Science Fiction & Fantasy

Last month, NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars to investigate current and past conditions on the Red Planet and search for life. With it, an old but still burning question inevitably arises: when—if—we find alien life somewhere, are we going to recognize it?
The question is far less trivial than it sounds. The odds are [...]

“All children, except one, grow up.” These words open the novel Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie. The story was published in and takes place in Edwardian England (after the death of Queen Victoria and slightly before World War I). Its pages are full of adventure, playfulness, terror, and levity. The novel was one of [...]

“Marley was dead, to begin with,” says Charles Dickens in the most famous Christmas ghost story. While modern readers continue to enjoy A Christmas Carol, few are aware that it was one of hundreds of Christmas-themed ghost stories that flourished in written form during the Victorian era. These stories represented a perfect meeting of interest [...]

Mary Shelley’s classic science fiction and horror novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, was an instant hit when it was published in 1818. It was and is such a prominent part of literary and popular culture that modern audiences might be forgiven for thinking it her only novel. However, in addition to articles and travelogues, [...]

It started with a motorcycle.
Not a flying motorcycle. Not one with jump rockets, magnetic impeller wheels, or wall climbing spikes. Just an ordinary broken-down motorcycle Tom Swift fixed back in 1910.
Then it was a motorboat bought at auction.
It hardly seems much of a beginning for forty novels—one of the most successful young adult series of [...]

People have always dreamed of flight. With the invention of the hot air balloon (specifically, the Montgolfier balloon, which is essentially the same design one might see at hot air balloon festivals today) this dream became a possibility for a startling variety of people—aristocrats and scientists, entertainers and artists, men and women. The popularity of [...]

It’s hard to imagine its impact.
The image was grainy, fuzzy, more tones of gray than black or white. There would be static, constant hissing and popping, lines rolling across the screen or, if the weather, or sunspots, or who knows what else interfered, it would roll around or break up completely.
But it was in the [...]

The sequence of the human genome is a living document that catalogs the history of migration, mutation, and environmental stressors that have shaped who we are and how we came to be. Sprinkled throughout the 3.1 billion DNA bases that comprise our genome are tens of thousands of protein-coding genes, regulatory regions that stipulate when, [...]

Many of us are having experiences with isolation as we experience various degrees of shelter in place and quarantine measures. Some of us live alone, experiencing contact with others only from a distance. Others live like a group of astronauts in a spaceship, relying on each other for social contact but also infringing on one [...]

When we think of archaeological digs, most of us picture Indiana Jones in search of ancient civilizations, but just as often, they are conducted on far more modern sites to learn how people lived in the recent past.
Not long ago they conducted a dig in the Shenandoah National Park. Back in the twenties and thirties, [...]