Constructing a believable, habitable universe is one of the first things a writer of speculative fiction has to tackle — the idea of the world, its shapes and peoples, is a necessary thing to telling any story, but it’s especially tricky when you’re playing with reality. Both SF and fantasy have [...]

Film producer Matt Hanson calls it Cinema 2.0. Using a radical new model derived from the social networking web phenomenon and the Creative Commons/Open Source movement, this unprecedented evolutionary step in the development of cinema throws aside traditional studio production methods in favor of a decentralized, web-based approach.
Several high-profile projects [...]

Languages, like species, mutate and evolve.
Take English for example. When I taught English overseas I learned a funny thing: there’s more than one kind of English. There’s Canadian English, which I can speak and teach, but there’s also American English, there’s the Queen’s English and there’s Australian English. While we’re [...]

For my latest illustration, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to paint. I knew I wanted to include a portrait, so I started with some random shapes using the pattern chalk tool in Painter X (using mostly some patterns of the Fibonacci spiral) and sketched a face within all that mess. Even though [...]

Coming off a polarizing political season, we’ve come to think of ourselves as "red states" and "blue states." You’re on one side of the divide or the other, and there’s no middle ground. That sort of binary thinking gets transferred to all sorts of subjects, and in the field of movies that means there are [...]

Imagine, if you will, a fictional society three generations hence. Fossil fuels have expired, Martian colonies are in their infancy, and instead of going to the opera, well-to-do citizens enjoy high culture by… playing networked video games?
This scenario is not as ludicrous as it seems. From Shakespeare to television, from [...]

Despite being brilliant, the great Sherlock Holmes is an ignoramus when it comes to the astronomical workings of the planets and stars. In the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, he accosts Watson on the subject: "What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go round [...]

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 [...]