The Orion Book Award recognizes a book that addresses "the human relationship with the natural world" in a fresh and thought-provoking manner. This year, the judges included Ursula K. Le Guin and the winner was a book about the apocalypse.

Karen Lord's new novel starts out with a horrific act of genocide. Sadira, the homeworld of the Sadiri race, is completely wiped out, with countless Sadiri dead. The remaining Sadiri, living on other planets, struggle with preserving their culture and keeping their race alive in some form. With that sort of set-up,…

We look to the great SF authors and get inspiration from their work — along with a healthy dose of envy, sometimes. It's impossible to read the works of authors like Vernor Vinge and Maureen McHugh without wishing we could have pulled something like that off. But which works do the great SF authors wish they'd written?

Molly Gloss is one of the best writers you've probably never read. Though she fits, both chronologically and thematically, into a cohort of female genre writers of feminist-inflected, anthropological SF — a group that includes Eleanor Arnason, Karen Joy Fowler, and of course Ursula K. Le Guin — Gloss is probably the…

So they actually did it: They turned the sprawling, insane Cloud Atlas into a movie, one that actually makes the book look straightforward and uncontroversial. It just goes to show, no matter how unconventional or sprawling a book is, there's a way to adapt that sucker into a movie. Except sometimes, no.

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.…

Now that Prometheus is out on DVD, we're all rediscovering Ridley Scott's long-awaited return to science fiction. Many people were disappointed with Scott's comeback — but we should have known it would never quite live up to our hopes. Science fiction and fantasy are full of cases of creators who returned to their most …

If you're in Brooklyn tonight at 7:30, you should stop by the new science fiction bookstore Singularity & Co., where some great SF authors are paying tribute to their influences. Lev Grossman is reading James White, Paul Park is reading Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ophira Eisenberg is reading Kurt Vonnegut. More details at…

We're still living in the shadow of the British Empire, at least as far as a lot of science fiction and fantasy novels go. From Steampunk reimaginings of British explorers to magical versions of nineteenth century England, the sun pretty much never sets on books about the British Empire. But it's rare to see a book…

What do science fiction and fantasy books have in store for you this fall? There are new fantasy series by Tad Williams and Jacqueline Carey. A brand new Culture novel by Iain M. Banks. Collaborations between Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, and Larry Niven and Gregory Benford. A classic Gene Wolfe novel. A massive…