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There's only one thing we know for sure about the future: It'll be weird, and you can't really prepare for it. Just imagine trying to tell someone in 2000 how to prepare for life in 2011. But luckily, there's one surefire way to brace yourself for another round of future shock: by reading a slew of great satires, about people trapped in weird and incomprehensible worlds. More »
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With The Tempest, opening tomorrow, Julie Taymor and Helen Mirren bring a splashy fantasy vibe to the Bard. But science fiction and fantasy have been playing with Shakespeare forever. Here are the greatest Shakespeare homages and cover versions in SF. More »
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We live in an absurd universe. And once you throw in stuff like time travel, fiction can get even sillier than real life. But how can you write speculative fiction that lives up to our ridiculous world, without being dumb? More »
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The Earth existed for four billion or so years before humans showed up and started recording history. Why limit ourselves to the what-ifs of the past few thousands years? In these alternate reality tales, continents and dinosaur empires rise and fall. More »
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LibraryThing's science fiction group had a great discussion about "wrong book, wrong time" situations, where you hate a book, but much later, you rediscover it and fall in love. What books are you glad you gave a second chance to? More »
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Classic science fiction author Harry Harrison says America is becoming a totalitarian state, and praised Russia for its interest in literature, according to an interview published in the Russian newspaper Pravda. The Stainless Steel Rat author, visiting Moscow for a convention, said America violates its own constitution and behaves undemocratically towards the rest of the world, but any totalitarian regime "is bound to collapse sooner or later." He didn't actually praise Russia's government, but did say Russians are much more avid readers, and science fiction consumers, than Americans. But he criticized Russian science fiction for emphasizing ideas over action or characters. [Pravda] More »
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The first time I ever read the word "anti-hero," it was in an article about science fiction, and it's always seemed a very science fictional type of word — like anti-matter, or anti-gravity. Science fiction has its share of one-dimensional white hats, but the characters who capture our imagination are usually the morally blurred rascals, who have their own best interests at heart. You never quite know what an anti-hero will do next. Here's our guide to the roots of science fiction's greatest anti-heroes. More »
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With the space shuttle program about to be retired, we need a new class of crewed ships for space exploration. But Congress may never cough up the money to build them. Luckily, science fiction teaches us that anything can be a spaceship: an old airplane, a World War II battleship, a fairground ride... or even some junkyard debris, as Andy Griffith shows in this clip. Click through for our roundup of the best repurposed and recycled spaceships. More »
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