Hello, my little neutrinos! In today’s round-up of recent sci-fi and fantasy links, I have stuff to share with you about budgeting for a Death Star, new books from Aja Gabel and Joe Abercrombie, soft robots, and more!
How Much Would It Cost To Build the Death Star from Star Wars?
Let’s kick things off with this hilarious dissection of what you would actually need to build and operate your own version of the Death Star from Star Wars. Spoiler: It’s more resources than anyone could possibly ever come up with in the present. Sorry to disappoint you, but you probably won’t be able to get this space station/superweapon.
The numbers about cost and material are actually from a 2012 study and then changed for inflation in 2025. The good news is that the Earth currently has enough iron material to build two Death Stars. The bad news is that you would need over a quintillion dollars to finance it and 833,315 years for the steel production. The good news is that, apparently, people in the future will have that kind of cash lying around. (But the bad news is that those people are always the villains.)
“According to a 2016 infographic that the British energy supplier Ovo Energy created (via CNET), the daily operation costs would be around $7,700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or $7.7 octillion. Just from that sheer number alone, it’s safe to assume that the budget applied to today’s inflation trends would be more annoying to calculate than spending an entire day with Jar Jar Binks.”
Tiny Robots Will Soon Deliver Medicine from Inside Your Body
In advances in science this week, scientists have made progress with what they call “soft robots.” They imagine that in the future, there will be robots that will be able to find humans in disaster rubble—after an earthquake, for instance—and bring them supplies. They also expect to have robot pills that will go into the human gastrointestinal tract and deliver medicine. (They have to deliver your medicine in thirty minutes or it’s free.) (Just kidding.)
“One of the most fascinating potential applications is in implantable medical devices,” said co-author Suk-Won Hwang, associate professor at the Graduate School of Converging Science and Technology, Korea University. “We’re working on miniaturizing the system to make it suitable for biomedical use. Imagine a small robotic system that could be swallowed like a pill, navigate through the gastrointestinal tract, and detect diseases or deliver drugs precisely where they’re needed.”
Innerspace, anyone?
An Early Look at Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel
Electric Literature talked to Aja Gabel about her upcoming novel Lightbreakers, which is the follow-up to The Ensemble. It’s about an artist and a scientist, Maya and Noah, whose happy marriage exists under the cloud of the loss of Noah’s daughter, Serena, from his first marriage. They agree to become part of a study about time and consciousness being financed by an eccentric billionaire, one that offers them the possibility of traveling back in time.
From the publisher: “The couple agrees to relocate to the Janus Lab, deep in the desert, where Noah finds himself drawn into a dangerous kind of time travel that could result in seeing Serena again.
As Noah delves into this groundbreaking, fringe work, his past begins to overtake him. And when his ex-wife, Eileen, joins the project, Maya embarks on a journey back to her own past, one that takes her to Japan, to her family, and to a formative lover who once shattered her heart. As Noah, Maya, and Eileen grapple with the balance between holding on and letting go, new information emerges that the Janus Lab might not be exactly what it seems.”
Says Gabel, “My book is about grief, but it isn’t a sad book. It is about living: how to breathe in the wake of loss, how to love someone who has been changed by tragedy, and how to move between versions of yourself.”
Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel will be out November 4, 2025 from Riverhead Books.
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Read Chapters 1-3 of The Devils by Joe Abercrombie Now!
One of the most anticipated fantasy books of 2025 is The Devils by Joe Abercrombie, author of The Blade Itself and many other books. The Devils is an epic adventure fantasy about a group of anti-heroes made up of devils, murderers, and monsters, who are responsible for wresting control of the throne away from a terrible prince in the Sacred City.
From the publisher: “Brother Diaz has been summoned to the Sacred City, where he is certain a commendation and grand holy assignment awaits him. But his new flock is made up of unrepentant murderers, practitioners of ghastly magic, and outright monsters. The mission he is tasked with will require bloody measures from them all in order to achieve its righteous ends.
Elves lurk at our borders and hunger for our flesh, while greedy princes care for nothing but their own ambitions and comfort. With a hellish journey before him, it’s a good thing Brother Diaz has the devils on his side.”
Reactor recently shared the first three chapters of this raucous story, you lucky devils, and you can read them for yourself now, ahead of publication!
The Devils by Joe Abercrombie will be out May 13, 2025 from Tor Books.
And, Why Not, Let’s End with More STAR WARS
Tony Gilroy, the showrunner of Andor, recently made comments alluding to a Star Wars horror story at a recent Andor event in London. What would that even look like? Zombie Ewoks? A haunted Millennium Falcon? A movie with only Jar-Jar Binks? I have so many ideas. (The Baba-Luke. Fett the Right One In. 28 Days Vader. Nosfer-R2. The Han-ting. 30 Days of Nute. Near Darth. I could keep going.) Maybe this will lead to the first R-rated Star Wars film. As soon as I know anything, I’ll be sure to tell you, friends.
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 Bluesky and Instagram.
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The following comes to you from the Editorial Desk.
This week, we’re highlighting a post that had our Managing Editor Vanessa Diaz feeling a type of way. Now, even five years after it was published, Vanessa is still salty about American Dirt. Read on for an excerpt and become an All Access member to unlock the full post.
Picture it: The United States, January 2020. A book with a pretty blue and white cover is making the rounds on the bookish internet. The blue ink forms a beautiful hummingbird motif against a creamy background, a bird associated with the sun god Huitzilopochtli in Aztec mythology. Black barbed wire, at once delicate and menacing, cuts the pattern into a grid resembling an arrangement of Talavera tiles. The package is eye-catching, ostensibly Mexican in feel, and evocative of borders and the migrant experience.
The book tells the story of a bookstore owner in Acapulco, Mexico, who is forced to flee her home when a drug cartel murders everyone in her family except for her young son at a quinceañera. She and the boy are forced to become migrants and embark on a treacherous journey north to the U.S. border, evading the cartel and befriending fellow migrants along the way. The book is being lauded not just as the “it” book of the season but as the immigration story. It gets the Oprah treatment and is praised by everyone from Salma Hayek to the great Sandra Cisneros, who called it “the great novel of Las Américas.”
It’s been over five years, and this book is still the bane of my existence.
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