science fiction
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Run the WorldCon
At the Atlantic, Vann R. Newkirk interviews Hugo-winner N.K. Jemisin about her novel The Fifth Season and the hardline conservatives who boycotted it: It’s the same sort of reactionary pushback that is generally by a relatively small number of very loud…
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Weekly Geekery
Biotech might give Icarus his wings. Solar eclipses, laser physicists… and mosquitoes? New Muslim voices in science fiction. Happy 50th, Star Trek. This unexpected writer made you what are. Oh, and starship shields: coming soon.
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Weekly Geekery
Your brain on stories. (Or, molecular effects of Star Wars.) Read books, live longer… …but only Toni Morrison or Salman Rushdie will make you live better. Mapping the human condition on 10,000 New Yorkers. Startup culture meets culture culture. Afrofuturistic science…
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Weekly Geekery
Phillip K. Dick’s holy spirits—or hallucinations? Lovecraftian scientific horror in Stranger Things. Shakespeare + math = … Narcissists doth make psychiatrists of us all. As women of color win science fiction awards, ATTACK OF THE RABID PUPPIES!
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Imagining A Dystopian Olympic Games
At the Huffington Post, Maddie Crum and Maxwell Strachan ask 7 science fiction authors to hypothesize about what a dystopian Olympics might look like. While most of the authors acknowledge the influence that climate change and technology will have on the…
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz discusses the challenge of writing about family members, her greatest joy as a writer, and her literary role models.
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Carving the Uncanny Valley
Any Luddite with half a brain has already begun stockpiling nonperishables for the inevitable moment the robots rise up against us. Over at the Ploughshares blog, Joelle Renstrom recounts how writers were awakened to the threat of artificial intelligence: A…
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Weekly Geekery
Science fiction has a huge race problem, and stock solutions don’t cut it. You’re welcome: 19th century math genius gets Hamilton-ized. The electrifying history of modern fencing. Ah, Ancient Greece. Land of democracy—and human sacrifice? Controversy over a canonical character in…
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Anti-Blackness in Sci-Fi Publishing
Less than two percent of science fiction stories published in 2015 were by black writers. And a recent study found that black speculative fiction writers face “universal” racism—more damning evidence demonstrating the institutionalized racism in book publishing, and the importance of…
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Doors to Other Possibilities
I think what has brought imaginative fiction, imaginative literature, back into central centrality is that so much of it is very good, and so much of it is kind of needed because of the fact that it sort of opens…
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Mercury Plummeting
For the New York Times, Marisa Silver reviews Jenni Fagan’s new novel, The Sunlight Pilgrims, which takes place in a scarily plausible world in which ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the average temperature is well below 0…
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A Better Look at Science Fiction
In an excerpt from the introduction to their new book The Big Book of Science Fiction, Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer explore what they identify as the three strains of science fiction (via the works of Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H.…