importance its previous titles achieved while doing more with less?

And remember: the game will sell despite the fact that there were two delays, an $80 conversation, and an ongoing fight over physical media. But people have also just as quickly thrown Cyberpunk 2077’s launch into the memory hole. CD Projekt Red recouped the disaster in preorder money, stapled Phantom Liberty onto the wreck, and waited. Time did the reputational work the patch notes could not. And the influencers announced that the game had been redeemed.

Even after so many of the creative teams that made the thing people loved have already left, the brand remains. Brands are always what remain. And for many people, that’s all that matters.

Obsidian will drop New Vegas 2 any day now. Right?

Companies have taken the place of gods in this arrangement. Developers are the disciples. And all your parasocial attachments complete the circuit. Alana Pearce, Yong Yea, Sphere Hunter, SmashJT, Endymion, Grummz. The machine still runs.

And it runs because the people reading this article will condemn microtransactions in public but preorder the deluxe edition in private. It runs because thousands of developers can be on a death march in November, and the replies will still say, it’s GTA 6, bro.

Do you want games that reward your attention? Then stop letting the conversation be settled by trailer stills that photograph well. Stop treating a sequel number as a sacrament. Stop outsourcing your taste to men and women whose entire trade is remaining adjacent to whatever is trending long enough to stay paid.

The “ugly stick” was a real argument, once, about a real habit in a real industry. It is now a reflex.

Reflexes are what you use when you have nothing to say about the work.

If GTA VI becomes the biggest game in the world but sacrifices the design features that made earlier Rockstar games special, does its success prove that nothing was lost? Or does it prove that we have forgotten how to measure what really makes a video game worthwhile?

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Even though the two articles I did today are about some smaller names that many may not recognize, I feel like it’s important to recognize the efforts of both Will Murray and Rick Katze for what they’ve contributed to genre fiction. I hope they’re remembered fondly. I talked with Katze a few times about Poul Anderson, and I actually checked on him a couple of weeks ago; he was in good health, though an intermediary spoke on his behalf to me from his assisted care facility. Really tragic losses in both cases. RIP.

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Will Murray, one of the pulp fiction community’s most prolific writers and its foremost living historian, died earlier this week at age 73. Matt Moring of Steeger Books announced Murray’s death on Facebook Friday morning.

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Murray had been active in pulp fandom since the early 1970s. He edited and largely wrote the fanzine Duende from 1975 to 1977, and The Duende History of The Shadow Magazine, which he co-authored, remains a foundational text in Shadow scholarship. His breakthrough came in 1978, when a visit to the La Plata, Missouri home of Doc Savage creator Lester Dent turned up the outline for a Dent story that had never been written. Murray built a novel from it, Python Isle, published in 1991 under the Kenneth Robeson house name. It launched more than 20 new Doc Savage adventures written by Murray. He had served as literary agent for the Dent estate since 1979, and went on to write authorized continuations of The Spider, Tarzan, and King Kong under their respective house names or estates. He had recently completed a story featuring Robert E. Howard’s El Borak for an upcoming Howard-inspired anthology.

Beyond Doc Savage, Murray built a bibliography of more than 75 novels, contributing extensively to The Destroyer and The Executioner series, and writing short fiction featuring Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Sherlock Holmes, the Phantom, the Green Hornet, Zorro, Honey West, and the Cthulhu Mythos. He was widely regarded as one of the top authorities on 20th century pulp fiction. Pulpcon awarded him its Lamont Award in 1979, when he was 26.

Genre readers with an interest in Clark Ashton Smith know Murray’s editorial work directly. In 1995, he co-edited Clark Ashton Smith’s Tales of Zothique with Steve Behrends for Necronomicon Press, organizing Smith’s Zothique cycle stories in chronological order of original publication. Necronomicon Press followed in 1996 with The Book of Hyperborea, gathering Smith’s Hyperborean cycle. Both books served for years as the standard editions of Smith’s two best-known story cycles before newer collections arrived.

In comics, Murray co-created Squirrel Girl with artist Steve Ditko for Marvel Super-Heroes vol. 2 #8 in 1991. Murray wrote the character’s origin story without an artist attached, originally intending to work with Tom Morgan before requesting Ditko. Ditko added the character’s signature knuckle spikes, a detail not in Murray’s script. Murray later described the character’s genesis in his own words:

“Actually I created Squirrel Girl in script form without any artist input. Tom Morgan was originally going to draw it, but when he dropped out, I requested Ditko and got him. Ditko did a great job in bringing my baby to life. He invented that knuckle spike. It wasn’t in the script. I based Squirrel Girl ironically enough on a long–ago girlfriend who read comics and was into “critters”—wild animals of all types. Coincidentally, she was a big Ditko fan. I think I got the idea because I had a bunch of squirrels running around my roof and sometimes coming in through my open bedroom window and inspiration struck.”

Squirrel Girl went on to become a recurring Marvel character with her own ongoing series decades after that 1991 debut, and Murray returned to write a story for her in 2016.

Murray grew up in Boston, graduated from North Quincy High School in 1971, and went on to graduate summa cum laude from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He remained a fixture at PulpFest and its predecessor Pulpcon for decades, appearing as a dealer, panelist, and in 2013 as guest of honor. His most recent PulpFest appearance came on August 1st, 2026, on a panel titled “Working With Licensed Characters.” He had contributed to every issue of The Pulpster, the convention’s program publication, from its first issue at Pulpcon 20 in 1991 through issue 35 released at PulpFest 2026 just weeks before his death.

Murray’s decades of work kept Doc Savage, The Shadow, and Clark Ashton Smith’s lost continents in print for generations of readers who came to them long after the pulp era ended.

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Richard “Rick” Lewis Katze, the fan and editor who spent decades preserving Poul Anderson’s short fiction in print, died on August 27th, 2026, at the age of 81. Katze passed away at Oak Knoll Rehabilitation & Healthcare Center in Framingham, Massachusetts, of natural causes following a long series of health problems, after a bout of pneumonia earlier in the year had confined him there for roughly the last six months of his life.

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Katze was a longtime member of the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA) and Massachusetts Convention Fandom, Inc. (MCFI), serving as an officer of both organizations, and was also a member of the Southern California Institute for Fan Interests. NESFA elected him a Fellow in 1980, one of the club’s highest honors.

His most lasting contribution to genre readers came through NESFA Press, where he edited the seven-volume Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson, published between 2009 and 2017. The series gathered the bulk of Anderson’s short fiction, including every Hugo and Nebula nominated and winning story he wrote, across volumes titled Call Me Joe, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Saturn Game, Admiralty, Door to Anywhere, A Bicycle Built for Brew, and Question and Answer. Katze edited the set largely on his own, with Lis Carey co-editing the first volume and Michael Kerpan joining him for the sixth and seventh. Anderson, a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, won seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards over his career, and Katze’s project gave readers a way to trace that career in full rather than piecemeal across decades of scattered anthologies and out-of-print magazines.

Beyond editing, Katze was a fixture of convention-running in Boston-area fandom for over forty years, volunteering on Worldcons, Westercons, Smofcons, and Boskones. He chaired three Boskones, numbers 21, 28, and 41, and also chaired Lexicon 8. He served multiple times as Hugo Award Administrator for Worldcons, a role that put him at the center of the genre’s most visible award process for years running.

His legal background found its way into fandom as well. As counsel to the Constellation Bailout Committee, he negotiated the settlement of the 1983 Worldcon’s unpaid non-fannish debt down to roughly sixty cents on the dollar, a piece of behind-the-scenes fan history that kept a Worldcon’s financial mess from becoming a lasting black mark.

Katze was born in Boston on October 1st, 1944, graduated from Boston University in 1966, and went on to Suffolk University Law School before practicing law for many years. He later lived in Natick and Framingham. He was preceded in death by his parents, Hyman Allan Katze and Esta Dorothy Katze. Cremation will be private, with details on a memorial service to follow.

For any reader who’s picked up a Poul Anderson collection with Katze’s name on the editor’s page, the work speaks for itself: seven volumes’ worth of a Grand Master’s short fiction, kept in print and in order because one fan decided it needed doing.

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NEXT: Folio Society Sells Netflix’s Title, Not Liu Cixin’s, With New Three-Body Problem Limited Edition

The Folio Society has announced a Limited Edition release of Liu Cixin’s science fiction trilogy, branding it “The Three-Body Problem Trilogy.” That title belongs to the first book. Liu Cixin’s own trilogy is called “Remembrance of Earth’s Past.”

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The edition launches September 8th at 4pm UK time, restricted to 750 numbered copies. It collects all three novels, The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End, with a new introduction by Liu Cixin, artwork from illustrator Matt Griffin, and signatures from both the author and the illustrator. As of this writing, the page only accepts email signups ahead of the launch.

The naming choice lines up with Netflix’s adaptation, “3 Body Problem,” which debuted in 2024 and has a second season coming. Netflix titled its show after the first novel because that’s the recognizable hook for a mass audience that never read the books. Folio has now done the same thing with the printed trilogy, collapsing three distinct novels under the name of one.

Liu Cixin and the trilogy’s original Chinese publishers never called the series “The Three Body Problem Trilogy.” Readers who know the books catch the substitution instantly. Readers who only know the Netflix show won’t notice, and that’s who Folio appears to be marketing to. A publisher that commissions an introduction from the author and puts his signature on the book knows the correct series title. The choice to use the show’s branding instead is a marketing decision, not an oversight.

This fits a pattern for Folio’s Limited Edition catalog. The company currently runs a banner on its site for its Iain Banks release, The Wasp Factory, noting fewer than 150 copies remain. Folio’s limited runs on genre titles with built-in fandoms and screen adaptations, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, tend to move through their print runs on the strength of that pre-existing audience rather than word of mouth after release. A 750-copy run signed by a bestselling author with a Netflix show driving new readers to the source material sets up the same dynamic.

The books themselves are a mild success independent of the show. The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, the first work in translation to do so. Liu Cixin built a readership in China and internationally before Netflix optioned the rights. Folio’s branding choice doesn’t change what’s inside the slipcase. It changes who Folio expects to buy it.

Sign-ups are open now at http://foliosociety.com/uk/three-body-problem-limited-edition-sign-up.

Does a publisher owe readers the correct title of a work it’s charging a premium for, or is show-branding just how genre fiction sells now?

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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: The Prophet Who Saw 2010 From 1968: A John Brunner Retrospective

I fell among YouTube fragments and found Family Matters again. I grew up watching that show and, I admit, I liked Steve Urkel. Looking back, however, I had to ask myself. Why wasn’t he allowed to become his alternate ego, Stefan Urquelle, permanently?

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The series began as the story of the Winslows, a working-class Black family in Chicago. Steve Urkel entered in Season 1 as the next-door neighbor. Although he was conceived as a guest appearance, he conquered the show because the audience resonated with him. Steve’s look and manner are the whole gag that follows him throughout the series. The voice is squeaky, his glasses are thick, and his pants are high-water. He breaks the furniture and asks, “Did I do that?” And the audience roars with laughter.

He is also an inventor. Later seasons hang whole plots on his gadgets: the transformation chamber, shrinking, cloning, teleportation. The other constant is Laura Winslow. From the very beginning, he cannot help but express how much he loves her. She finds him grating and does not want him. Time and again he begs for her affection, even after she has been dating other men, and even after the room has long since placed Steve as the butt of the joke.

Enter Stefan Urquelle. He arrives in Season 5, episode 8, “Dr. Urkel and Mr. Cool.” Steve drinks a serum said to suppress “nerd genes” and raise “cool genes.” Then Steve achieves a brand-new bearing: better clothes, a normal voice, and far more ease in a room. Stefan has that rizz, and Laura is immediately taken with him. Other girls are too. People who never granted Steve his dignity now treat Stefan as a man worth addressing.

Yet even as Stefan receives the attention Steve never received, he is also written as vain. He speaks of his former incarnation as an annoying, clumsy nerd and the village idiot. Laura objects, and the show installs her objection as the moral of the story. Sure, Steve may be irritating, but he cares, dammit. Stefan may look like the man she wanted, but he acts as if everyone else exists to orbit him. So Laura commands him to change back. Reluctantly, Stefan takes the antidote and becomes Steve again. Laura is glad. That is the entire moral resolution.

But then they bring Stefan back in “Stefan Returns.” Steve builds a transformation chamber and lessens the arrogance. This Stefan is kinder and Laura falls for him again. Unfortunately, the formula expires while she is telling him she loves him. Here the show wants two contrary things at once: the cool man may be decent, but for some reason he still needs to disappear so that the “real” man can continue.

The Season 6 Disney World two-parter makes the preference naked. Steve shows the transformation chamber at a contest and steps out as Stefan. Secretly, Laura sabotages the machine so he cannot change back, leaving Steve trapped as Stefan for the rest of the trip.

They spend their time at Disney World as a couple, and after Stefan proposes in the park, Laura accepts.

Then Myra, Steve’s actual girlfriend, arrives from Chicago. Unlike Laura, she has been in a committed relationship with him as Steve. Her arrival exposes the situation for what it is: Laura has taken advantage of Steve’s inability to return to his normal form while building a romance around the version of him she prefers. Laura confesses. Stefan is furious, not only because she wrecked the machine, but because the engagement itself now feels like a trap built around one form of him. She asks him to repair the chamber and become Steve again. And so he does.

This is where the show’s little piece of magic begins interfering with whatever moral the story thinks it is telling. The transformation chamber is never allowed to settle on who Stefan actually is, existentially. Is he Steve’s authentic potential, a genuine aspect of his personality finally given a body and a voice? Is he an artificial persona, a handsome costume produced by technology? Or is he something darker, a dangerous alter ego whom Steve must periodically lock back inside himself before temptation leads him away from his proper life?

The episode wants all three answers when convenient. Stefan is real enough to fall in love, propose marriage, become furious at Laura’s manipulation, and demand recognition as someone with his own desires. Yet when the plot requires Steve Urkel to return, Stefan can be folded back into the machine as though the handsome man were merely a spell that needed to be broken. The science-fiction premise becomes a moral escape hatch. Nobody has to decide whether Laura loves a real person, whether Steve has genuinely changed, or whether Stefan represents a legitimate future for him. The chamber simply reverses the problem.

The most generous interpretation is that Laura is not allowed to keep the handsome man because she had to cheat in order to be with him. That would at least be a coherent lesson: she manipulated the circumstances, got caught, and lost the relationship built on the deception. But this begs the question: is it imperative that Steve be restored to the role the series requires?

Must he remain a man who wants Laura more than he wants to remain the person she actually said yes to?

The series never adequately decides who Stefan is. And Family Matters is hardly alone in this. A great many sitcoms of the era wanted the benefits of character growth without accepting the consequences of it. Characters could learn lessons, enter new relationships, change jobs, mature, fall apart, reinvent themselves, and briefly become someone new. By the next episode, the furniture of the series usually had to be put back where it belonged. The audience was invited to watch change happen while being quietly assured that nothing essential would actually change.

Season 7’s “Send in the Clone” is the show’s most revealing attempt to solve the problem it had spent years refusing to answer. Steve clones himself. And so, of course, Laura wants to place the clone in the transformation chamber and make Stefan a separate, permanent person. What is funny is that Laura’s logic, on its own terms, is perfectly sound. Divide the men between the women. Laura gets Stefan. Myra gets Steve. Everyone receives the version of Steve they actually want, and the immediate romantic conflict appears to disappear.

Yes, Steve Urkel was asked to participate in his own replacement while continuing to affirm that his rejected self is still authentic.

At this point, the story has gone well beyond whatever lesson it was originally trying to teach. The science-fiction machinery has turned morals about romance into a metaphysical problem about identity, personhood, and change. Laura’s solution also opens a series of questions that the writers seemingly had no interest in addressing. If Stefan can now exist independently as a permanent person, then what exactly was he before? Was he always a genuine part of Steve, or was he an artificial personality created by the machine? And if Laura can legitimately choose Stefan over Steve, what does that say about the years in which the show insisted that Steve’s persistence was a form of romantic virtue?

What makes this even more bizarre is that Steve consents to having his clone used this way. He even says he wants Laura to be happy, and the show presents this as generosity, perhaps even as maturity. But it is difficult to ignore what the arrangement actually means. There is something almost cuckold-like in the structure of it. Steve can keep his dignity, his identity, and his authenticity, so long as someone else gets to have the man Laura actually wants. More than that, the other man is himself, or at least everything Laura has told Steve she wishes he were. Meanwhile, the original Steve stands aside and watches the woman he loves receive the version of him she actually desires, while he settles for someone else. That is what makes the gesture even stranger: Steve is not surrendering Laura to some rival who defeated him. He is manufacturing his own rival and then endorsing the arrangement. The humiliation is metaphysical. This is “simp” rewritten as virtue.

A person is not a thing that remains identical. A person is one who answers and is changed by the answer. Family Matters increasingly writes Steve according to the opposite principle: a soul whose authenticity is certified by its refusal to change. The clone becomes the technical image of that refusal. One person might grow into someone new, but two distinct bodies solve the problem without requiring anyone to grow. The old man can remain frozen in place while the new possibility is separated from him and treated as another person altogether.

Even after Stefan exists on his own, the ranking does not entirely disappear. He dates Laura, builds a life of his own, and works as a model. By Season 9’s “Pop Goes the Question,” the show finally brings the two men to the same point. Both propose to Laura. Steve’s proposal is characteristically self-effacing. He tells her that she could have a grander life with Stefan and a more modest one with him. He even prepares to leave for Russia to join his parents, convinced that the loving thing to do is remove himself so Laura can choose what he believes is the better option.

Laura stops him. In the end, she chooses Steve.

The reason she gives takes the story all the way back to the beginning. Steve has been a gentleman since they were children. He has demonstrated that he will be there when times are difficult. Stefan, she argues, could eventually revert to the arrogant, uncaring man he once was in “Dr. Urkel and Mr. Cool,” take her for granted, and ultimately destroy the marriage.

There is something revealing in that reasoning. Why did the writers spend years complicating the distinction between Steve and Stefan, only to reach backward and treat his original transformation as evidence against his future? In other words, Stefan was allowed to change, but he was never completely allowed to escape the meaning of how he first changed. His later kindness and maturity did not erase the memory of the arrogant man who first emerged from the chamber. Steve, by contrast, wins precisely because his character is understood as continuous. The qualities Laura values in him have been demonstrated repeatedly over time. That constancy becomes the proof of his worth.

Steve wins because he never stopped being Steve. More specifically, he wins because the show has spent years rewarding his refusal to give up on Laura. He just kept asking and was kept waiting. He repeatedly put Laura’s happiness ahead of his own, even when she had given him very little reason to believe that his persistence would ever be rewarded. The show presents this as devotion. By the end, it starts to look remarkably like simp behavior being rewarded as moral virtue. Steve’s willingness to endure rejection is treated as evidence that he deserves the woman who rejected him. The moral becomes: you will eventually be rewarded if you never stop pleading for attention. That is perhaps the strangest irony of the entire story: While Steve’s persistence is treated as evidence of his nobility, the series never seriously considers whether that same persistence could become its own kind of pathology.

Two episodes later, the series itself is over. Steve and Laura are engaged. Steve returns from the space-mission finale, and they kiss. Stefan does not receive another transformation, another attempt, or another argument. Once Laura has chosen Steve, his part in the story is finished.

That may be the most revealing thing of all. Nothing in the plot required Steve to stop being Stefan. Nothing required Laura to stop loving Stefan. Nothing required the two possibilities to remain mutually exclusive forever. The series had already established that Stefan could exist independently. It had established that Laura could genuinely love him. It had even established that Steve and Stefan could coexist. The final choice therefore does not really resolve the contradiction. It just closes the door on it. Steve is rewarded for remaining the same rejected man who spent years pursuing Laura, and the alternative version of himself simply disappears from the story.

Myra is perhaps the clearest evidence that the show’s romantic logic does not quite hold together. She wants Steve as Steve. She does not need him to become Stefan before she can love him. She accepts Steve’s awkward nerdiness without requiring him to become someone else first. In that sense, she represents the alternative the show never fully explores: a woman who says yes to the man before the upgrade. Yet the machinery of the story kept pointing toward Laura.

Why was Laura ultimately given the authority to determine which version of Steve deserves to become permanent? That is where the show’s treatment of Steve’s simping becomes difficult to ignore. Stefan represents the possibility that Steve might receive Laura without having to spend years begging for her attention. So why contain that?

Why was the nerd the authentic core while Stefan was merely the mask? The more interesting possibility is that Steve was an unfinished version of the same man. What would have happened if Steve had been allowed to grow without needing a transformation chamber to turn him into someone else? What if he could have become more confident, more capable, and more self-assured while still remaining Steve Urkel? Would Laura’s eventual choice still feel like the triumph of genuine character, or would it reveal how much the series depended on Steve remaining the same rejected, endlessly persistent admirer?

Perhaps that is where we should leave the question.

Was Steve really rewarded for becoming a better man, or was he rewarded for never stopping his pursuit of Laura? And if the series had allowed Steve to grow into a more confident and capable version of himself without ever becoming Stefan, would we still recognize the ending as a happy one? Or did Family Matters ultimately need Steve to remain the nerd that he always was?

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NEXT: Deadpool, Spider-Man, and the Trap of “Feeling Like Itself”

Grand Theft Auto VI had its Netflix debut on August 27, twenty-six minutes of footage, years in the making, one of the biggest entertainment reveals of the decade by any measure. Somewhere in the middle of it, a woman holds up two outfits to her boyfriend and asks what he thinks. He says “sequins.”

This reads as a sitcom bit, and it’s one small piece of a pattern that’s showing up across Rockstar’s own marketing, its own dialogue, and its own promotional partners.

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Marvel Studios closed out D23 on August 14 by bringing seven actors onstage to reveal its X-Men reboot cast, and the internet had its verdict before Kevin Feige finished the sentence. Of the roster confirmed that night, four are women and two are men, and multiple users on X immediately started asking, “where are the men?”

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The reveal was staged for maximum drama. Director Jake Schreier walked out with Sadie Sink, who’d already debuted as a teenage Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. “It is so wonderful to be here and to finally be able to talk about this character after months of speculation,” Sink told the crowd. She and Schreier then brought out the rest of the cast one at a time: Kit Connor as Scott Summers, Christopher Abbott as Professor Charles Xavier, Samara Weaving as Emma Frost, Inde Navarrette as Rogue, and Maya Boyd as Storm. Adam Driver closed the segment with a video message from Pinewood Studios, revealing he’ll play a villain named Nathaniel Milbury, widely read by fans as a setup for a future Mister Sinister. Most of the cast met each other for the first time backstage that night.

Feige addressed the scale of the project in response to the backlash. “Having 85, almost 90 years of comic book history, there’s so many stories yet to tell,” he told the Disney Worldbuilders panel, according to GamesRadar+. “We announced a very young, new cast for a property called X-Men the other day.” He went further elsewhere in the panel, floating a future that could stretch to “100 more” X-Men movies and “sagas upon sagas” of mutant storytelling, positioning this cast as a foundation piece meant to carry the franchise for decades rather than a single trilogy.

On the casting-ratio complaint specifically, Feige was on record calling the group incomplete. He said onstage that this was the first wave of actors, with more names still to come, and Marvel put that same line in writing in its own official recap of the panel. Deadline had signaled the same thing before the show even started, reporting that Schreier and Marvel spent the summer auditioning through a final casting round after the Fourth of July, with the roster still being treated as a work in progress. Reported names still missing include Wolverine, Beast, Cyclops’s eventual X-Men teammate Gambit, and Magneto, the character most fans assumed Driver was about to reveal before the Milbury twist.

The math behind the complaint isn’t wrong on its face. Judging a seven-person cast that Feige himself called unfinished skips past the actual claim being made: this is wave one, and the characters still missing happen to be some of the franchise’s most prominent men. Whether Marvel closes that gap the way it says it will is the real open question, not whether Friday night’s group leaned female.

What gives the backlash its edge is the pattern it continues. The term “M-She-U” has been circulating since Captain Marvel in 2019 and picked up steam through The Marvels, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk, all shows and films that leaned into female-led storytelling and all of which underperformed with general audiences relative to expectations. Marvel has responded to the term in wildly different ways over the years, at one point having She-Hulk mock the criticism directly in a 2022 episode built around fictional hate-tweets aimed at its own heroine. That dismissive posture looks different now. In June, Cosmic Book News reported that a Marvel promotional event in Italy for Avengers: Doomsday displayed a cast board stacked heavily with male characters, sparking real-time speculation that the studio was deliberately signaling a course correction after years of the M-She-U label sticking. Whether that shift is a genuine strategic reset or just how this particular cast board happened to fill up, the fact that fans immediately read it as an apology tells you how loud the complaint has gotten.

Put the X-Men reveal next to that Doomsday promo and a pattern starts to look less like coincidence. A franchise that spent years brushing off “M-She-U” complaints as bad-faith noise is now fielding the same complaint about its splashiest new IP and pointing, this time, to an unfinished roster and a promise of more men to come, rather than mocking the people asking the question. That’s not nothing. It’s also not a finished answer, and Marvel won’t have to actually answer it until the next wave of names lands.

Is holding back the male-led half of a cast reveal really the correction fans are asking for, or is Marvel just hoping “wait and see” buys enough goodwill to get past the next round of headlines?

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The biggest shocker of the week is my actually liking a Strange New Worlds episode! I told my wife this morning usually I dread Thursdays because it’s such a chore as a job to sit through these and review them, but this week actually was enjoyable. Wonders never cease!

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Robert J. Kuntz spent his teenage years three blocks from Gary Gygax’s house. He became Gygax’s co-Dungeon Master, played the character Robilar in the campaign that would become D&D’s founding myth, and was the first player to survive Gygax’s Tomb of Horrors. In a new Bleeding Fool interview, the last major living original creator of Dungeons & Dragons accuses Wizards of the Coast and its in-house historian of running a coordinated campaign to paint the game’s founders as bigots. He backs it with a list of named grievances, a documented legal dispute, and a threat to sue. And it arrives at the tail end of nearly two years of Wizards controversies this outlet has tracked one by one.

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Rockstar Games broke a week of silence on Wednesday, posting an apology to fans hours before tonight’s Netflix reveal of GTA VI’s first real gameplay footage. It is a unusual move from a studio that has weathered leaks before by saying almost nothing.

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“We know that many of you have been waiting to hear from us regarding the events of the past week,” the statement began. “It would be an understatement to say that having videos of Grand Theft Auto VI gameplay leak in this way has been heartbreaking for our team, and this is obviously not how we intended for you to see the game after all this time.” Rockstar went further than acknowledging the leaks. It apologized for the entire wait behind them: “We are very sorry that everything has taken as long as it has, from getting the game finished (nearly there!) to sharing more details and official gameplay, and providing the community with everything you want to know.” The studio confirmed November 19 stays the release date, called tonight’s Netflix Extended Look something it needs “to exceed your expectations,” and closed by thanking fans for messages of support: “Every word from you meant more than you know.”

Compare that to how Rockstar handled its last major leak. In September 2022, when a hacker posted more than 90 clips of unfinished development footage stolen through a network intrusion, the company’s public response ran two sentences: it called the breach “extremely disappointing” and said it expected no impact on development. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick later described that leak as “really frustrating and upsetting” on an earnings call and told investors it had no measurable financial effect. This week’s leak got a full statement, a direct apology, and an admission that the wait itself, not just the leaked footage, has been a problem.

The financial numbers explain why the tone changed. Cyberleek’s first clips went up August 18. Take-Two stock sat at $248.13 before that. Within two days it hit an intraday low of $231.60, a drop Insider Gaming calculated at $2.83 billion in erased market capitalization, sourced from Yahoo Finance data. Shares clawed back to the $240 range by the following week as investors priced in the fact that nothing about the actual release changed: pre-orders are still running ahead of Take-Two’s own forecasts, with Sensor Tower estimating 89% of them are for the $100 Ultimate Edition, and the company reaffirmed its $8.0 to $8.2 billion full-year outlook on its most recent earnings call. Roughly $1.5 billion of the initial loss was still outstanding as of this week. Wall Street isn’t betting the game fails. It’s pricing in uncertainty about how deep the breach goes and what else Cyberleek is sitting on.

That reaction gap between 2022 and now says something about what actually changed. Four years ago, a leak had zero measurable financial impact and Rockstar could shrug it off in two sentences. This time a leak cost close to three billion dollars at the bottom and got a full apology letter. The footage itself isn’t why. The difference is what Rockstar built around this release, and how badly that structure was set up to absorb a hit.

Rockstar’s entire reveal strategy ran through a single choke point: an exclusive deal with Netflix. Tonight’s Extended Look airs on the streaming service at 3 p.m. ET and stays locked there for six hours before hitting Rockstar’s own YouTube channel and website. That structure meant Rockstar could not simply drop the real footage the moment Cyberleek’s first clip went up to kill the story with an official version. The contract wouldn’t let it. Every day between August 18 and tonight was a day Cyberleek controlled the narrative uncontested, because the one tool that could have flipped the story back to Rockstar’s terms, its own gameplay reveal, was sitting behind a paywall the studio had signed itself into. Cyberleek’s site briefly went dark last Thursday, which sparked rumors that its operator had been arrested. The leaks resumed within days, and mirror sites have been springing up faster than takedowns can remove them, including a federal court order granting Take-Two subpoenas against Microsoft and Discord to try to unmask the account behind it.

None of this happens in a news vacuum, either. GTA VI has already been delayed twice, first from a Fall 2025 window to May 2026, then from May to November, both explained as time needed to finish the game. The base game runs $80, the Ultimate Edition $100, and the disc-free “physical” edition ships as a code in a box redeemable on one console. Rockstar built a marketing rollout for this exact moment on the assumption it would control every frame the public saw first. A leaker with a playable build and a crypto-token side hustle took that assumption apart in eight days, and the studio’s own contract left it no way to respond until the leaker had already been setting the terms of the conversation for over a week.

Tonight’s reveal was supposed to be Rockstar dictating the story on its own timeline. Instead, it airs after a public apology, a $2.8 billion stock swing, and a federal subpoena fight that isn’t resolved. How much of that was foreseeable the moment Rockstar signed away same-day access to its own reveal?

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On the evening of Friday, August 25, 1995, at the 53rd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Scotland, Robert Silverberg stepped to the podium at the Hugo Awards ceremony and told four thousand fans that John Brunner had died of a stroke earlier that day, in his hotel room, at the age of sixty. Silverberg suggested that instead of a moment of silence, John would have preferred a last round of applause. The standing ovation ran four minutes. Fans in every corner of the SF world learned of his death within hours, over the still-young internet, which was the kind of communications architecture Brunner himself had described in one of his novels twenty years earlier.

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He had been the first British author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel. He had won the British Science Fiction Association Award twice. He had won the Prix Apollo. He had been Guest of Honour at the first European Science Fiction Convention. He had written more than eighty novels across four decades. His 1968 masterpiece Stand on Zanzibar is set in 2010 and got so much of the twenty-first century right that reading it in the actual twenty-first century is uncanny. He coined the word “worm” for self-replicating malware. He predicted the internet. He predicted mass shootings. He predicted the corporate takeover of nation-states, the collapse of American cities, the ecological crises of the 2020s, and the drug-saturated media environment we all now live inside.

By the time he died, most of his books were out of print. His publishers had lost interest. The mainstream SF conversation had moved past him. He was, at the moment of his death, one of the great forgotten prophets of modern science fiction.

His stock has recovered somewhat in the years since as the world he predicted has continued to come true, but most working SF readers under fifty do not know his name. That should change.

The Boy Who Sold His First Novel at Seventeen

John Kilian Houston Brunner was born on September 24, 1934, in Preston Crowmarsh, Oxfordshire, England, the son of Anthony and Felicity Brunner. He was educated at Cheltenham College, one of the old English public schools, then went up to Oxford. He served as a pilot officer in the Royal Air Force from 1953 to 1956, which he loathed. He came out of the RAF with a deep suspicion of military institutions and became active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, for which he wrote the anthem “The H-Bomb’s Thunder” in 1958. The song is still sung at CND marches. It is one of the most durable political anthems in twentieth-century British political music.

His writing career started early. He sold his first novel at seventeen: Galactic Storm (1951), published under the pen-name Gill Hunt. Through the 1950s and early 1960s he became one of the most prolific pulp SF writers on either side of the Atlantic, working for Ace Books, DAW, and every American and British paperback house that would take his work. He wrote under several pseudonyms including K. Houston Brunner and Keith Woodcott. He did not start writing full time until 1958.

The Pulp Catalog

The current SF conversation talks about Brunner, when it talks about him at all, as if his career started in 1968 with Stand on Zanzibar. That version of the story leaves out the first fifteen years of his working life and about half his best sword-and-spaceship instincts. Brunner spent the 1950s and 1960s writing exactly the kind of tight, imaginative, adventure-driven space opera that the current indie SF space is rebuilding at industrial scale, and a lot of it holds up better than the field’s later dismissal of it would suggest.

The Interstellar Empire sequence is the crown jewel of Brunner’s pulp period. Set in the twilight of the Argian Empire, a galactic civilization that humanity built on the back of a discovered cache of abandoned alien starships and then lost the ability to maintain, the sequence works the ground Isaac Asimov staked out in Foundation and H. Beam Piper worked in Space Viking, but with a texture and moral seriousness that belongs to Brunner alone. Empires crumble. Frontier worlds fall to barbarism. Slaves, mutants, adventurers, and swordsmen fight for space in the ruins. The novella The Wanton of Argus appeared in 1953 in Two Complete Science-Adventure Books under the byline Kilian Houston Brunner, and was reissued as The Space-Time Juggler by Ace in 1963. The Altar on Asconel followed in 1965. “The Man from the Big Dark” filled in the middle. DAW collected all three as Interstellar Empire in 1976, which is the edition most readers should hunt for. Brunner later dismissed these stories as “naive,” which is the kind of thing serious writers say about their pulp when the prestige conversation makes them ashamed of the work that formed them. The stories are better than that assessment.

The Zarathustra Refugee Planets trilogy is the other essential Brunner pulp sequence. Secret Agent of Terra (1962) introduces a Terran agent working undercover on a lost colony world to keep imperial law functioning in a corner of space that has forgotten it exists. Castaways’ World (1963) and The Repairmen of Cyclops (1965) complete the trilogy. Brunner later reworked Secret Agent of Terra as The Avengers of Carrig (1969). The framework is competent-agent-in-over-his-head planetary romance, and it is exactly the kind of self-contained adventure that a reader can pick up on a Saturday morning and finish before dinner. This is the Brunner that fans who love Poul Anderson’s Flandry stories, H. Beam Piper’s Paratime and Space Viking novels, and Andre Norton’s Solar Queen books should be reading. It has been out of print more often than in, which is a scandal.

Beyond the two organized sequences, the pulp catalog is enormous. Threshold of Eternity (1959) is a time-war novel. The 100th Millennium (1959) is far-future adventure. The Skynappers (1960), Meeting at Infinity (1961), The Super Barbarians (1962), Times Without Number (1962), The Rites of Ohe (1963), and The Astronauts Must Not Land (1963) are all straight adventure work of varying quality but consistent inventiveness. The Long Result (1965) is the first-contact novel that shows Brunner beginning to write about ideas rather than around them. The Squares of the City (1965) is the political novel set in a fictional South American capital and structured around the sequence of moves in the actual 1892 Havana chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin. It was nominated for the Hugo. The Whole Man (1964), also published as Telepathist, is the story of a physically disabled telepath who becomes a healer working for a UN agency. It was nominated for the Hugo. Both novels sit right on the seam between the pulp work and what came next.

None of the pulp is required reading to understand Brunner’s contribution to the field. All of it is required reading to understand Brunner as a working writer, and much of it is more fun than the more famous later novels. If you like sword-and-spaceship space opera, planetary romance, or competent-agent adventure, Brunner wrote some of the best examples of each in the 1960s, and the catalog is sitting there in used bookstores and Kindle reprints waiting for readers who did not get the memo that this stuff was supposed to be embarrassing.

The Turn

In 1968 Brunner published Stand on Zanzibar, and the field had not seen anything quite like it. The novel is 582 pages long. It is set in the year 2010. It is structured after John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy, dividing its narrative into four rotating types of chapter: Continuity, Tracking with Closeups, The Happening World, and Context. Continuity chapters carry the main plot. Tracking chapters follow individual characters. The Happening World chapters are collages of advertisements, news bulletins, propaganda, official government notices, television transcripts, and overheard fragments of conversation. Context chapters are excerpts from the sociological writings of a fictional pundit named Chad Mulligan, who functions as the novel’s philosopher-critic.

The plot centers on two Manhattan roommates, corporate executive Norman Niblock House and undercover intelligence analyst Donald Hogan, whose lives converge with a genetic engineering breakthrough that will reshape human civilization. The world around them is a hyperkinetic collage of overpopulation, media saturation, corporate feudalism, and casual daily violence. The book won the Hugo Award for Best Novel at Worldcon 1969. Brunner became the first British author to win the top Hugo. He also took the BSFA Award and, later, the French Prix Apollo. He was thirty-four years old.

The novel’s predictions have held up in ways that are hard to overstate. Brunner predicted the media environment of the smartphone era. He predicted the terrorism-as-ambient-noise of the post-9/11 world. He predicted mass shootings, which he called “muckers” and imagined as ordinary people who snap and go on random violent sprees. He predicted commercial genetic engineering, corporate takeover of African states, in-vitro fertilization anxieties, mass-marketed psychedelic drugs, the collapse of Detroit, President Obomi (his stand-in for an African-American president elected in 2010), and the general texture of a Western civilization that no longer believes in its own future. He was writing this in 1966 and 1967. It landed in 1968.

The Club of Rome Quartet

Stand on Zanzibar was the first of what critics have come to call the Club of Rome Quartet, named after the international think tank whose 1972 report Limits to Growth codified the anxieties Brunner had been dramatizing on his own. The other three novels are The Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972), and The Shockwave Rider (1975). Together they add up to one of the most sustained and prescient bodies of near-future speculation in twentieth-century science fiction.

The Jagged Orbit (1969) takes on race, weapons proliferation, and the medicalization of daily life. Set in an America of the 2010s that has been sorted into “knee” (African American) and “blank” (white) enclaves after decades of unchecked racial violence, the novel imagines an arms industry that profits from perpetual paranoia, a psychiatric establishment that pathologizes normal human distress in order to sell drugs, and a state apparatus that has abandoned all pretense of neutrality. The book has 100 numbered chapters, some running only a single syllable, some running several pages. It won the BSFA Award in 1970. Its predictions about the militarization of civilian police, the psychiatrization of ordinary distress, and the profit motive underlying racial polarization are somewhere between prescient and unnerving.

The Sheep Look Up (1972) is the ecological catastrophe novel. It takes place over the course of a single year, one chapter per month, tracking the environmental collapse of the United States under an administration that responds to every warning by demanding more industrial deregulation. The environmentalist Austin Train, an academic who has become disillusioned with public life, is pursued as a folk hero by a scattered network of eco-terrorists calling themselves Trainites. The book ends with America burning. It is Brunner’s bleakest novel, and it is arguably his most morally serious one. The specific warnings, from contaminated tap water to synthetic food subsidies to a president whose media strategy is to bully the press into printing “what is good for America,” read now like a checklist of anxieties that have become permanent features of Western political life.

The Shockwave Rider (1975) closed the quartet with the most technologically prophetic of the four. Brunner was reading Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock while writing it, and the novel imagines an America whose information infrastructure has become so pervasive that human identity itself has become a matter of what the “data net” says about you. The protagonist, Nickie Haflinger, is a fugitive from a covert government program who survives by using his hacking skills to invent new identities on the fly. In the course of the plot he releases a self-replicating program called a “worm” designed to expose the corruption underlying the data net. Brunner coined the term. Every subsequent use of “worm” for self-replicating malware traces back to this novel. William Gibson has cited The Shockwave Rider as a direct precursor to cyberpunk. It is one of the most influential SF novels of the 1970s and almost nobody outside the specialist conversation reads it anymore.

Together the four books add up to a body of speculation about the twenty-first century that has no peer in mid-century American SF. Ballard was doing something similar in the UK. Le Guin was working a different vein. But nobody else combined Brunner’s political seriousness, his rigorous futures-studies approach to extrapolation, his experimental structural boldness, and his willingness to imagine the collapse of the world he was writing from. Brunner was the writer who took the intellectual tools of the 1960s New Wave and applied them to the actual problems of running a civilization into the twenty-first century.

The Post-Zanzibar Catalog

The Club of Rome Quartet gets most of the post-Zanzibar attention, but Brunner kept writing serious standalone SF for the next two decades, and significant chunks of it deserve recovery alongside the four famous dystopias.

Total Eclipse (1974) is a first-contact archaeology novel about a human expedition trying to figure out why an alien civilization went extinct. It is short, tight, and devastating. The Crucible of Time (1983) is his generation-spanning novel about an alien civilization struggling to develop the technology to escape its dying star system before catastrophe wipes it out. Web of Everywhere (1974) explores what happens to a society that adopts personal teleportation before it works out the social consequences. A Maze of Stars (1991), one of his final novels, is a mature space opera about a sentient starship tasked with observing the descendants of the human colonists it originally seeded across the galaxy.

He also wrote thrillers, contemporary novels, and poetry. The Great Steamboat Race (1983) is a mainstream historical novel about the 1870 Mississippi steamboat race between the Robert E. Lee and the Natchez. He worked on it for years. It did not sell well. He was a linguist and translator who spoke fluent French, German, Italian, Spanish, and some Russian, and he did significant translation work throughout his career.

The Final Years

By the late 1970s and early 1980s Brunner’s commercial fortunes began to slide. The Club of Rome Quartet had won every major award and stopped selling. Publishers wanted more of the pulp adventure Brunner had been producing in the 1960s and less of the ambitious near-future work he had built his reputation on. He kept writing. The industry lost interest.

His first wife Marjorie handled his publishing relationships for the entirety of their marriage. She was, by all accounts, the reason his business affairs held together. She died in 1986. Brunner’s health had already begun to decline. Her death accelerated the slide. His finances tightened. He became known in the industry as difficult to deal with, which some observers attributed to grief and financial pressure and others attributed to accumulated frustration with a business that had stopped valuing him.

He remarried on September 27, 1991, to Li Yi Tan, a Chinese immigrant. The marriage brought some stability back into his life. He continued to write, continued to attend conventions, and continued to work through health problems that were becoming steadily more serious. Most of his novels were out of print by the early 1990s. He accused publishers of a conspiracy against him. The truth was probably simpler and sadder: his kind of book was out of fashion, and he did not have the personal or professional infrastructure to fight for the catalog.

He traveled to Glasgow in August 1995 for Intersection, the 53rd Worldcon. He was sixty years old. He died there of a stroke on the afternoon of Friday, August 25, in his hotel room. Robert Silverberg’s eulogy at the Hugo ceremony was one of the great moments in modern SF fan history. The four-minute standing ovation is what the field remembers.

Why He Matters Now

Brunner is the writer who proved that near-future speculative fiction, done with rigor, can outlast the moment that produced it. The Club of Rome Quartet was written to be topical, and it has aged into permanence. That is a rare accomplishment. Most topical fiction dates the second the topic changes. Brunner’s dates upward, becoming more accurate every year.

The indie and crowdfunded SF space that is rebuilding a genre where craft, ambition, and unfashionable perspectives are welcome has almost nobody to point to at Brunner’s level of technical accomplishment in near-future extrapolation. He wrote novels with real people in them, real ideas driving them, and real political consequences following from the ideas. He did not preach. He showed the reader the world twenty years out and let the reader draw the conclusions. That is what serious speculative fiction is supposed to do, and modern SF has largely forgotten how to do it.

Reading Brunner now is also an object lesson in what happens to a working writer when the publishing industry decides it no longer wants what he does best. The commercial collapse of his career in the 1980s was not the result of declining quality. A Maze of Stars (1991), written near the end, is a serious mature novel. The Crucible of Time (1983) is one of his finest sustained works. The catalog stopped selling because the market moved. The writer kept working. The pattern is familiar to anyone paying attention to the current state of trad-pub SF, and Brunner’s case is the historical precedent for what recovery through indie publishing is going to look like as the next generation of writers finds itself in the same position.

If you have never read Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar is the entry point. It is long, it is dense, it takes about a hundred pages before the Dos Passos structure starts feeling like a feature rather than an obstacle, and it is worth every page. The Sheep Look Up is the darkest and most morally serious of the four. The Shockwave Rider is the fastest and most accessible, and the one that reads most obviously like a cyberpunk novel written before cyberpunk had a name. The Whole Man is the entry point for the earlier work.

He was one of the great prophets of the field. The prophecies keep coming true. The books are, slowly, coming back into print. The reading is waiting.

Which prescient SF writer do you think saw the twenty-first century most clearly from the twentieth, and which of their books would you put in every reader’s hands?

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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.

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