Many of the characters in this book feel really close to home, from the exhausted mother trying to get her kids to bed, to the teenagers getting busted using fake IDs. Bearing in mind that of course you don’t live on a flotilla of spaceships, are your characters based on real people? On personal experience? […]
Artificial intelligence (AI), by definition, is somehow made, rather than innate. But how do you make an intelligence? It is a billion, trillion dollar question in the real world, and we don’t appear all that close to finding out the answer. But science fiction authors have lots of ideas about how to create intelligence and […]
For those who don’t know (and oh, how I both pity you and envy the journey that awaits you), the greatest fantasy adventure of the last three years is not a book, nor a movie, but a podcast—one begun on a lark, at that. Three years ago, podcasting stalwarts the McElroy Brothers (Travis, Justin, and […]
The term “space opera” conjures grand vistas, massive spaceships, multi-threaded plots of romance and intrigue, dashing protagonists, and dastardly villains, evoking all the grandiosity of an opera and the hallmarks of the best imaginative science fiction. But while all this is true, operas rarely come in a single flavor. There are gothic horror operas, romantic operas, fantastical operas, […]
Earlier this week, a VIP at Marvel comics earned the ire of about 82 percent of the internet when he tried to blame the publisher’s flagging sales on a recent strategy to push comics with “diverse” heroes, claiming readers just aren’t interested in buying those kinds of books. Plenty of folks have offered cogent rebuttals of […]