Interstellar Visitors, Just Passing Through: Fact, Fiction, and Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama Series
This past fall, astronomers from the Pan-STARRS program in Hawaii announced they had spotted a small asteroid, or perhaps a…
Throwback Thursday
Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser Deserve Their Own Sword & Sorcery Buddy Movie
By most reckonings, the three biggest names in the sword and sorcery sub-genre are Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, and…
Throwback Thursday: Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human Points a Way for Us to “Live Long and Prosper”
I recently read and enjoyed Ramez Naam’s Nexus, a book with a central premise that has preoccupied science fiction since H.G. Wells…
Throwback Thursday: The Mad Scientist’s Daughter Is Romantic Science Fiction with a Capital R
I can admit it: I first read The Mad Scientist’s Daughter by Cassandra Rose Clarke almost solely because of the…
Throwback Thursday: The Stars My Destination Serves Up Revenge as Cold as the Vacuum of Space
Alfred Bester was a pioneer of the science fiction field, and he’s got the legacy to show for it: he was the…
Throwback Thursday: The Chronicles of Amber Are the Original—and the Next?—Game of Thrones
Once again, fiction is bending reality: season seven of HBO’s Game of Thrones has officially been delayed until the Summer of 2017…
Throwback Thursday: Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide Is a Magical Tour of a Drowning World
“The bureaucrat fell from the sky.” This simple opening sentence introduces the protagonist of Michael Swanwick’s Nebula Award-winning Stations of the…
Throwback Thursday: The Rook Is a Delightfully Weird Twist on Urban Fantasy
Daniel O’Malley’s 2012 debut The Rook is a sharp, exciting urban fantasy that ditches the over-used tropes of the genre, retains its…
Throwback Thursday: The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You Is Both of Its Time and Startlingly Relevant
I first encountered Dorothy Bryant’s incredible, incredibly strange novel The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You in college, where…
Throwback Thursday: The DragonCrown Cycle Is Old School Fantasy That Delivers
This past winter, in a nostalgic mood, I’ve went browsing my bookshelves looking for something for an old favorite to dig into,…
Throwback Thursday: Childhood’s End Is the Definitive First Contact Story
When I first encountered it, Childhood’s End completely blew my mind. I was in college, taking what I’d assumed would be…
Throwback Thursday: The World Ends with a Whimper in Soft Apocalypse
Imagining the apocalypse is a fun thought experiment. How would you react when the world crashes down? What could bring…
Throwback Thursday: Another Trip Around Larry Niven’s Ringworld
In 2015 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made Larry Niven their latest Grand Master, and the impression…
Throwback Thursday: Voyaging to Allen M. Steele’s Coyote
Some of my favorite science fiction stories are those focused almost entirely on exploration: traveling beyond our system, discovering new worlds,…
Throwback Thursday: Bored of the Rings Offers a Skillful Skewering of High Fantasy Tropes
Anything that takes itself seriously is ripe for parody, and the list of things that take themselves more seriously than…