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What would it be like to live inside an orbital space colony? A new online app lets you glimpse the possibilities. Created by author Joan Slonczewski to tie in with her new novel The Highest Frontier, Frontera 3D takes you inside a rotating cylindrical colony, similar to the O'Neill cylinders envisioned in the 1970s by NASA artist Don Davis. More »
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What does September have in store for you? A new Neal Stephenson novel! Not one, but two new releases from Cherie Priest! Plus faeries, vampires, digital revolutionaries, and a college in outer space. Here are all the new releases your bookshelf needs this month. More »
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NASA recently held a press conference announcing the first demonstration that organisms could use arsenic in place of phosphorus in their cells. Not surprisingly, science fiction got there first. More »
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Joan Slonczewski is one of the few science-fiction authors who's also a biology professor. She's teaching a Biology In Science Fiction course at Kenyon College, using Tribbles, Dune and Jurassic Park to teach biological principles, and you can join in. More »
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If Ben Stein really wants to convince us all that evolution is a crock, he doesn't need to make a documentary and play semantic games with Richard Dawkins. He just has to sit us down and make us watch this episode of Star Trek: Voyager, where traveling at super-warp speed causes Janeway and Paris to super-evolve into lizards (and make lizard babies.) But it's not just Voyager — science fiction provides a ton of evolution theories that make intelligent design seem downright sensible. More »
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With Y: The Last Man wrapping up and turning into a movie, the science fiction cliche of the female-dominated planet is red-hot once again. The cosmos is safe for our red-blooded spacemen to venture to worlds where there are no men, or where men are subjugated and the women wear funny headgear. But what about the subset of gynarchic cultures where everyone's a lesbian? It turns out science fiction is full of those, too, and it's time they got the appreciation they deserve. More »
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