The masters of science fiction: Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, Clarke, Herbert, and the writers who built the genre, celebrated in essays, holiday tributes, and craft articles by a lifelong SF reader and novelist.
NovemberKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden three stories underground and couldn't write about it for more than twenty years. When he did, he broke time apart to get there, and Slaughterhouse-Five still shows memoir writers how to approach what…
Reading LifeA 2016 science fiction novelette by Kenn Brody. Shannon Redwine wants to be a video reporter, so she has a ham radio mentor surgically install a broadcaster in her, and what she puts on the air makes powerful enemies.
Reading LifeKenn Brody's science fiction novel about Zila Aropova Biddey, sent across the galaxy by a mysterious Sage to find the origin of LUCA, the common ancestor of all life. What she finds instead is an ancient entity that opposes life…
Reading LifeKenn Brody's science fiction thriller about Aura, an artificial intelligence contacted by the most advanced civilization in the galaxy, while a criminal group seizes the world's fissile material. Kenn was a founding member of the critique group I started in…
Reading LifeIsaac Asimov's 1950 collection of nine robot stories, framed as the memories of robopsychologist Susan Calvin. It's where the Three Laws of Robotics took hold, and it's where I started reading Asimov at about eight years old.
Reading LifeHeinlein's 1963 novel about Podkayne Fries, a fifteen-year-old girl from Mars traveling to Earth with her troublemaking younger brother. It's best known now for the fight over its ending. Heinlein lost that fight, and his readers eventually won it back.
Reading LifeRobert Heinlein's 1961 novel about Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised by Martians who comes to Earth and looks at humanity from the outside. It won the Hugo Award, gave the language the word grok, and was the first science…
Fantasy FictionLe Guin grew up in a house of anthropologists and applied their central question to places that did not exist: not what a society has, but why it arranged itself that way. That order of operations is why her worlds…
JanuaryAsimov published around five hundred books across nine of the ten Dewey categories, wrote science fiction whose plots are almost entirely arguments, and invented a set of rules whose whole purpose was to break interestingly. He also never knew his…
AdaptationDick wrote forty-four novels for cheap paperback money and died at fifty-three, months before the first film adaptation arrived. He asked one question so persistently that the whole culture now asks it with him: how would you know if what…
Book ReviewsThe Forever War does something almost no other war novel manages: it makes alienation measurable. Joe Haldeman takes the distance a soldier feels coming home and literalizes it across decades and centuries, building the best portrait of that specific rupture…
JulyHeinlein is one of science fiction's Big Three and the dean of the genre, author of Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. A look at his plot-driven fiction and the complicated love I hold…
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