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Philip K. Dick died before Blade Runner was completed, but in a letter to film's production company, he praised what he'd seen and claimed it would breathe life into what he believed was a stale genre. [via Letters of Note] More »
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Margaret Atwood insists that her novels aren't science fiction, as everything she writes either has happened or could happen today. But in looking at Atwood's latest novel, The Year of the Flood, science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin disagrees. More »
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Steampunk's Victorian and Edwardian aesthetics, combined with its imagined technologies has captured the imagination of designers, hobbyists, and writers. Now a literary publicist hopes to launch the same kind of movement for green technologies. More »
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Astronomer Marcus Chown wonders if science fiction is dying. With technology and scientific discovery advancing so quickly, it's unclear what will become of a genre based largely on predicting the future. Charles Stross has gone so far as to say that it’s no longer possible to write near-future science fiction. Six other science fiction writers, including William Gibson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kim Stanley Robinson, join him in the latest issue of New Scientist to weigh in how science fiction needs to change. More »
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The final frontier of pulp literature is the romance novel, which is also the biggst selling book genre. So it's not surprising that a growing subset of romance novels also feature lovelorn spacemen (and women.) After all, astronauts need loving too. As the handful of romance books featuring spaceship battles and aliens has grown, the sub-genre has gotten more sophisticated — and closer to real science fiction. We give you a taste of these soft-core space operas. Just watch out for shirtless cover models and purple prose. More »
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Call it the year of mindwipe chic. Coming up on TV in midseason, we've got Joss Whedon's new show Dollhouse, about "actives" whose personalities are wiped and replaced for each job they do. And in the fall we've got the debut of My Own Worst Enemy, where Christian Slater plays a nice guy who finds out he has a secret alternate personality: a turbo assassin he's been brainwashed to forget about. Plus, we'll be treated to the continuing adventures of Summer Glau, who plays a Terminator who has been reprogrammed in Sarah Connor Chronicles; and we'll still be following the adventures of the taciturn Haitian mind-wiper on Heroes. What's the allure of the mindwipe, and why has it invaded the small screen? We've got three answers for you. More »
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Genre movies are like folk tales: hundreds of people tell the same basic story again and again, with little variations and tweaks. Thus part of the pleasure of watching horror or scifi movies, at least for me, is figuring out which things have been tweaked — and which stories are getting retold. I like to make little genre/subgenre charts in my head. If you have the same strange urge, you'll love the article about giant bug movies over at PopPolitics, charting the strange ways the "giant bug" movies of the 1950s mutated into the 1990s/2000s Mimic series about giant transgenic cockroaches in New York. More »
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Boyz n the Hood director John Singleton is set to direct his first science fiction film, Executive Order. It's typical alien-invasion fare, with a plane crash unleashing a space monster that terrorizes a snowbound small town. Still, Singleton's got the violent-action chops to make it work: his remake of Shaft may have bombed at the box office, but it was still badass. Singleton's also attached to direct the inner-city superhero film Luke Cage. More »
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