Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
I am not a great fan of supernatural per se, I have to say, and my favourite horror stories have generally a scientific explanation for what happens, even when they scare me silly. What I enjoy in ghost stories, on the…
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The Windup Girl (2009) by Paolo Bacigalupi is a SF dystopian / biopunk novel. It’s set in Thailand in the 23rd-century, where powerful biotech corporations and global warning have created a ruthless new world and where humanoids like Emiko (the…
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Rendezvous with Rama (1973) is a novel by Arthur C. Clarke, set in the 2130s in the Solar System. Rama, initially mistaken for an asteroid, is instead a mysterious alien spacecraft in the shape of a 50-kilometre spinning cylinder, that…
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In 1967, Harlan Ellison put together a short-story anthology titled Dangerous Visions. Mildly put, this collection made history and “almost single-handedly [it] changed the way readers thought about science fiction.” What all the fuss was about? First of all, the quality…
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2312 (2012) by Kim Stanley Robinson is a SF novel about a (relatively) near future of interplanetary colonisation. Humanity has spread across the whole Solar System, settling down by many different means, from biomes in hollowed-out asteroids to cities on Mercury….
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An interview to Ken Liu, the SF Chinese-American writer, author of some excellent short stories (published on F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld among others) and winner of many SF awards, has appeared on December, 17 on Amazing Stories. Regina Kanyu…
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The Drowned World (1962) is a SF novel by J. G. Ballard, an author that has written in other literary genres and became especially famous thanks to a war novel, Empire of the Sun. Set in London in a far-away 2145, The…
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In addition to astrophysics and space exploration, I do also write articles about another of my favourite subjects, science in science-fiction, on this blog and elsewhere. The ones listed below have appeared in summer 2014 on Amazing Stories. Arrakis and Single…
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There are two things about this odd yet fascinating book worth mentioning straight away. The first is that, albeit featuring a seventeen-year old boy, it’s definitively not a YA story, under any standard. More: it is not the kind of book…
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The Shadow of the Torturer (1980) is a fantasy novel by Gene Wolfe. It is the first of four volumes in The Book of the New Sun series, and tells the story of Severian, an apprentice in the torturers’ guild….
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