What do telekinesis, brain hacking, and large scale cultural transformation have in common? The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Speculative fiction is full of stories that explore the potential of language to enhance, change, or control its speakers; to the point where the genre has a set of recurring tropes that are self-perpetuating long after current research has [...]

2013 is shaping up to be the Year of the Asteroid.
On February 15th a 10,000 ton meteor, undetected until it streaked through the sky, exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. According to National Geographic, the shock wave from the explosion circled the entire globe twice before dying down.
Coincidentally, it came on the [...]

It took a long time to heat up. It was nothing special, just an old plastic GE radio. First silence, then crackling and hissing static, and then—if you were very lucky, if the weather conditions were perfect, if the stars were in the right conjunctions, who knows—then came the faint strains of a familiar theme [...]

Folklore and legends are part of a legacy of primal fear that begins at the dawn of humanity, when the world seemed to be dominated by the supernatural: the woods, the hills, the mountains, and the rivers were the domains of old, unseen things, and living meant living in their shadow. Candles illustrated man’s deepest [...]

During the Second World War, a new form of applied science emerged called Operational Research (OR). OR scientists came from nuclear physics, engineering, advanced mathematics, physiology and other disciplines and applied their knowledge to a myriad of military problems, from lethality of weapons studies to battle investigations.
In many ways, these talented and unmilitary people are [...]

The capsule of metal begins to hum. Forces accumulate. Seated inside, the passengers feel the propulsion system lurch to life. Their bones thrum in synchronous frequency. Thus harmonized, man and machine move as one. The vehicle is launched along a predestined trajectory, arcing outward, soon to bisect a barren frontier. It accelerates hesitantly at first, [...]

Directors Werner Herzog and Errol Morris are well known for their renegotiations of what’s called cinéma vérité—the notion that truth can be found through footage in the absence of a blatantly intervening narrator or narrative. When these documentarians sat down in 2008 with Believer Magazine, Herzog observed that Morris’s recently released Standard Operating Procedure had [...]

Since speculative fiction is about imagined worlds, one might theorize that it poses fewer problems for translators than genres of literature more tethered to the specific cultures and languages of the real world.
In a sense, the theory is right. When the global language of science is English, it is indeed easy to translate to [...]

“A lot of people have thought of this film as very prophetic. I myself have never been interested in being a prophet of any kind. [ . . . ] But when your antennae are out there waving in the breeze and you allow them to develop because you think of yourself as an artist, you will undoubtedly pick [...]

Science Fiction isn’t always about the big things.
Nor does it get it right all the time.
Consider the first SF visions of the internet: for William Gibson and the other pioneer Cyberpunks, the online world was home to a chosen few—the corporate elite on one hand, the radical fringe of cowboys and hackers on the other.
But [...]