Cosmologists are obsessed with origin stories. We are the physicists and astronomers who take on the task of explaining why spacetime and its ...
Tag: Astronomy
Earth First, Then Mars: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson
No writer has done more to realistically imagine the development of human life on other planets ...
Cyborg Communitarianism
Since life on Earth is so hard, the utopian imagination likes to turn to space. Almost as soon as astronomers and their telescopes emptied the heavens of angels, philosophers like Bernard Le Bovier ...
China at World’s End
In a galaxy far away, but close enough, an intelligent alien civilization finally realizes that its planet orbits around three suns instead of one. They face the classic three-body problem of ...
Sleep and Synchronicity
Two spectacularly haunting new works of fiction share a frightening and resonant premise: a world in which sleep is disappearing. Insomnia has a storied history, of course, as both ailment and plot ...
Papa Can’t Buy You A Brand New Earth
In the lullaby “Hush Little Baby,” a singer tries to quiet a child by promising to give her a slew of new things. “Papa’s gonna buy you a mocking bird,” she croons, “And if that mocking bird don’t ...
No Man Is an Island
Early on, Andy Weir’s novel The Martian—about an astronaut left to fend for himself on Mars when his team thinks he has died during a crisis—falls into a reliable pattern. Mark Watney, the team’s ...