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Idoru
As a rule, I avoid judging the quality of a science fiction novel by the success of its predictions. For one, it’s too easy. And I inherently distrust any method of judging literature as cleanly...
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In The Beginning…Was the Command Line
When Neal Stephenson penned In the Beginning…Was the Command Line in 1999, a book of technical essays had a short shelf life. Now, it’s almost inconceivable that a writer would dedicate as much time...
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Patternmaster
I have an arcane personal system for reading. It’s basically a hierarchy of dog-earing: big folds at the top corners of the page when I put a book down, and precise little tucks on the bottom corners...
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Ray Bradbury’s Birthday, William Gibson, and Being Science-Fictional in Los...
Los Angeles is arguably the science fiction capital of America. Blade Runner’s iconic sino-Futuristic downtown notwithstanding, there’s a strong historical lineage for science fiction in the...
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The Drowned World
Epochs drifted. Giant waves, infinitely slow and enveloping, broke and fell across the sunless beaches of the time-sea, washing him helplessly in its shallows. He drifted from one pool to another, in...
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Listen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews
Ray Bradbury always seemed out of synch with the contemporary science fiction milieu: he wrote on a typewriter until the end, was sentimental, loved circuses, dreams, toys, fantasies, myths, loathed...
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The Jewels of Aptor
The Jewels of Aptor is Samuel Delany’s first book, written when he was just 19 and published a year later. His wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker (with whom he went on to edit the speculative fiction...
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Science Fiction’s Speculative Pharmacopeia
Last week, I published an article on Motherboard rounding up some of my favorite fake drugs from the coffers of science fiction. The list isn’t exhaustive; rather, it tackles a representative spread...
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We Can Build You
The scene is a basement repair shop, 1982. Work benches, tools, and a prone robotic simulacra of Abraham Lincoln, being turned on for the first time. In the presence of its makers, the Lincoln is...
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Merry Christmas from the Outer Limits
As a holiday treat, here’s a small gallery of painterly Christmas-themed covers from the great Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, all from the mid-50s and early 1960s, arguably the golden age of science...
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Ubik
I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell...
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Ben Bova: The OMNI Interview
I recently had the great fortune of interviewing three of the surviving editors of the late, great OMNI magazine, a publication which, for 17 years, blew minds with its gonzo blend of science fiction...
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Man of Earth
Although “Golden Age” science fiction has always seemed corn-fed as hell to me–space cowboys and army men, pioneering colonists and alien baddies usually tinged with Soviet undertones–I’m discovering,...
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Flowers for Algernon
This is how long it’s been since I last read Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon: I can remember the neck-ache I got from bending to read it under my school desk. It was one of those particle-board,...
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J.G. Ballard, Social Media Prophet
Quick nugget: this excerpt of an interview with J.G. Ballard in a 1977 issue of Vogue has been making the rounds on the web today: All this, of course, will be mere electronic wallpaper, the background...
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Introducing OMNI Reboot
Big news: yours truly has been tapped to become the Editor-in-Chief of a rebooted version of OMNI, the classic science and science fiction magazine upon which yours truly cut her very own teeth. The...
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On The Boredom of Fantasy
I have just read an essay on the subject of science fiction that I found both spectacularly wrong-headed and completely astute. It was published in 1953, in Harper’s Bazaar, by the...
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