Patrick Stewart made us believe. Now he’s gone. I have been a science fiction fan since I became able to read, raised on Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. Star Trek was a natural affinity. It was the first television program to do what science fiction should do: speculate about a future world and how human beings’…
I’ve been an avid reader of science fiction since childhood. My path to it was a little unusual. I loved science books, especially Isaac Asimov’s sparkling nonfiction. When I ran out of that, I found out Asimov wrote (science) fiction books. That turned me on Clarke, Heinlein, Pohl, Dick, and the rest of those hard…
I’m stuck on a new TV series from Amazon Prime: “Tales from the Loop.” This is science fiction in its purest form, removed from the explosions and laser battles that have predominated in film and video “sci-fi” for the last 40 years. Science fiction is, or ought to be, an exploration of how people and…
The writer Harlan Ellison died yesterday. He was a brilliant, irritating, iconoclastic, inflexible force of nature. I cannot imagine him being 84 years old, and death is exactly the sort of inconvenience he’d never put up with. Harlan (everyone just called him “Harlan”) began his writing career by joining a street gang, undercover, and then…
I was a science fiction fan growing up in the 60s and 70s. I was a technology analyst, predicting the future, in the 90s and 00s. Here’s what science fiction and strategic analysis have in common — and what they don’t. How science fiction challenges the mind (and “sci-fi” doesn’t) Science fiction is not the same…