science fiction

  • Weekly Geekery

    Is Star Wars the Death Star of science fiction? Rat nirvana: being tickled till your ears turn pink. 250-million-year-old rocks might soothe science-religion conflict.

  • The Rumpus interview with Jeremy P. Bushnell

    The Rumpus interview with Jeremy P. Bushnell

    Jeremy P. Bushnell discusses his new novel, The Insides, themes of consent, and designing a post-apocalyptic board game.

  • Weekly Geekery

    Why Finnish women matter to the history of science fiction. Holiday science books: let visions of squid and sarcophagi dance in their heads. Astronauts survive thanks to a black female mathematician. This robot could make your toddler Mark Zuckerberg. (Minus the…

  • Damned and Damaged Vessels

    Damned and Damaged Vessels

    I envisioned a new science fiction canon, one in which I was a cyborg, fashioning my body into something new.

  • The Rumpus Interview with Malka Older

    Malka Older discusses her debut novel Infomocracy, the nature of elections, and the future of democracy.

  • Weekly Geekery

    Los Angeles: capital of science fiction? The latest Rx craze: novels. Richard Dawkins on Robert Frost. The scariest costume yesterday? A mite. Evolutionary biologists have a grudge against Frankenstein’s bride. The future of books: a bunch of Norwegian spruce trees.

  • Weekly Geekery

    The plot thickens: literary fiction may not affect empathy after all. China’s solution to producing entrepreneurs? Science fiction. Kids of all races prefer black and Latinx teachers to whites. Science says: everything you learned about sexuality is wrong. Take back…

  • Weekly Geekery

    Is HBO’s bookish Westworld poised to give science fiction the Game of Thrones treatment? Antelopes, Bollywood, climate change, Brönte. National Geographic‘s autumn book recommendations—sushi, hiking, murder, oh my! Elon Musk name-drops Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Also, we’re going to Mars?) Spotting…

  • Like Tears in Rain

    In a universe slowly sinking into entropy, writing can take the disordered pieces of our experience and fit their edges together into something organized. If the work of a writer is to tease out meaning from the tangled mess of life, many of…

  • Spotlight: VHS Starfield: Escape from the Dome

    Spotlight: VHS Starfield: Escape from the Dome

    Artist, writer, and illustrator Pip Craighead shares an installment of VHS Starfield, a series of comics describing a fictional sci-fi film franchise from the 70s and 80s.

  • The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Michael Helm

    The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Michael Helm

    The Rumpus Book Club chats with Michael Helm about his new novel After James, the line between paranoia and caution, and the use of poetry as a plot device.

  • Defining Writing

    For JSTOR Daily, Chi Luu examines the long-conflicting ideas of whether writing is a form of technology or a separate dialect of its spoken form. Luu references the upcoming film Arrival and the sci-fi novella it’s based on, Ted Chiang’s…