It was a brisk autumn afternoon in the grungy backstreets of Johannesburg.   Moving in fits and starts, a draft manuscript of Charles S...

I am far from the most knowledgeable person on the subject, but in my web wandering and scattered reading it has certainly come to my...

Deft prose, in-your-face ideas, cut to the punch mentality—Norman Spinrad is one of the more contentious voices in the field, if not ...

Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is one of genre’s more divisive offerings.   Loved or hated, it tells of an alien arriv...

The European Union very well may be the most interesting social experiment ever attempted by mankind.   Taking almost a billion peopl...

Gardner Dozois is well known for his The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies.   Roughly five-hundred stories having accumulated...

According to Jonathan Strahan’s introduction, Engineering Infinity (2010) is intended to be a survey of the state of hard sf short f...

Clifford Simak’s work puts such a debate into my mind: where to draw the line between good intentions and overly-simplistic outlay?  ...

Ken Macleod’s The Star Fraction , despite the throwback genre name, was a politically variegated take on near-future science fiction ...

Numbers sometimes speak louder than words, so rather than open my review of editor Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fa...

A wise man once said that nothing is certain in life but death and taxes.   Science fiction creating scenarios which put an end to th...

One of the significant differences between science fiction and realist fiction is the sense that the possibilities of sf are so much ...

Brian Aldiss designates Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) the first science fiction novel.   The story of human creating human and ...

Every five or ten years, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine is poring over its backlog and publishing a fresh ...

After finishing a book that has no obvious flaws I feel guilty writing something of a negative review.   Viable critiques generally f...

One of life’s little pleasures, it’s always nice to encounter a writer for the first time and discover a keen sense of style.   Molli...

From cyberpunk’s focus on near-future political and technological concerns to the explosion of singularity/post-human texts which fol...

    “I am slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat.   There aren’t many like me in the universe.   I can change personalities in ...

Lightning-cracked time portals.   Secret tombs. Slave ship mutiny. Snake men.   Buried alive.   Parlays with kings.   These are just ...

There are many modes and styles of storytelling.   Classic, minimalist, expository, stream of consciousness, mosaic, meta-fiction—and...