How science fiction and fantasy stories live and die by their technical details, for both better and worse.
Fantasy can be used as a distraction, but its job is to give us new ways to look at what's around us every day,
On a narrow, reductionist view of fiction (and not a very good one, for that reason).
A reason why I haven't written any time travel stories: I don't think time exists. At least, not in the sense of something we can travel through.
If I didn't feel before like I was living in a science fiction novel, this year sure clinched that feeling. But not for the reasons you might think.
"How come it is easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a modest change in our economic order?" Let me take a crack at this, including how it relates to SF.
When we can't think our way out of it, that is.
A blueprint for how to do the impossible -- namely, follow up a classic: give it to another artist of vision and stand back.
How to seek out stories that intelligently confront the moral complexity of the 21st century.
Things SF&F need to do, in no particular order.
More on how SF's main purpose isn't to predict the coming of specific things, but to understand how we might respond to them, whatever they are.
SF and fantasy both have shelf lives, but drastically different kinds.
ON SF exhaustion, and the point of believing in tomorrow.
AO3's Hugo: a sign of progress.
Why was 'Justice League' only okay instead of epic? How could it have been made epic? Here's my plan.
On 'Blade Runner 2049': All these moments in time must be kept, like tears from the rain.
Take a book that's not SF. Imagine it as SF. What would it be like?
Last updated: 2017/05/19
It's 1977 all over again, sort of.
"We expect more change than actually happens in the future because we imagine our lives have changed more than they actually have."
How did this astonishing little miracle of a movie -- easily the best adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's work to film yet -- pass without leaving so much as a ripple?
We've got to put a stop to these doorstoppers.
SF's sparks of crazy in the '60s and '70s were a market condition, not an innovation.
Breitbart flings mud at SF's power structure, soils own shirt. More at 11.
Can gaming's great women characters be written by men? | Polygon ... writers are required to create convincing characters who are different from themselves. But in video games, writers have tended towards idealized versions of themselves. I take this as...