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 [...]

"Nowadays, many modern remakes of classic superheroes have gone for the latest superscience — Genetic Engineering. Be it a bite from a genetically engineered spider, or exposure to it in a freak accident, genetically engineered origins are the Phlebotinum for the 21st century."
—TvTropes.org: "Genetic Engineering Is The New Nuke"

From man-eating dinosaurs to [...]

"To be thoroughly conversant with a man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair." — Edgar A. Poe
"Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors … on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be [...]

On July 1 2004, seven years after its launch, the Cassini spacecraft crossed the plane of Saturn’s ring system. Its chunky body, wrapped in gold-colored Kapton insulation and crowned by the dish of its high-gain antennae, bristled with instrumentation; an independent instrument package, the Huygens probe, clung to it like [...]