Science Fiction & Fantasy

It wasn’t unbelievable.
It was something more than that, something you could hardly wrap your mind around.
If you’ve seen the Matrix sequels, you would recognize it instantly: the APU (Armored Personnel Unit), a huge, heavily-armed and intensely detailed battle exoskeleton.
It wasn’t so much that someone had created a model of this complex machine: after all, McFarlane [...]

Perception is the gateway to cognition; it is the difference between awareness and ignorance. Although we are often not consciously aware of how our senses operate as they perceive the world, their physiology nevertheless dictates our understanding of reality. The realm of speculative fiction is filled with characters that possess sensory abilities different from those [...]

In 2010, the Chinese science fiction market was heavily dominated by a small number of magazines that published mostly short fiction. Science fiction has since become a hot theme in multiple cultural and creative industrial areas such as book publishing, movies and television, games, comics and animations, and theme parks. For instance, in 2016, there [...]

In 1966, Time magazine asked, “Is God Dead?” on its infamous April cover. Around the same time, a piece of graffiti began appearing in New York subways: Frodo Lives! It was an interesting crossroads for America—God seemed to be fading out of the lives of many Americans, while Tolkien’s masterpiece was just starting to find [...]

In 2014, the psychologist Gary Marcus from New York University gathered a book of essays by the world’s leading neuroscientists, including multiple Nobel prize winners. From this experience, he drew one main lesson: we have no unifying idea about how the brain works.
However, Dr. Marcus and his essayists missed something. We comprehend much more than [...]

We have seen this scenario in science fiction a million times: Scientists uncover an alien organism previously buried under ice, or bring bugs from another celestial body to Earth. Before we know it, an apocalypse unveils: It was a deadly pathogen threatening to wipe out all life on Earth! This clichéd scenario is far removed [...]

By the time 2001: A Space Odyssey arrived, everything had changed.
Behind the Iron Curtain the Soviets launched their own science fiction boom, one far more realistic and adult-oriented than ours.
Pavel Klushantsev’s 1958 documentary, Doroga k zvezdam (Road to the Stars), strongly influenced Kubrick. It starts with a brief history lesson, then moves into the future [...]

The future looks a lot more real than it used to.
Or at least that’s the impression given by movies like Gravity and The Martian. For over a century filmmakers have wowed audiences with voyages to space. Unfortunately, most of them look silly now—and even fewer would hold an audience’s attention for ninety minutes.
Will these [...]

“I am a computer,” says the voice. It isn’t human. Robotic and coldly electronic, it sounds like something conjured by the eeriest science fiction nightmare. Underneath it hovers a mechanical hum that might be the ambient noise of a spaceship, or an android brain, or even cyberspace. “I have been programmed to dance,” the voice [...]

Monsters are constructed from the passions of their age. In Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, Dr. Victor Frankenstein creates life out of corpses using arcane science that defies the natural world. The creature comes to life but is an abomination to its creator, who abandons it to a world that will despise him. When Victor [...]