Skyward by Brandon Sanderson to Be Adapted for Television
The first novel in bestselling author Brandon Sanderson’s young adult quartet, Skyward, will be the next project for Tomorrow Studios and TV writer-producers Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen. Sanderson is set to be one of the series’ co-writers. Skyward is about a young woman who wants to become a fighter pilot to help humanity on a hostile planet and restore her disgraced father’s legacy.
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From the publisher description: “Spensa’s world has been under attack for decades. Now pilots are the heroes of what’s left of the human race, and becoming one has always been Spensa’s dream. Since she was a little girl, she has imagined soaring skyward and proving her bravery. But her fate is intertwined with her father’s–a pilot himself who was killed years ago when he abruptly deserted his team, leaving Spensa’s chances of attending flight school at slim to none.
No one will let Spensa forget what her father did, yet fate works in mysterious ways. Flight school might be a long shot, but she is determined to fly. And an accidental discovery in a long-forgotten cavern might just provide her with a way to claim the stars.”
Dan Ackroyd is Releasing a Sci-Fi Novel!
The legendary actor Dan Aykroyd, 73, probably best known for Saturday Night Live, Ghostbusters, and The Coneheads, announced his first novel! It’s about an insurance adjuster living a pretty normal, ordinary life who is chosen by extraterrestrials to complete an important mission.
From the publisher description: “Doug embraces his responsibility with pride, believing he’s playing a crucial role in something far bigger than himself and enjoying the lucrative side of his new vocation. But as he soon discovers, he’s not just a courier—he’s a pawn. Multiple alien species are locked in a silent interdimensional rivalry, using Doug as an unwitting middleman in their cosmic chess game. The more he understands his role, the more Doug realizes that the fate of Earth itself may hang in the balance.”
Soulhider by Dan Aykroyd will be available from Harper on October 27, 2026.
Read the New Short Story “The Perpetual Post” from Isabel J. Kim!
Award-winning short story writer Isabel J. Kim’s debut novel, Sublimation, will be hitting shelves on June 2. It’s a sci-fi thriller for fans of Severance, about doppelgängers and borders. And while you wait to pick it up, you can read her new short story, “The Perpetual Post.”
In the story, a transgalactic delivery service worker, Hanna, receives a new delivery assignment that turns out to be personal. You can read an excerpt below and the whole story at Reactor!
The communique slides through just as Hanna is finishing the fuel checks on her engine. All systems green, but that’s the full extent of her knowledge. Hanna has no idea how her ship actually works. After 150 years of time dilation and her third ship, she gave up on keeping track.
Hanna’s on her twenty-sixth ship now. The vehicle is near-unrecognizable as a spacecraft. It’s just a clean silver bullet with an interior five thousand years out of date. She controls the ship through a blocky dashboard with anachronistic punch-buttons and lights, which she memorized the codes for back when she started this job.
The communique ticker-tapes itself across the screen of her dash.PERPETUAL POSTAL WORKER #7, YOUR NEXT ASSIGNMENT IS A PICKUP ON FS-T-XN156 ORBITAL STATION CARRE. GOOD LUCK HANNA!
Her dashboard also has voice-activated commands and a speaker from which the Administrator could speak, but Hanna was born on a planet that relied on written commands. Text was considered a true thing; spoken words were malleable ephemera. Min values the cultural comfort of her human employees.
Hanna types backASSIGNMENT CONFIRMED, THANK YOU MIN!and a few seconds later, Min responds with hearts and a kissy-face emoticon last favored four hundred years ago in the Riverbank Colonies.
Min is widely regarded by the employees of the Perpetual Post as a soft touch. Hanna has a great working relationship with her. Min tells her where to go, Hanna confirms, Min spams her with emoticons and affection and they both pretend Min is not an immortal, precognitive AI that holds the power of life, death, and unemployment over Hanna’s very-much-human existence.
And to close
Sunyi Dean, whose new novel The Girl with a Thousand Faces is one of my favorite books of the year, talked to Locus Magazine.
Okay, star bits, now take the knowledge you have learned here today and use it for good, not evil. If you want to know more about books, I talk about books pretty much nonstop (when I’m not reading them), and you can hear me say lots of adjectives about them on the BR podcast All the Books! and on Instagram.
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