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.
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…
OctoberFrank Herbert's Dune was rejected by 20+ publishers before an auto-repair-manual company printed it. On his birthday, a look at the worldbuilding that makes Dune the genre's gold standard, and what it teaches anyone building a universe.
AugustBradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and The Illustrated Man, the book that hooked me for life. On his birthday, a look at the lyrical, humane science fiction that took hold of me and never let go.
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…
DecemberClarke gave us 2001, Childhood's End, and Rendezvous with Rama, and he conceived the communications satellite before it existed. One of the Big Three, and a master of hard science married to genuine wonder.
FebruaryJules Verne imagined submarines and space travel before either existed and is the second most translated author in history. On his birthday, the father of science fiction, reimagined from the inside.
Jules VerneH.G. Wells founded the opposite half of science fiction from Verne. Where Verne loved the machine, Wells used the impossible to hold a mirror to humanity. A look at the divide that still runs through the genre.
JanuaryNational Science Fiction Day is January 2, Asimov's birthday. Why the genre matters more than its reputation suggests, and the books that hooked me for life.
Book ReviewsHapless Arthur Dent is dragged across the galaxy after Earth is demolished for a hyperspace bypass, in a gloriously absurd comic SF classic. Endlessly quotable, brilliantly inventive, and genuinely hilarious, it gave the world 42, the Babel fish, and don't…
Professional ghostwriting for executives, founders, coaches, and authors who want to get the book done right. 113+ books authored. 54+ ghostwritten for clients.
Ready to discuss your book?
BOOK YOUR PRIVATE CONSULTATIONNo pitch. No pressure.
© 2026 Richard Lowe. The Writing King. All rights reserved.
