It was a bright and boundless future, with flying cars dotting a perpetually blue sky. In the shadows of the mile-high spires, though, the poor and the outsiders struggled to survive. And everywhere you looked, thinking their steel thoughts, were robots.
This was the world of Magnus Robot Fighter, a comic [...]

Twenty years ago, it was very easy to look at something and say whether or not it was a magazine, newspaper or book. With the advent of online magazines, new print technologies and ebooks, it has become significantly more complicated. I regularly run into people who try to claim that online [...]

The basic requirements of life ― air, food, water ― are provided for us by the biosphere, the assemblage of plants and animals, bacteria and fungi that share our world. We’ve always been able to rely on the services that these organisms provide to us. Most of us in industrialized countries [...]

Rock ‘n’ roll was never intended to have a future. Hot, fast, loud, bright: the genre was made to be as disposable as the chemically-fueled rockets that had started putting objects into orbit just as rock was getting off the ground in the ’50s.
It’s perhaps more than coincidence that the song [...]

Sometimes I imagine a world where stories are experienced not by reading, listening or seeing, but are instead comprehended through telepathic signals sent directly from the stories themselves. Here stories are living, corporeal things, floating around in the air like butterflies, or humming birds, or bats. In one scenario, I am [...]

When, in a movie or TV show, the aliens arrive on Earth, or we meet them somewhere out in space, one thing is certain: whatever they’re supposed to represent, it’s not life on other worlds. Each genre has certain stock characters and situations which, in the hands of a master storyteller, [...]

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 [...]