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io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Primordial Soup and Salad” by Gene Doucette. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on Lightspeed’s website. Enjoy!

This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.

Didn’t make it to New York Comic Con this past weekend? Don’t worry about it. We did, and we’ve compiled every iota of news, trailers, and descriptions of all the other footage that debuted at the convention, including the bananas teaser for season three of Star Trek: Picard, a look at the epic finale to Lord of the…Read more...

The potential for a nuclear armageddon has seemingly increased in recent months, much to the confusion and worry of some of the American public. That potential appears to be crystallizing into a legitimate concern for the U.S. government, which recently announced the purchase of a drug used in radiological and nuclear…Read more...

The InSight mission on Mars is currently waiting out a continent-size dust storm that has caused the lander’s power levels to drop.Read more...

As Oscar Isaac took the stage at New York City Comic Con 2022 for his spotlight panel, the applause was, and I’m not being facetious here, deafening. A spotlight panel typically focuses on a single actor, and Isaac’s fans filled up the entire Empire Stage Room—the second-largest stage at NYCC. As the panel began, the…Read more...

A Twitch streamer says she broke her back in two places after jumping in a foam pit live at TwitchCon on Saturday. In a brutal video that’s painful to watch, streamer and adult performer Adriana Chechik happily jumps into the pit but then begins to writhe in pain almost immediately after she lands. Chechik told her…Read more...

“Prepare for Nuns. Demons. Murder. Some children. A Goat. And a dead priest,” warns the newest trailer for Wendell & Wild, the upcoming stop-motion film by The Nightmare Before Christmas creator Henry Selick and co-written by Get Out’s Jordan Peele. But can anyone ever truly prepare for goats and nuns?

The biggest monetary losers from crypto lender Celsius’ demise are on full public display.Read more...

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The second season of Syfy’s horror series Chucky kicked off with a bang this week. Showrunner/creator Don Mancini and the main cast teased what’s to come at New York Comic Con today: There will be oodles of trauma, new characters, and a cheeky homage to Jennifer Tilly’s 1996 crime thriller Bound in Episode 4.

If you’ve ever felt like being told to turn your camera on during the Zoom meeting was a fundamental overstep of workplace boundaries and rights, a Dutch court might be on your side. A remote employee of U.S.-based software company Chetu has been awarded about €75,000 by a Dutch judge for wrongful termination, after…Read more...

Now, even hackers are taking a page out of big advertising’s playbook to promote their ill-gotten personal financial details. Over the weekend, the stolen credit card marketplace called BidenCash announced they were offering a free giveaway of 1,221,551 credit cards, promoting the leak on multiple other sites.Read more...

V/H/S reveals another anthology, with a major new slew of directors. Mike Flanagan is no longer a part of Netflix’s Something Is Killing the Children adaptation. Plus, get a look at the latest Walking Dead spinoff, Dead City, and new Titans clips tease a showdown with Lex Luthor. Spoilers get!

Chinese government officials thanked Elon Musk over the weekend for his ideas about Taiwan which were shared in a new interview with the Financial Times. Musk said that Taiwan, which is currently independent as a self-governing democracy, should be controlled by China, something that hasn’t happened since 1949.

One of Iran’s state-run TV channels was reportedly hacked on Saturday to briefly display a message against Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, with a graphic of the Ayatollah in crosshairs, according to multiple news outlets. The message displayed in Farsi read, “the blood of our youths is on your hands,” according to…Read more...

The very online folk will know that the “Pope Francis Holding Things” meme isn’t new. It’s been around for years. However, in recent days, the meme has been given new life thanks to a Twitter feature that allows users to go wild and tweet videos, images, and GIFs—all in one tweet. Although the rise of the meme was…Read more...

They were happy. For one unexpected, shining moment, the extended Targaryen family existed as one House, together, the past at least temporarily forgotten. And then the moment ended.Read more...

What the hell was that?

Not content to just reveal Titans’ newest villains earlier this week, DC also debuted the long-awaited first trailer for the fourth season of the series at New York Comic-Con.

When we last left Doom Patrol, Madame Rouge had joined the group, Cliff’s brain was stuck in a giant robot body, and they had access to a time machine. What could go wrong? As usual for the Doom Patrol, everything.

Earlier in the week, the news broke that South Korean illustrator Kim Jung Gi passed away at the age of 47. Kim, according to his US agent, had experienced chest pains in France as he was preparing to take a flight to New York, and died after being transported to a hospital.

The Superman line of DC Comics has seen some sizable shakeups in the last few years. As Clark Kent has been on Warworld up until fairly recently, it fell to his teenage son Jonathan to take the Superman mantle and save the world in his father’s absence. (Yes, Clark’s dead right now, but let’s not pretend we don’t know…Read more...

It’s the final day of New York City Comic-Con! In between all the news that we here at io9 have been covering throughout the weekend, we’ve also shone a spotlight on some sick ass cosplay. Here’s the final batch to close things out!

Kanye West, legally known as “Ye,” is rapidly running out of social media platforms to post his antisemitic content. On Sunday, Twitter locked Ye’s account after he posted an antisemitic tweet saying he was going “DEFCON 3” on Jewish people. In the same tweet, Ye added he “can’t be antisemitic because black people are…Read more...

The Muppets’ time with Disney shows lately might have been a bit up and down, but The Muppets Mayhem looks like it wants to live up to some of the zaniness of the franchise’s most classic show—with a little help from the Electric Mayhem themselves.

Since Star Wars Rebels in 2014, the franchise has consistently featured Inquisitors as threats for Force users and veteran Jedi to face off against. Created by the Empire with the express intent of capturing or killing Jedi that managed to survive Order 66, the Inquisitors have only recently begun to feel like a…Read more...

io9 is currently be covering New York Comic-Con, and one of the many things being shown at the event is a new animated movie for the Mortal Kombat franchise. And as we’ve been wont to do throughout the year, this movie makes it as good time as any to look back on the series overall and see how far it’s come.Read more...

Whether it’s for the silver screen or pen and ink, Marvel uses the season of Comic-Con to tee up the big stories they’ve got cooking. San Diego Comic-Con in July saw the House of Ideas build up to comic arcs involving the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, and this weekend’s New York Comic-Con focused on the other heavy…Read more...

Instagram deleted an antisemitic post on Kanye West’s account and restricted his use of the app for violating its policies, according to its parent company, Meta. In response, West, whose legal name is “Ye,” stormed over to Twitter to shame Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for “kicking him off” Instagram.Read more...

Just in time for spooky season, NYCC got a little visit from our favorite member of the Addams family. Tim Burton’s Wednesday series from Netflix stars Jenna Ortega in the title role, with Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia, Luis Guzman as Gomez and more filling out the cast including Gwendoline Christie, Christina…Read more...

Last Sunday’s part-three premiere of The Walking Dead was somewhat underwhelming, especially as it kicked off the series’ final eight episodes. But that looks to be changing soon if this new trailer can be trusted, as the fight between the Alexandrians and the Commonwealth reaches a new simmering point.

Good news if you liked the unhinged vibes of Picard’s season 2 finale: if this new trailer for the third and final season is anything to go by, that vibe is continuing strongly.

In a few weeks, Jodie Whitaker’s tenure with Doctor Who will come to an end. The upcoming Power of the Doctor special will see her Thirteenth Doctor face off against a greatest hits album of the Doctor’s more prominent foes, including the Daleks and The Master (Sasha Dhawan). After all, since this is her last time in…Read more...

Star Trek: Prodigy’s young heroes ended the first half of the season having learned how to be a crew together, and now more ready than ever to make the leap to becoming Starfleet cadets. Those plans have hit a bit of a snag, however... and it looks like this season is going to continue with Starfleet not being on the…Read more...

This November, The Dragon Prince returns to Netflix for its fourth season. But what does the future hold for Callum, Rayla, Viren and the rest? At New York Comic Con, series co-creators Aaron Ehasz and Justin Richmond, writer Paige VanTassell, visual development artist Caleb Thomas, and actor Jason Simpson took the…Read more...

During New York Comic-Con, Paramount revealed another look at the fifth season of Star Trek: Discovery. The teaser was short, and featured the Discovery crew and Captain Michael Burham (Sonequa Martin-Green) travel through a variety of alien worlds and get into the chaos that the crew’s become accustomed to by now.

Electric car manufacturer Rivian is voluntarily recalling 12,212 vehicles over concerns of a possible loose fastener, or nut, that could cause serious problems like excessive wheel tilt, and in rare cases, wheel separation that could lead to major loss of steering control.Read more...

Since the relatively early days of the pandemic, DC Comics has been gradually making changes to the way that it handled the releases of its comics. In addition to moving releases from Wednesdays to Tuesdays, it’s slowly but surely been making marked improvements to DC Universe Infinite, its comics subscription service…Read more...

New York Comic Con 2022 is here and that means cosplay. So, so much cosplay. To quote a certain video game, “Everyone is here!,” and it’s here where we’ve got some of the coolest cosplay in town!

Walking around New York Comic Con’s show floor, I’ve seen an incredible number of glowing tubes sticking out of backpacks or cradled in the hands of con-goers. Everyone at NYCC, it seems, wants a lightsaber, one that feels, looks, and sounds (wwooom) like the one they know from the movies and shows.Read more...

Of the many DC animated series from the 90s and early 2000s, KidsWB’s Batman Beyond and Static Shock are among the most beloved. In the comics, both characters have received their own solo books within the last several years, mostly Batman Beyond, both because of obvious reasons and DC’s revival of for Static (and by…Read more...

R.L. Stine, a man whose name seems born to be featured on 160 books of children’s horror fiction, told an utterly packed room at New York Comic Con that he never intended to write the Goosebumps series. Stine is an incredibly sarcastic and sardonic man, speaking like your uncle from New York who’s lived too long, seen…Read more...

A decade from now, a young woman taps into her talent—she is scary-good at VR games, to the point that wealthy clients hire her to play in their stead—to scrape up cash for her family. The Peripheral, which stars Chloë Grace Moretz as the gaming whiz, asks: what if that futuristic VR world was actually real?Read more...

In the last decade, archaeologists have discovered evidence that foxes may have been kept as pets thousands of years ago—or, at the very least, tolerated to hang around human settlements.

Comic book writers and artists tend to alternate between working at Marvel and DC Comics fairly often, assuming they don’t break off to do their own stuff. Soon to be joining DC is former Joe Quesada, writer and artist who previously served as the editor-in-chief for Marvel the during the early 2000s.

Before an injustice becomes a reality, when the consequences are all very abstract, it can be easy to doubt and defer grasping how inevitable they are. Some people will write off what is plainly obvious to everyone around them as the misgivings of pearl-clutching doomsayers, the fallout of overactive imaginations.…Read more...

More than 65,000 salmon have died before they could spawn in just one Canadian stream. The die-off of two species, mostly pink and some chum salmon, hints at a potentially devastating season for the fish, local people, and the wider ecosystem throughout the region.Read more...

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