Every cover project has its own challenges and creative dilemmas. Tobias Buckell’s collection, Tides From The New Worlds, offered some wonderful scenic opportunities which made it incredibly difficult to choose only one. In the end I decided on his story, “Tides”, and chose to go for a montage kind of approach [...]

It’s 2009. Where’s my jet-pack, my car-plane hybrid? Where are all of those neat vehicles that science fiction promised? Actually they are already here, along with things that no science fiction writer forecast. Aviation pioneers around the world are working hard to bring us the vehicles of the future. Some of [...]

As soon as the remake of the 1951 classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still" hit the theaters, the knives were out. The movie failed on numerous levels, but not because it was a remake. Like the snap judgment on a film adaptation that the book has [...]

Focus on the Family released a science fiction propaganda story the week before the recent elections, the ersatz letter from "A Christian from 2012" predicting dire consequences from four years of President Barack Obama. The story became one of those pieces of conservative political kitsch progressives like to gab about, so [...]

The door of the plane opens and the first hint of the tropical night wafts inside. In spite of nearly twenty-four hours of traveling, the fresh air and perfumed humidity wake me up. That, and the knowledge that I’ve arrived.
I’ve flown from London to Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii [...]

Peruse the genre section of any bookstore and you will see a large chunk of shelf-space bending under the weight of Star Wars, Star Trek, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels. Lucrative and popular, media tie-in fiction is a sub-genre all to itself. It even has its own professional organization, the [...]

In the antiseptic, sour-smelling halls of psychology, there is an entire wing devoted to Anxiety. Within that wing is a dingy corner containing a dry mop and a broken drinking fountain bearing a sign that reads "Please Love Me." This section is wholly devoted to Writer’s Anxiety.
There is a hierarchy [...]

It was two long months of candlelight demonstrations in Seoul.
They began on May 2nd. The only blockage the police erected then was a flimsy perimeter round the protest area. But soon, downtown Seoul would fall into a nightly ritual of lockdown at sunset: the adjacent road leading to the Presidential [...]

Back in the heyday of the science classes I adored, I learned something very important about the color white: it isn’t actually a color. It’s the combination of all the colors in the visible light spectrum.  Now I’m talking light here, not pigment. Mix all your paints together and you get [...]

This essay was presented as part of a panel called “Reeling Beyond Realism: But to Reel in What?” proposed by Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan of Omnidawn Publishing for the 2008 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in New York City.  I’m grateful to Rusty and Ken for proposing such a fantastic panel, and [...]