Tag
Science Fiction
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On Our Nightstands: July 2026
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is actually on our nightstands? Here we bring you, in our own words, a behind-the-scenes look at what we have been reading this month. Nicholas Dames Editor in Chief Frederic…
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The Empty Lab, in Science and in Fiction
When literature refuses readers entry into the laboratory, it fosters suspicions of science itself.
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Betwixt or Bewitched? Rethinking the “Middlebrow” with Dino Buzzati
Reframed as a “bewitched middlebrow,” Buzzati’s fiction re-enters literary history not as a comforting escape, but as a sharp tool for existential inquiry.
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The Origin of Love and Nightmares
Hong Kong has become an apt prism through which to probe the skin tissue between state violence and victimization, and the widening wounds to personal freedom.
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Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey
“All fictional works are in some sense defined by the moment they were written and what their authors were trying to experience.”
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Atomic Achilles: On Benjamín Labatut’s “The Maniac”
“‘The Maniac’ isn’t interested in speculating, in the manner of science fiction, about where AI leads: whether to utopia, dystopia, or somewhere in between.”
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Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra
“Literature has this remarkable, almost miraculous, ability to distill human experience.”
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Reality, as Seen by Godzilla
Perhaps the function of Godzilla is to trouble happily ever after.
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John Plotz on Earthsea, Anarchism, and Ursula K. Le Guin
“Rather than thinking of creative arts and sciences as ‘two cultures,’ we should realize that they’re running on parallel tracks.”
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Developing AI Like Raising Kids
“In terms of the machine learning programs or robots that we have now, I basically think of them as being comparable to thermostats.”
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Speaking the Monster: Ecofeminism in “Alien” and “Aliens”
“The Alien movies model how patriarchal culture distracts people from capitalism’s parasitism by designating women as the real threat.”
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“Finding Other Ways to Flow”: The Once and Future Le Guin
“There’s something very solitary in her writing as well. I almost think of it as solitary solidarity.”
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What Would Undo the Maxim Gun? Magic: P. Djèlí Clark and andré carrington
“You need your heroes to have flaws.”
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Fixing Nostalgia: “Star Trek” Boldly Goes to Less Utopian Futures
“Picard” is perhaps the least utopian of any “Star Trek” media. But’s that because its political pragmatism shows how to build a better reality.
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On Our Nightstands: September 2023
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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“If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It”: Ander Monson on “Predator” and the Monster of American Masculinity
“I see actual male friendship, in a way that I don’t in almost any other action movie from the 80s.”
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On Our Nightstands: February 2023
A behind-the-scenes look at what Public Books editors and staff have been reading this month.
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All Futures Are Possible
“It is fanciful to invest too much faith in the isolated act of reading – the stimulated, inspired or entertained brain does not store carbon.”
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“In Any Version of Reality”: Talking SF with Charles Yu
“It’s why science fiction matters so much to me: I’m trying to dislocate our sense of the normal.”
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One More Embrace: Octavia’s Future/Present
Butler’s work helps us see how time is a spiral, how the present moment is always layered with multiple pasts and underlying alternate futures.
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Octavia E. Butler: The Next 75 Years
Rather than politically utopian, Butler’s stories teach us about grief, consolation, hope, and—most of all—how to live in struggle.
