Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
Who’s Connie Radar PhD anyway? As IO9 rightly defined her in this article, she’s a SF comics “badass, retrofuturistic space heroine”, who in her adventures lands on the lunar surface in 1957, well before the 1969 Apollo 11. And this 7-minute video “Over the…
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The Uplift War (1987) is a SF novel by David Brin and part of the Uplift Universe. It portraits a fictional future universe where species evolve with the help of more developed ones that help them in the “uplifting” process,…
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Neptune’s Brood (2013) is a SF novel by Charles Stross. The story is set in the same universe of Saturn’s Children, but 5000 years later and with different characters. It features clones, bank-employed historians, assassins and the fantastic water-world of…
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Written in 1983 and adapted into a movie in 1989, Pet Sematary is by any standard one of the more frightening books I ever put my hands on. I recently had a go at it again, and albeit I knew the story by heart for…
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Blood Music (1985) by Greg Bear, originally published as a novelette in the SF magazine Analog, portrays the frightening experiment of a biotechnologist who creates nanobots out of his lymphocytes and injects them into his body. As expected, they multiply, change…
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I read this novel (to be precise, and oddly enough, in its French edition) long time ago. I don’t remember what I thought at that time, but the book I remembered all right. And after so many years, being now in…
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The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K Dick is one of the most famous books of alternate history. In this dystopian world, Nazi Germany won the war together with Japan, and the US are divided between the…
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That SF is becoming less anglocentric is an exciting and much-welcomed novelty, and I’m not talking here (just) about language, but also culture and tropes. It often results in a fascinating and compelling mix of different worlds and traditions, like in the case…
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…which is maybe not a myth after all. When I have written some time ago about Nemesis, or the Death Star, in fiction and in conspiracy theories, I have briefly mentioned Planet X. Historically, this name has been given to two…
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Reviewing The Martian is not an easy task, for a series of reasons. The most important is that there has been a lot of hype around this book, therefore expectations from my side (and from other readers, I guess) were obviously high….
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