Octavia Butler’s prescient science fiction
Octavia Butler was the author of three cycles of science fiction novels—two Parable books, the...
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Category: Science Fiction
This long-forgotten “classic” SF should stay that way
A reader alerted me to Bob Shaw’s award-winning 1975 novel, Orbitsville, reporting that it...
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Shakespeare’s magic rendered into advanced alien technology
At what point does hard science fiction cross the line into fantasy? Read the work of any of the...
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The best science fiction of 2022
To be clear, what follows is not a list of the best science fiction published during the past...
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These dinosaurs left something behind
Now, here’s a story that involves dinosaurs, Thai human traffickers, teams of...
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This classic dystopian novel is steeped in Catholicism
Author William Gibson famously made the point that any science fiction story, no matter how far in...
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Murder in space on an interplanetary cruise ship
Dashiell Hammett’s murder mystery, The Thin Man, published in 1933, reached the silver...
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American refugees in a near-future dystopia
Book critics write a lot about unreliable narrators, and no wonder. They’re so numerous in...
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Gene editing is a federal crime in this near-future thriller
Robotics. Artificial intelligence. Nanotechnology. These fields, among others, compete for...
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Pushing the boundaries of ethics in artificial intelligence
Consider what possibilities might open up—for good or ill—if programmers could code artificial...
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A troubled First Contact mission led by Jesuit priests
What can I say about a science fiction novel that’s really about religion? Roman Catholicism, to...
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A prescient look at the military of the future
Visions of future warfare abound with horror stories about robot soldiers. Ranks of Star Wars...
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Stephen King’s take on the JFK assassination
A review of 11/22/63, by Stephen King. @@@@ (4 out of 5). Jake Epping, 35, is a high school English teacher in a small Maine town when an acquaintance lures him to step through a window or portal in time that leads directly back to September 9, 1958. Jake’s mission: to hold out until 1963 and kill Lee Harvey Oswald before Oswald can assassinate JFK.
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A taut thriller about the world of multibillion-dollar hedge funds
A review of The Fear Index, by Robert Harris. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Set in Geneva, this taut thriller takes the reader into the world of a brilliant American scientist, Dr. Alexander Hoffman, who has developed mathetical formulas that make billions in profits for his hedge fund.
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A satirical science fiction novel about life on Europa
You’ll get a sense of what Mat Johnson is driving at on the second page of his satirical...
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