Science Fiction & Fantasy

Editor’s Note: Knowing that some people will be curious about the math behind Susan’s piece, we asked her to provide something a bit more technical for those more mathematically inclined among us.
Key Points for Understanding

Publications refers to prose fiction published by a market, including reprints and solicited stories.
Each publication is treated [...]

Humans are incredibly adaptable. A person can lose a hand or a leg and learn how to do most of the same things they could do before, from mundane daily tasks to impressive athletic feats. No one would argue that life is easier when you’ve lost a limb  though, which is why we’ve been making, [...]

These places never see sunlight, are buried deep under thick ice crusts and warmed mostly by radioactive decay and tidal forces: subsurface oceans of celestial objects far from their stars—if they have any. Decades ago, they were the domain of science fiction, until such places were hypothesized in our solar system thanks in part to [...]

The decade started well enough.
We boldly set out into the stars, confident we could conquer every peril. We faced unknown hazards, unexpected consequences of our own actions, beings vastly more powerful than us, and even the darkest corners of our own psyche. Yet we knew the universe would open all its secrets to us.
But then [...]

When drawing upon real archaeology to build a fictional world, it’s perhaps no wonder that we often turn first to settled societies with written languages. Some of those societies have built impressive monuments and maintained complex governments—and left us a written record of those activities. It’s easy to stop there and [...]

The Swarm is a fleet of at least one hundred fifty dirigibles that ceaselessly crisscross their planet in the recent action-packed novel Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds. Once they were the defense force for the vast city of Spearpoint, but they along ago declared independence and have become a complete society. In effect, they constitute [...]

Stonehenge rises like a crown above the horizon, ancient four-tonne bluestones fixed in a sacramental circle. The cryptic monument’s sudden appearance through the windshield is seductive. Alone with these noble rocks, one’s mind turns to ritual and rite, and druids. From Merlin and Terry Brooks to World of Warcraft and the neo-druids celebrating solstice at [...]

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 [...]