Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
A WorldCon – i.e., the annual SF Word Convention – is an amazing event, culminating in the Hugo Awards night but also featuring a head-spinning series of events, panels, games, music performances (called filk in SF jargon), art dealers, promotions…
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I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson is one of the most influential books written in speculative fiction. It is a SF/horror novel, featuring humans turned into vampires by a virus, and following the story of the only survivor to…
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This is a guest review on Space Pirate Captain Harlock – 宇宙海賊キャプテンハーロック (2013) – the latest movie of the manga/anime created by Leiji Matsumoto in the 70s. Some background of the original series can be found here, but previous knowledge is not necessarily…
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Raft (1993) by Stephen Baxter, tells the story of a few thousand humans in an increasing hostile environment, located in an alternate, high-gravity universe. They are divided in classes, they fight against each other, and they have eventually to leave in…
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Friday 1 August was the last useful day to vote for the 2014 Hugo Awards and now, finally done with them, I must admit I was not able to read the whole bunch. Too many things, too little time. Some reviewers…
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The Day of the Triffids (1951) by John Wyndham is a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi horror novel where mankind, with the exception of the protagonist, Bill Masen, has been blinded by a mysterious meteor shower. To make things worse, the world is…
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Keeping on the exoplanet series, after the general introduction and the presentation of the oldest one (so far) discovered, today I am going to address another interesting characteristic: distance. Distance matters, no discussion about it. I have already mentioned the importance of the…
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A visionary and ironic melange of comedy and SF, Equoid (2013) is a brilliant example of Charles Stross’ prose and a stand-alone novella in his Laundry series. It features a field agent working for British government agency “the Laundry”, in…
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Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert, is the world’s best-selling SF novel and possibly the most famous and popular ever. Paul Atreides, the planet Arrakis and the spice are known to all SF lovers, even though not that many have followed…
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Ever fancied naming a star – or even better a planet? If you are a SF author, that’s easy thing. (And actually there are hundreds of fictional planets out there. Some of them sport pretty names – Arrakis, Tatooine, Vulcan or Fleed)….
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