Science fiction has had brains on the brain at least since Dr. Frankenstein installed one in his monster. Over the years science fiction has depicted technologies like mind control (in Star Trek, for example), instant learning (The Matrix), telepathy (Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars), and transferring memories and skills (The [...]

Science fiction writers routinely get loads of cool physics right; and biology too. It’s expected of them. Maybe they stretch believability with that faster-than-light nonsense and all the strange creatures, but at least they know they need to imagine a means to circumvent the constraints of light speed, and that the [...]

Ever since 1978’s Space Invaders, science-fiction has been a mainstay of the video game revolution. The genre itself had already been in films for fifty years—dating back to Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis—and debuted in books somewhere between Lucian’s True History and Voltaire penning the alien visitation story "Micromegas." Video games were [...]

Certainly, you have your hat and coat. A wolfshead walking stick or a fan in the Japonisme style. The corset, and the goggles. Absolutely a crazy mustache or muttonchops for the males, and a silly feather-laden chapeau of some sort for the ladies. Totally inappropriate boots, yes. Perhaps even a steam-powered [...]

"Nowadays, many modern remakes of classic superheroes have gone for the latest superscience — Genetic Engineering. Be it a bite from a genetically engineered spider, or exposure to it in a freak accident, genetically engineered origins are the Phlebotinum for the 21st century."
—TvTropes.org: "Genetic Engineering Is The New Nuke"

From man-eating dinosaurs to [...]

"To be thoroughly conversant with a man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair." — Edgar A. Poe
"Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors … on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be [...]

On July 1 2004, seven years after its launch, the Cassini spacecraft crossed the plane of Saturn’s ring system. Its chunky body, wrapped in gold-colored Kapton insulation and crowned by the dish of its high-gain antennae, bristled with instrumentation; an independent instrument package, the Huygens probe, clung to it like [...]

Dominique’s beloved father died two weeks before his sixtieth birthday. The present she bought him is still wrapped, a collection of his favorite Dirty Harry movies on DVD. He would have loved to watch them again after so many years.
Driving home from the hospital where Dad took his final breaths, [...]

Last year, I wrote an editorial on the state of the short fiction market and given all that has happened in the last year, I thought this would be a good time to revisit the topic. It’s been an interesting year for genre fiction magazines and definitely worth talking about.
I’ve previously spoken [...]

‘Celt’ is a powerful word these days. It evokes images of woad-painted warriors battling the forces of colonisation and oppression, of strong-minded queens leading charges from chariots, of druids steeped in natural and spiritual law, of self-empowered women and bold venturesome men, of mists and [...]