NON-FICTION by Julie Nováková in Issue 195 – December 2022
“Perhaps it should be called a stroll into unfamiliar worlds; worlds strange to us but known to other creatures, manifold and varied as the animals themselves.” —Jakob von Uexküll, A Stroll through The Worlds of Animals and Men (1934) Science fiction often asks us to imagine the inner states of beings most alien, be it […]
NON-FICTION by Arula Ratnakar in Issue 194 – November 2022
Human minds are fascinating machines. They are able to process photons, soundwaves, and various other physical phenomena, turning the information into thought, emotion, and cognition—experience. They take snapshots and store these experiences to reemerge as memories in the presence of a reminder, then use those memories to generate fantastical simulations during dreams—experiences in their own […]
NON-FICTION by Julie Nováková in Issue 193 – October 2022
When the crew of USS Enterprise encounters yet another alien species that looks exceptionally humanlike, we know to suspect the production budget rather than more profound reasons. But the underlying question is an important one: How humanlike, or not, would members of an extraterrestrial civilization be? How familiar would we find walking through a forest […]
NON-FICTION by Volodymyr Arenev and Mykhailo Nazarenko, translated by Alex Shvartsman in Issue 192 – September 2022
It is known that Númenor had sunk under a great wave, much as the Kievan Rus had perished in the flames of the invasion by the Golden Horde. In both cases, the legacies of those cultures live on. The descendants of Númenor had founded Arnor and Gondor, while the descendants of Kievan Rus live in […]
NON-FICTION by Octavia Cade in Issue 191 – August 2022
Polar bears are a charismatic species. They’re also one of the most visible victims of climate change, as the Arctic ice melts and deprives the bears of much of their hunting grounds, forcing them to spend more time onshore instead of out on the ice, and to exploit terrestrial food sources in order to avoid […]
About fifty miles (eighty kilometers) off the coast of Venezuela lies Bonaire, the “B,” in The ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao). There isn’t much to see on Bonaire, the capital Kralendijk is about three blocks long. The island is flat, warm, dry, and humid. The only notable wildlife are flamingos. In the evenings they […]
NON-FICTION by Pauline Barmby in Issue 189 – June 2022
Many SF readers will know Arthur C. Clarke’s 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama, in which an alien starship passing through the solar system is at first mistaken for an asteroid. Twenty years after the novel’s publication, the first nonfictional interstellar objects were found: interstellar dust grains measured by the Ulysses spacecraft. It took another twenty-five […]
NON-FICTION by Galen T. Pickett in Issue 188 – May 2022
A fundamental consequence of Einstein’s Special Relativity is that no physical object can travel faster than light. A somewhat lesser-known consequence of this fact is a counterfactual. Any physical object (like a starship) traveling faster than light will break causality in exactly the same way a “time machine” would. That is, faster-than-light travel and time […]
NON-FICTION by Julie Nováková in Issue 187 – April 2022
Endor. Pandora. Acheron. What do these science-fictional places have in common? They’re moons. More precisely, habitable moons. In our own solar system, multiple moons—such as Jupiter’s Europa or Saturn’s Enceladus—host vast oceans of liquid water underneath their icy shells. But we have no moon whose surface would be habitable for life as we know it […]
NON-FICTION by Carrie Sessarego in Issue 186 – March 2022
Spoilers for: Halloween, Alien, The Babadook, Gaslight, Ready or Not, Rosemary’s Baby, A Nightmare on Elm Street In today’s world, women are often expected to be polite, to be selfless and self-sacrificing, and to be nurturing. Women never face more vitriol than when they express anger, an emotion that taints them with labels like “shrill,” […]
NON-FICTION by Douglas F. Dluzen in Issue 185 – February 2022
For many people, the COVID-19 pandemic changed perceptions about mental health, including my own. Suddenly, during lockdown, I was extremely restless at night, dreaming up worst-case scenarios for my family and community: What if my two-year-old son developed long COVID What if I lost my job? What if society completely fell apart? These worries have […]
NON-FICTION by Julie Nováková in Issue 184 – January 2022
Shall we go where no one has gone before? However, if we’re to stay there, we need to think about the next generation. Which means procreation in space—an issue we know very little about so far. What do we know, and what could be the potential obstacles of reproducing in space conditions? At least officially, […]
NON-FICTION by Julie Nováková in Issue 183 – December 2021
Live fast, shine brightly, die young: some stars are like that. But they are few. So are, cosmically speaking, stars like our own Sun, though it’s taking its “life” more slowly. By far, the most numerous stars in the cosmos are M dwarfs, also dubbed red dwarfs: tiny, dim stars that will never undergo the […]
NON-FICTION by Douglas F. Dluzen in Issue 182 – November 2021
The first time my four-month-old daughter Cedar spasmed, I had no idea I was witnessing a seizure. I had seen seizures in adults before, but this looked entirely different. Babies do strange stuff all the time, I thought, and this had been a brief thing. I dismissed the possibility that anything was wrong. But my […]
NON-FICTION by Carrie Sessarego in Issue 181 – October 2021
Almost everybody knows what a mermaid is, right? Human above the waist, fish on the bottom, oftentimes beautiful and seductive, sometimes terrifying and murderous: these creatures have appeared in a standardized form in Western art for hundreds of years. However, a deeper look at mer-lore shows a bounty of ancient and modern ways of thinking […]
NON-FICTION by Julie Nováková in Issue 180 – September 2021
In the stifling depths where nothing had been thought to live, life thrives. In the deepest regions of Earth’s oceans or embedded far within its crust, both macroscopic and microbial life flourish despite the pressure that would instantly crush a human. Do you think the Mariana Trench is deep with great pressure at its bottom? […]
NON-FICTION by Carrie Sessarego in Issue 179 – August 2021
The first decade of the 2000s was dominated by three groundbreaking heroines: Buffy Summers, of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Bella Swan from the Twilight series, and Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. These three heroines exercised power in ways consistent with their personalities and had different levels of success in reaching their […]
NON-FICTION by Andrew Liptak in Issue 178 – July 2021
There is no better example of how science fiction’s tendency to try and imagine a plausible future is like throwing a dart at a moving target than Larry Niven’s 1964 short story “The Coldest Place.” Up to that point, astronomers widely believed that the planet Mercury was tidally locked to the Sun: its rotation matched […]
NON-FICTION by Carrie Sessarego in Issue 177 – June 2021
Depictions of alien life-forms in movies and television are constrained by budget, by practicalities, and by storytelling purposes. For the purposes of budget and storytelling possibilities, Hollywood tends to highlight aliens with whom we can communicate, combat, cooperate with, and (if the original Star Trek is any indication) have sex with. Because of this, most […]
NON-FICTION by Alex Shvartsman in Issue 176 – May 2021
It’s telling that the Russian term used to describe speculative fiction doesn’t distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. The word is fantastika (фантастика)—the literature of the fantastic. It is used equally to reference the Three Laws stories of Asimov and the Middle Earth tales of Tolkien. It is this lack of distinction—combined with Russia’s rich […]
NON-FICTION by Andrew Liptak in Issue 175 – April 2021
The history of space opera is one that prizes exploration and discovery; of finding new worlds and new civilizations or sights that human eyes have never encountered. Science fiction authors, tech visionaries, and science communicators have highlighted humanity’s long history of expeditionary travel as a sign that it’s our destiny as a species, one that […]
NON-FICTION by Julie Nováková in Issue 174 – March 2021
Last month, NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars to investigate current and past conditions on the Red Planet and search for life. With it, an old but still burning question inevitably arises: when—if—we find alien life somewhere, are we going to recognize it? The question is far less trivial than it sounds. The odds […]
NON-FICTION by Carrie Sessarego in Issue 173 – February 2021
“All children, except one, grow up.” These words open the novel Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie. The story was published in and takes place in Edwardian England (after the death of Queen Victoria and slightly before World War I). Its pages are full of adventure, playfulness, terror, and levity. The novel was one of […]
NON-FICTION by Carrie Sessarego in Issue 171 – December 2020
“Marley was dead, to begin with,” says Charles Dickens in the most famous Christmas ghost story. While modern readers continue to enjoy A Christmas Carol, few are aware that it was one of hundreds of Christmas-themed ghost stories that flourished in written form during the Victorian era. These stories represented a perfect meeting of interest […]
NON-FICTION by Carrie Sessarego in Issue 170 – November 2020
Mary Shelley’s classic science fiction and horror novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, was an instant hit when it was published in 1818. It was and is such a prominent part of literary and popular culture that modern audiences might be forgiven for thinking it her only novel. However, in addition to articles and travelogues, […]
NON-FICTION by Mark Cole in Issue 169 – October 2020
It started with a motorcycle. Not a flying motorcycle. Not one with jump rockets, magnetic impeller wheels, or wall climbing spikes. Just an ordinary broken-down motorcycle Tom Swift fixed back in 1910. Then it was a motorboat bought at auction. It hardly seems much of a beginning for forty novels—one of the most successful young […]
NON-FICTION by Carrie Sessarego in Issue 168 – September 2020
People have always dreamed of flight. With the invention of the hot air balloon (specifically, the Montgolfier balloon, which is essentially the same design one might see at hot air balloon festivals today) this dream became a possibility for a startling variety of people—aristocrats and scientists, entertainers and artists, men and women. The popularity of […]
NON-FICTION by Mark Cole in Issue 167 – August 2020
It’s hard to imagine its impact. The image was grainy, fuzzy, more tones of gray than black or white. There would be static, constant hissing and popping, lines rolling across the screen or, if the weather, or sunspots, or who knows what else interfered, it would roll around or break up completely. But it was […]
NON-FICTION by Douglas F. Dluzen in Issue 166 – July 2020
The sequence of the human genome is a living document that catalogs the history of migration, mutation, and environmental stressors that have shaped who we are and how we came to be. Sprinkled throughout the 3.1 billion DNA bases that comprise our genome are tens of thousands of protein-coding genes, regulatory regions that stipulate when, […]
NON-FICTION by Carrie Sessarego in Issue 165 – June 2020
Many of us are having experiences with isolation as we experience various degrees of shelter in place and quarantine measures. Some of us live alone, experiencing contact with others only from a distance. Others live like a group of astronauts in a spaceship, relying on each other for social contact but also infringing on one […]
