Back in the mid-1970s, legendary filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky tried to make a movie of Frank Herbert's Dune, featuring people like Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and Salvador Dali, with designs by H.R. Giger and Chris Foss. It would have been astonishing, whether or not it lived up to the book. Now, a new documentary…

Sometimes there’s a character that the writers don’t know what to do with, or who's hit a dead end. What do you do with this superfluous character? How do you up the ante? Kill them. And then have them come back evil (or good), with new powers, or deeply troubled. Here are the 10 characters most improved by death.

Besides the subject mentioned in the headline, today’s “Postal Apocalypse” includes a historical look at butt-wiping technologies, how Cobra gets its funding in G.I. Joe, the worst Star Wars prequel quote, and more. It is possibly my favorite “PA” ever. Please, please keep those awesome questions comin’ to

By Katharine Trendacosta and Charlie Jane Anders. When you explore the darkest reaches of the space, you find out just who you really are. But why wait? Most science fiction heroes find out about their own inner psyches long before they ever leave home, thanks to the genre's huge range of personality tests. Why not…

The Tumblr blog MovieBarcode offers us a very different look at some of our favorite films. Individual frames from each film are compressed into thin digital strips and compiled into barcode-like sequences, giving us a sense of how the color palette changes across a film and sometimes across a franchise.

The main cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation ensured their places in science fiction history with their appearances in seven intense seasons, plus four movies. But that wasn't enough for these genre stalwarts. Almost every member of the Enterprise-D crew has also appeared in some off-the-wall science fiction or…

Everybody knows that the engineers are the ones who keep everything going in a science fiction story. They're the ones who make the ship fly. They build the megastructures. They make the spinning things spin and the jumping things jump. And some of the coolest engineers and designers in science fiction just happen to…

Nate Silver is the talk of the internet today, and for good reason. When every news outlet on the planet was presenting the presidential race as a dead heat, the NYT's political stats guru was giving Obama a greater than 90 percent chance of clinching a second term — a call he's been making for weeks. In any case: the…

Next week sees the release of Cloud Atlas, the movie version of one of the most famously unfilmable books of all time. But Cloud Atlas isn't the first supposedly unfilmable book to make it to the screen. There have been several classic novels that everybody thought couldn't be captured on film — until somebody did it.…

Even starship captains get the blues sometimes. And when you get depressed, or when you're stuck in bed with a nasty case of black plague, you need something to cheer you the frak up. Luckily, there are tons of science fiction and fantasy books with proven restorative properties.