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You think your city's leadership is bad? Just look at these 10 stand-out examples of terrible mayors and awful city leaders from science fiction and urban fantasy. They steal, they kill, they won't give the people air! More »
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Yesterday I mentioned that China Mieville's novel Perdido Street Station could change your life. Here's how artist Gordillo imagined the city of New Crobuzon, where the novel takes place. This is very much how I imagined it too, with the huge central train station of the novel's title hulking over everything. More »
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What would weather be like if you lived in a planet-sized bag of oxygen? What would reproduction be like if there were a third sex who combined the genetic material of two other sexes by linking them at the neurological level and giving them braingasms? What would scientific progress be like in an anarchist-feminist society? One of the ingredients in many great science fiction novel is world-building, the practice of creating an entire unfamiliar (yet familiar) world whose strange permutations allow us to explore how unfathomable environments can dramatically reshape events that happen all the time in our own lives. Here are five cool world-building novels to suck your attention away from the misery of cooling weather and impending turkey day doom. More »
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