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Why I’d Rather Read Dystopias than Dysfunctional Family Dramas
Go into your local, independent bookstore (no, really), and you’ll easily be able to tell the difference between literary and science fiction — often it will be delineated for you, with sections of...
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Bend Reality with Thought Experiments
Ursula K. Le Guin As fiction’s equivalent of messy chemistry experiments, thought experiments play with ideas until they explode. Most commonly found in—you’ve guessed it—speculative and science...
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Crowdsourcing the Canon: Literary Merit in Science Fiction
Imagine the carefully catalogued books available in your favorite library. The rows on rows and stacks on stacks, categorized with little regard for how they participate in the literary canon. There...
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Drones & Dystopia: Can Life Overlap with Literature?
Life is sometimes so surreal that you feel as though you’re in a story; as though the anecdote you’ve just related over drinks has an air of falsity about it, simply because it seems too strange to be...
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Going On: After the Apocalypse
Do you have a plan in place for what to do after an apocalypse? Survivalists do. Survivalists, mainstream North American culture thinks, are a little weird. They prepare for severe disruptions in the...
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Ambiguity: The Boundary Between Psychosis and Reality in Science Fiction
Philip K. Dick.by Pete Welsch CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons Television culture means that we often lack the depth to deal with ambiguity. The complexity of novels eludes our attention; we often...
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Chainmail Bikinis and Other Sexism in Science Fiction and Literature
Winter 1939 issue of “Planet Stories” If you’ve seen older issues of popular science fiction magazines—think from the 1930s to the 1960s—you’ve seen cover art of half-naked women being abducted by...
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Don’t Go See World War Z!
Hollywood’s latest apocalyptic zombie romp, World War Z, could have been great. If it followed the lead that the book set out, it could have portrayed a nuanced view of life ten years after the world...
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