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The end draws nigh. After a decade of action packed adventure, the Infinity Saga is coming to its conclusion this month with the release of Avengers: Endgame. It has been a long and winding road to the final battle between the original six Avengers and Thanos, the being who has been pulling the strings on the world’s greatest heroes, but after 22 movies, the time has finally come to bring a close to things. As the original Avengers prepare to pass the torch of Earth’s defenders, they are going to need an exit plan for what to do in their golden years. With that in mind, we at Quirk are offering up some post superhero life plans.  

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There’s a day to celebrate just about everything, and that includes alien abductions! March 20 is Extraterrestrial Abductions Day, and it’s for everyone who is actually enthusiast about the prospect of meeting some little green men. It might be hard to understand why, though. Most depictions of aliens in pop culture are less than charming: the psychotic killers in Mars Attacks, the faceless insectoids in…well, pretty much all of science fiction, even the pleasant but deeply strange aliens encountered on the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Truly friendly, funny, charming extraterrestrials are few and far between when it comes to alien portrayals, but that doesn’t mean that there are none to be found. We’d be happy to have these little green (and not so green) men abduct us this month!

Photo by Gantas Vaičiulėnas from Pexels

Prophecy and fortune telling may seem like a good idea – a way to know what’s coming up, to be able to plan, to prepare, to make sure that the right decision is made. However, with few exceptions, prophecies are either completely off-base… or so difficult to interpret that those trying to just end up making things worse (or even fulfilling the prophecy because they were trying to avoid it). One of the most famous prophetic lines, of course, is ‘beware the Ides of March’. Spoken by a soothsayer to Julius Ceaser in Shakespeare’s play, it’s something of a perfect prophecy. Doomy, gloomy, and so completely vague that anything from a stubbed toe to a stabbing can still be considered to ‘fit’.

[source: Moving Image]

Here at Quirk, we love science fiction. There is nothing as entertaining as a good piece of speculative fiction with great story lines and characters. While there are some writers who are well established science fiction masters like Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler, there are also some creators who have the skills to make some of the best science fiction to ever hit the shelves but simply haven’t gone down that path yet. With that in mind, it seemed appropriate to speculate on what the future of science fiction writing may look like.

Jorge Luis Borges has a literary career chock-full of wondrous ideas and conceits, but perhaps none of them are as compelling as his “Library of Babel,” a library the size of the universe, containing all possible 410-page books. Most of the books, naturally, are gibberish, but those inside the library believe that somehow, somewhere, there are books of coherence and meaning, if they could only find them. Unsurprisingly, book lovers and authors alike have fallen in love with an idea, and made it their own. Here are a few of our favorites.

An UFO is an unidentified flying object, which could mean many things other than a vessel carrying visitors from space, but we still plan to spend World UFO Day imagining not-quite-human possibilities with the little readers in our lives. When you hear alien, your mind might automatically imagine stereotypical “little green men,” but these picture books show that extraterrestrial life comes in all shapes, sizes, and circumstances – science fiction, but with undeniable timely relevance. In each selection, you’ll find aliens with much in common with humans, from a love of cupcakes to homesickness. Imagination sparked, craft your own alien and spacecraft (handy tutorial linked below)!