Sometimes when you're exploring other planets or strange realms, your best friend really is a warm gun. Sometimes, your wits and your fists aren't enough, and you need to defend yourself... with a pistol.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels to Cheer You the Frak Up
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.
R.I.P. Harry Harrison, creator of the Stainless Steel Rat, Bill the…
If Harry Harrison had only created "Slippery" Jim DiGriz, the roguish hero of the Stainless Steel Rat books, he would deserve a high place in science fiction history. But he also wrote dozens of other novels, including the hilarious Bill the Galactic Hero saga, the proto-Steampunk classic A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, …
The Stainless Steel Rat still shines bright
It's been ten years since the last Stainless Steel Rat book, and now Harry Harrison is back with another tale of "Slippery" Jim diGriz. John T. Ottinger ventures into Harrison's dangerous world, and lives to tell the tale. Spoilers below...
How to be a very silly science fiction/fantasy writer
We live in an absurd universe. And once you throw in stuff like time travel, fiction can get even sillier than real life. But how can you write speculative fiction that lives up to our ridiculous world, without being dumb?
Stainless Steel Rat Author Defects To Russia
Classic science fiction author Harry Harrison says America is becoming a totalitarian state, and praised Russia for its interest in literature, according to an interview published in the Russian newspaper Pravda. The Stainless Steel Rat author, visiting Moscow for a convention, said America violates its own…
Why Do Anti-Heroes Rule Science Fiction?
The first time I ever read the word "anti-hero," it was in an article about science fiction, and it's always seemed a very science fictional type of word — like anti-matter, or anti-gravity. Science fiction has its share of one-dimensional white hats, but the characters who capture our imagination are usually the morally …
Weakest Con Artists Of The Distant Future
Click to viewIn a few centuries, everybody will be a rube. Centuries of in-breeding in deep space will remove everyone's street smarts and turn people seriously gullible. That's the only explanation for why anybody would ever get taken in by some of the grifters you run into in science fiction, who practically have a…
All the Best Futuristic Guns for Your Holster
Science fiction has three iconic images that definite the genre: aliens, rockets, and rayguns. Whether due to our obsession with phallic guns, or the idea that a laser pistol is just too cool to pass up, the scifi gun has endured since H.G. Wells introduced them as a "Heat-Ray" in 1898's War of the Worlds. As good old…
