Speculative Fiction Archives

Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Dragonriders of Pern Game

For over thirty years, master storyteller Anne McCaffrey entertained us with her epic science fantasy series the Dragonriders of Pern. The settings intrigued us, the characters grabbed us, and the stories–oh the stories. Two trilogies initially, two short story collections…

Fakereals, Realfakes

“We all know synthespians are coming. Very soon we will reach a point when we switch on a television or a computer, see an actor or newscaster, and not know if they are flesh and blood and what’s more… not…

Punk Punk. Who’s There?

“Something Is Broken in Our Science Fiction. Why can’t we move past cyberpunk?” That’s the title of a Lee Konstantinou Future Tense article Slate ran in January. The entire article is worth a read. But for me the precious metal…

TraveLink – Antarctica Pt. 1

I’m a big history buff in general–but not so much when it comes to treaties. If I was, I’d be a huge fan of one of the most successful treaties in the history of mankind. A living and active treaty…

Quoth the Raven, Ever Noir

“The most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.” Those are the words of the late Roger Ebert, critic, historian, journalist,…

Remake, Reboot, or Rest in Peace? Dollhouse

Dollhouse was called “The best action show on network television” It was. They said “The Actives are all young hot women.” They weren’t. Fans complained “Fox is marketing this thing like it is Cathouse.” Fox was. Picture the ‘Eliza Dushku…

No Such Thing

…As bad publicity. In 1946, Kirkus Reviews described Halldor Laxness’s Independent People as “A sprawling, unselective, overlong… A bleak and bitter book, with little to interest or attract the American reader.” In 1955 Laxness took home the Nobel Prize in…

Scratch!

What’s a seven-letter synonym for ‘Awesome’? Mitch Resnick and MIT’s Scratch. 37 million projects can’t be wrong. Yeah. You read that right. That’s Thirty-seven and six trailing zeros before the decimal. So yeah, awesome. Scratching your head? You can learn…

Consciously Adapting

This started as research for a class on Hidden Biases. Disappointingly, there was a lot of suitable background material. Most emotionally accessible to me was the 2017 breakout of the top 100 academic and technical high school students in STEM…

artwork hand-writing-by Linnaea Mallette

Novel Writing

Growing up there were two types of kids: kids who went to other peoples’ houses to play, and kids who had everyone else over. I was firmly entrenched in the former category. The home that our group hung out at…

Tag: Speculative Fiction