Psychologist Robert Lindner's 1955 book The Fifty-Minute Hour details the case of a man who believed he was "living part of the time in another world—on another planet." And many people now believe this famous case study was actually Norstrilia author Paul Linebarger, aka Cordwainer Smith.

So much of science fiction's core topics intersect with war, one way or the other. Rapid social change and technological innovation both get supercharged during wartime, and some of our greatest explorers are also warriors. So it's not surprising that many of science fiction's most well-known authors served in the…

Being a non-player character in someone else's virtual world can be a pain — especially when some of the monsters won't stay dead. Tobias Buckell's story "A Game of Rats and Dragon," published in Lightspeed Magazine, takes a lot of the cliches of augmented reality and virtual gaming, and adds a really neat spin — what if …

Celebrated SF author Cordwainer Smith grew up among anti-imperial revolutionaries in China, then became a master of psychological warfare. Over at PLoS blog Neurotribes, Steve Silberman has a terrific article about Smith and his cyborg masterpiece "Scanners Live In Vain."