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Science fiction and fantasy books are bigger than ever. A Dance With Dragons and Stephen King's time-travel saga rule the bestseller lists. Literary authors all flock to write about zombies, apocalypses and time travel. And by all indications, 2012 is going to be an even greater year for genre books. More »
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What's new for February? Cherie Priest tries her hand at bad-ass bloodsuckers. There's also paranormal police, feminist hackers, and an ARG that sparks a revolution that may overturn a whole government. More »
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Walter Jon Williams' Deep State, out next week, picks up the themes of viral marketing and social media from his previous novel This Is Not A Game. And a lot of the stuff that Williams wrote about is very similar to what's been happening in Egypt and Tunisia. Is Williams a prophet of the internet age, or just lucky? Here's his take on what happened. More »
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It's election day, and all indications are that the GOP will sweep Congress. What's the worst that can happen under the Republicans? Science fiction has the answer, with a wealth of stories about right-wing policies taken to horrendous extremes. More »
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Which books do you buy extra copies of on sight, especially if they're used — knowing you'll want to give them to someone else soon? Jo Walton has sparked a great discussion of book hoarding and giving over at Tor.com. More »
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The Taos ToolBox Writers Workshop is taking applications for its "graduate level" writing classes, taught by Walter Jon Williams, Nancy Kress and guest-instructor Carrie Vaughn. But beware: It sounds like the instruction gets pretty intensive. More »
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Is there life after death? Maybe, if you're wired. After all, death is just a failure of storage media. Science fiction is full of people who've died in meatspace, only to live on in cyberspace. Here's our inventory of cyber-Heaven. More »
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This Is Not A Game, Walter Jon Williams' new novel, shows how "reality" and Alternate Reality Games blend and become more and more indistinguishable - just as our culture, money and society melt down. Spoilers... More »
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"Right up till the 1980s, SF envisioned giant mainframe computers that ran everything remotely, that ingested huge amounts of information and regurgitated it in startling ways, and that behaved (or were programmed to behave) very much like human beings... Now we have 14-year-olds with more computing power on their desktops than existed in the entire world in 1960. But computers in fiction are still behaving in much the same way as they did in the Sixties. That's because in fiction [artificial intelligence] has to follow the laws of dramatic logic, just like human characters." — Walter Jon Williams, interviewed by Bibliophile Stalker. More »
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What's the worst that can happen if you vote Republican in November? Science fiction has the answer, with a wealth of stories about right-wing policies taken to their most horrendous extremes. We already recounted the scariest dystopias where liberals triumph, and now here's our list of the most awesome dark futures where Sarah Palin holds sway. More »
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Artificial intelligences aren't going to take over Earth by building a bunch of robotic fashion models to karate-chop us to death. Instead, the A.I. takeover will come from a nasty nano-tech sludge that consumes all matter in its path to recreate itself endlessly. This "gray goo" scenario has popped up in novels by Walter Jon Williams, Rudy Rucker and Greg Bear, but it hasn't yet appeared in any major movies. Here's how we would tell a Hollywood-friendly "gray goo" story. More »
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