Wayward Children, Seanan McGuire’s award-winning Tor.com Publishing novella series—about what happens when your portal fantasy story is over and you return to the real world—is being adapted for television!
Legendary Television and Syfy will bring Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children to the small screen, beginning with Every Heart a Doorway. Joe Tracz, whose credits include Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief musical and the A Series of Unfortunate Events TV series, will adapt the novella and serve as showrunner.
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Every Heart a Doorway
More about Every Heart a Doorway:
Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children
No Solicitations
No Visitors
No QuestsChildren have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere… else.
But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children.
Nancy tumbled once, but now she’s back. The things she’s experienced… they change a person. The children under Miss West’s care understand all too well. And each of them is seeking a way back to their own fantasy world.
But Nancy’s arrival marks a change at the Home. There’s a darkness just around each corner, and when tragedy strikes, it’s up to Nancy and her new-found schoolmates to get to the heart of things.
No matter the cost.
Tracz is an incredibly fitting choice for showrunner, having written about kids magical (Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief), misfit (the Broadway musical Be More Chill), and brilliant (A Series of Unfortunate Events). That all three are adaptations—of books by Rick Riordan, Ned Vizzini, and Lemony Snicket, respectively—is even better.
Wayward Children has won multiple awards including the Alex, Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and ALA RUSA Fantasy Awards, and was a World Fantasy and British Fantasy finalist and Tiptree Honor List book.
Be sure to check out our Wayward Children Reread—and let us know in the comments who you would love to see as Nancy, Kade, Rini, Cora, Lundy, Eleanor, and more!
depending on your view of canon (regarding BH and KJA work), Liet’s father married a Fremen woman. So he is half-Fremen by ancestry. Pardot Kynes is the one who went native.
I’ve thought that Liet Kynes takes the place of John the Baptist to Paul’s Jesus.
This is another very pointed jab at Donald Trump. “This is another very pointed jab at the Baron Harkonnen, who may be clever in his plots, but has no measure of self-control whatsoever. He makes his plans, orders others to do his bidding, then does exactly as he pleases.”
The contrast between the clever Baron and the… President only sharpens the point,
On Earth (from Wiki): Singing Sands also called whistling sand or barking sand, is sand that produces sound. The sound emission may be caused by wind passing over dunes or by walking on the sand.
Certain conditions have to come together to create singing sand:
The sand grains have to be round and between 0.1 and 0.5 mm in diameter.
The sand has to contain silica.
The sand needs to be at a certain humidity.
At this point in time in the Dune universe, access to education is limited to certain classes, royals, nobles, and higher class commoners. Someone without the right connections isn’t going to get Liet-Kynes education. There’s also the fact that Liet-Kynes inherited his position from his father. The fact that a Fremen or other native of Dune hasn’t got this training and position is kind of the point. A native might ask, “What’s best for the planet and its people?” An imperial appointee asks, “What’s best for me and the people who gave me this job?”
But, it’s telling that the Fremen, who make a habit of killing strangers for cannibalistic dehydration purposes (and expect the ghosts of people they kill to get over it), are an easier club to join.
Or that’s the idea. Liet-Kynes shows that even nepotism doesn’t always work the corrupt way it’s supposed to.
Couple side things worth tossing in before he vanishes forever from the book. I don’t know the name meanings, but Liet sounds like Leto. The characters have a bit in common as adult male leaders who both die in the Harkonnen plot and whose places will be taken by Paul. It also suggests a link between Paul and Chani.
A couple online sources say “Kynes” may mean “royal,” which may reflect Kynes social class. However, it also soulds like “kind,” which may again suggest a link between Liet-Kynes and Leto. They are the same “kind.” It also sounds like kine, meaning cattle or cows, but I don’t see any useful symbolism there. Anyone?
What I find disturbing is Irulan’s brief summary of the slave her father was given.
First, this is a society that gives sex slaves as presents and it isn’t even worth commenting on.
Second, Irulan leads in by pointing out that a slave wasn’t a threat to her or her sisters in terms of inheritance because there was an airtight contract protecting them.
So, we’re once again reminded of the precarious position of even high ranking women in this society. Normally, Irulan could be displaced by any male child born to any woman her father slept with. Also, while her I don’t think her mother is ever referred to as the empress, I assume she would be the highest ranking woman in the household. Without that contract, any slave could displace her.
Which may tie into (if Irulan’s suspicions are true) her own father may have tried to assassinate her. After all, if the BG daughters are all dead, he can make whoever he likes heir–and maybe that is exactly what he’d like.
It’s no wonder the Bene Gesserit want a male BG to consolidate power, given how women are treated in this world (although you’d think it would have taken fewer centuries to modify the culture, given their talent in that area. Don’t get stuck on the first strategy that comes to mind and refuse to consider alternatives, ladies!)
Third, it may be reading a bit too much into the very little we know of the slave in question, but the only thing we really know about her appearance is that she has hair the same, unusual color of the emperor’s. Since the last time people had similar hair colors, they turned out to be family, I can’t help wondering. What we’ve seen of this world suggests an unacknowledged child or one not given official rank could be sold off. It seems quite possible a slave likely born to a slave who also served royals or nobles could be related to the families she’s served.
Fourth, NC-17 elements aside, neuro-enticement sounds like one of those skills not all normal humans can be trained in, a little like BG abilities. But, whatever her potential, this slave has clearly been trained only in ways that make her more worth exploiting.
Fifth, again, she’s reduced to an object. She’s been told she’s going to be given to the emperor. Consent obviously doesn’t come up, but (potential assassins aside) it doesn’t sound like a bad deal for her. But, no, she gets told she’s going to be given to some other person (one assumes whoever the emperor next owes a birthday card to). Decent human being? Sadistic Harkonnen? She doesn’t know and neither do we.
Sixth, in a household where you have to worry about your own father having you killed, it might be a bit much to expect sisterly solidarity among women, but it also bothers me that Irulan also sees this woman as an object. Her father’s fidelity or relationship with her mother doesn’t seem to have any emotional context outside that contract. Turning down the slave matters only because it shows a disturbing amount of self-control.
“neuro-enticement” is one of the nonsense words that throws me right out of the story. One assumes the entity the slave woman is trying to entice has a functioning neurology, eg a brain. She sounds as if she knows what she can do with her body. What does attaching the word “neuro” to “enticement” add to the infodump?
(I find it similar to excessive descriptions of female anatomy in far too many novels. One assumes the woman so described has a functioning anatomy; one assumes the male so taken has a functioning sexual appetite; in truth very few men would spend as long detailing the relevant bits on a woman he has just met – that’s usually something reserved for a woman he is actively interested in.)
Now if it implies “action at a distance”, ie she can entice a half-asleep blind man with no feelings in his extremities, who lives underground on the moon, merely by thinking of him and wiggling her bits, then it justifies itself, otherwise it’s unnecessary.
At this point in time in the Dune universe, access to education is limited to certain classes, royals, nobles, and higher class commoners. Someone without the right connections isn’t going to get Liet-Kynes education. There’s also the fact that Liet-Kynes inherited his position from his father. The fact that a Fremen or other native of Dune hasn’t got this training and position is kind of the point
Yeah, exactly. The alternative is “Welcome to the Harkonnen planet of Arrakis. The local population consists of the graben and sink people, who are degraded and exploited serfs, and the Fremen nomads, who are ignored, oppressed, hunted for sport, and generally treated as barely human. Oh, except this one Fremen guy, who received extensive post-graduate education from the Harkonnen government and was then appointed by the Emperor himself to a position of immense power and authority. That creaking noise? Oh, that’ll be the worldbuilding breaking.”
the means to create this paradise of Arrakis that the Fremen dream of is only attainable with the help and vision of some sandy-haired guy sent over by the Emperor
Wait, what’s that? You say you have a culture of desert nomads who are being energised and led to their vision of a state of their own by a short sandy-haired guy sent over by an emperor who went native and developed messianic tendencies? Is there any chance we could get Peter O’Toole to play him in the movie?
Stilgar is one of the most interesting characters in the books. He’s not “enhanced” or “special” in any way. He’s not trained as a Mentat, Bene Gesserit, or a Swordmaster. But he’s a leader of people, (and a damn good one), highly intelligent, and very sensible. He later adapts well to being a Chief of Staff.
The scene with Jessica and Stilgar is one of the reasons I absolutely love the Bene Gesserit. She take little clues and some educated guesses and plays him like a $2 banjo. Stilgar, one of the most formidable characters in the books, is totally at her mercy both physically and mentally. We see more moments like this in Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune, which is why I love those books.
I don’t see a colonialist interpretation of Kynes as particularly accurate.
First off, we know that the Fremen have been primed to be on the lookout and accept an offworld prophet a the Lisan al-Gaib. Perhaps Kynes isn’t a prophet in the mold of Cassandra, but he certainly has an ambitious vision with a glorious future for Arrakis. The BG scheme with the Missionaria Protectiva is colonialist, perhaps, but not necessarily Kynes.
Second, Kynes has an education and perspective the Fremen cannot hope to match. This isn’t even a statement that a Fremen couldn’t have said vision, but the culture of the Fremen is insular and particularly matched to the climate of Arrakis. Moreover, the Fremen are poor. Sure, they have a rich culture and lead fulfilling lives, but there is no indication that the industrial-scale spice harvesting going on at the time of the novel (to bribe the Spacing Guild) was extant before Kynes organized the sietches. They lead subsistence level lives and don’t trust outsiders, at all. Why in the world would a Fremen ever go off world, or be able to afford, or be welcomed if they did?
Which ties into the third point. This is a tribal society. I imagine in the 10,000 years prior to the arrival of Pardot Kynes, many charismatic Fremen leaders tried to unite sietches into a large polity. But the nature of Fremen society is to fracture into isolated communities that fight over water resources. Part of the reason both generations are so successful in uniting the Fremen into a single force is specifically that they are offworlders. They aren’t a naib associated with any sietch or tribe, they have no baggage of inter-sietch competition or raiding, they are blank slates except for their dream of a future which provides a tangible and inspiring benefit for all Fremen equally, and not one particular group. There isn’t anything colonial about that; history is rife with examples of neutral parties (relatively speaking) gaining great power, specifically because they aren’t aligned with a particular power bloc (think Lincoln winning the 1860 Republican primary).
I just don’t see how you can enjoy the well-realized Fremen culture and also think that such a culture could produce a character like Kynes. The Fremen don’t have the perspective or practical knowledge to understand how to realize that dream on a planet-wide scale, and once you admit that you need an outside, colonial education in order to get it, you are already admitting that the colonial aspect is needed. The Fremen are insular, xenophobic, internally divided, and poor. And, not to mention, addicted to an insanely expensive substance that is omnipresent in their lives that would kill them if they stopped consuming it (I think someone alludes to spice addiction in those terms, could be remembering wrong). How does one suppose the sietch keeps their planetologist-in-training alive while he’s studying? Care packages of melange? No chance they can afford that; barely anyone can. The combination makes it unlikely to the point of impossibility that the Fremen could produce a native, technically-trained ecologist in the mold of Liet Kynes.