Tag
Science Fiction
-
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…
-
5,000 Years of Climate Fiction
Kim Stanley Robinson is not the first to write about Manhattan under water. Others, notably Nathaniel Rich in Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), have also …
-
Rising Tides, Rising Profits
In New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson takes on one of the almost unimaginable yet probable outcomes of climate change: that in the foreseeable future, some …
-
Virtual Roundtable on “Get Out”
In the weeks immediately following its release, Jordan Peele’s Get Out quickly established itself as the crossover film …
-
The Bingewatch: #Resist
After November’s election, I only wanted to watch normporn. Craving fallible yet manicured characters whose gaffes—provoked by pain mired in class privilege—always culminated in tear-jerking …
-
Books after the Death of the Book
Last summer I decided to assign Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects in the graduate course I was getting ready to teach. The title …
-
Jane Austen Meets Sci-Fi
After two hundred years of being known as a genius, Jane Austen is now a brand, a marketing phenomenon. According to Wikipedia—so this is more universally acknowledged than necessarily true—in 2015, 25 Austen-inspired works were released per month, which suggests that more people are writing such fan fiction than are reading it. Most of these…
-
The Monstrous H. P. Lovecraft
Part literary detective story, part Gothic tale, and part fictional biography, Paul La Farge’s enthralling novel The Night Ocean is composed of the formal hybrids and …
-
What It Feels Like When Your World Ends
The increasingly popular genre recently christened “cli-fi,” or climate change fiction, tends to move from the outside in: as the environment deteriorates …
-
Miéville’s Surreal Weapons
In his rambling 2011 photo-essay “London’s Overthrow,” composed in the lead-up to the London Olympics, China Miéville takes his reader through the ever-changing, history-drenched streets of his beloved city …
-
My Neighbor Octavia
For years, I knew Octavia E. Butler, the famed African American science fiction and fantasy writer, by her first name only. That was the way she introduced herself when I first met her back in the fall of 1999 …
-
“Westworld” and the Dawn of Baroque TV
Part of the thrill of our New Golden Age of Television has been discovering incredible shows in places one wouldn’t have previously thought to look: streaming services, formerly niche channels, YouTube. With so many options, it’s a bit exhausting when a show arrives demanding to be recognized as the next big thing. Westworld—the 1973 sci-fi…
-
The Bingewatch: Mother Winona
Since its release last July, Stranger Things has been praised as an “original,” “meticulous” homage to the Great Men of 1980s popular culture (Carpenter, King, Lucas, Spielberg) …
-
Imagining the Near Future: An Interview with Dexter Palmer
At a reading this past winter, Dexter Palmer introduced his latest novel, Version Control, by sharing private messages swapped between Rebecca Wright, the story’s protagonist, and her would-be suitors through an online dating site known as Lovability. The series of awkward exchanges met with gentle scoffs and knowing laughter from the assembled audience. As social…
-
Speculative Pulp Fiction
Margaret Atwood’s most recent novel, The Heart Goes Last, began as an unusual digital experiment. Starting in March 2012, the website Byliner played host to the “Positron series,” a sequence of interconnected stories published gradually over the course of a year, which Atwood claimed was an attempt to revive a literary tradition of serialization popular…
-
Trouble in Lovecraft Country
Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country drops into the world of science-fiction and horror publishing at an interesting time. The fandom around this culture is arcane and probably irremediably nerdy to outsiders, but even “mundanes” (non-fans) must have registered something of the huge boom in Lovecraftian horror that has plumed out through film, TV, and videogames…
-
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 …
-
Jeffrey Combs’s Re-Animator
The first scene of the Stuart Gordon’s 1985 cult classic Re-Animator shows us our lead, our anti-hero protagonist, in a state of panic. In the halls of the stately University of Zurich, Herbert West has experimented on his mentor, who is now a screaming, pulsating aberration, a physical monstrosity. West, played by stage actor Jeffrey…
-
Ghost in the System
It’s fitting that a videogame about novels and their authorship manages to marry two media long thought to be polar opposites. Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe’s The Ice-Bound Concordance, available for free, for iPad and Windows, on their website, is a story-based game that requires a real printed-and-bound book in order to play. In an age…
-
The Novel in the Age of Digital Diversion
In The End of Absence, an alternately shrewd and sentimental account of Internet-age distraction, author Michael Harris offers an autobiographical parable: once a lonely pre-tech teenager obsessed with fantasy novels, the now 30-something Harris finds he’s lost his ability to read more than a few pages without stopping to check his phone. Frustrated, he resolves…
-
Afrofuturism: Everything and Nothing
Whence the “Afro” in “Afrofuturism”? In the 1994 interview with Samuel R. Delaney that inaugurated the term, Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture—and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.”…
