The best science fiction and fantasy television hooks you with endless suspense... including hair-raising cliffhangers. But only the greatest cliffhangers can make you throw your remote at the screen, and keep you wondering for weeks. Here are the 20 awesomest.

There's been a popular meme going around lately about the "Busy Trap" — the idea that we're all keeping busy with meaningless junk like checking our email or doing random tasks, and that this is somehow a lifestyle choice. But a new essay by Mark Fisher, "Time Wars," makes a persuasive case that our chronic busy-ness is…

When it comes to discovering strange new worlds, there's nothing like a young protagonist venturing out into a world where it feels like absolutely anything can happen. Many of science fiction and fantasy's coolest stories are about coming of age — but coming of age, in the end, means losing your innocence and…

In "Sovereign," the final act of Mac Rogers' epic alien-bugs vs. humanity Honeycomb Trilogy of plays, we learn that rebuilding the world from the ashes is much harder than leading the resistance. What happens after you've won the battle for the post-apocalypse?

K. Tempest Bradford is the main writer behind the Angry Black Woman blog, and also the author of that great list of stock science fiction TV plots we linked to a few years ago. Here, she explains why Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter isn't just a weak genre mashup, but also the ultimate white guilt fantasy.

Wind-Up Girl author Paolo Bacigalupi's essay over at Wired is both a must read and a quick read. The essay is mostly about how Cyberpunk saved science fiction by shaking up the complacent view of the future that had dominated for decades — but then he broadens out into a more general theory of science fiction as a…

The love of television is always tragic. We're doomed to fall in love with television shows and then lose them, again and again. And often, our love burns the brightest for shows that live the shortest amount of time. We'll never get our favorite cancelled TV shows back again — but the good news is, for every TV show…

However you feel about Prometheus, one thing's for sure: This movie has inspired more arguments than any film in the past few years. What's it all about? Does it actually mean anything at all? David J. Williams, author of The Mirrored Heavens, The Burning Sky and the Machinery of Light, has a few theories that might…

We often tend to think that the best era for trash culture was sometime in the middle of the Twentieth Century. An era where there were a lot of 25 cent paperbacks with gun-toting lesbians on their covers, plus drive-in movies, stag films, cheap comics and weird burlesque shows. And so on. But actually, the pinnacle of …

When you've got amazing technologies or strong magical powers, death doesn't have to have the final word. But is bringing the dead back to life always a good idea? We look the reasons it's better to say no to resurrection.