Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
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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A few days ago I received an email from the NaNoWriMo Team kindly informing me that I, proud winner of the 50,000 word-race, am now in the NowWhat Months where, like some other (thousand? million?) people around the world, I am wondering what I…
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Not happy with having discovered many of the secrets of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko thanks to the Rosetta mission and its Philae probe, ESA-Rosetta team scientists have also engaged in a naming exercise, and identified 19 regions on the surface of the comet…
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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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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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That things don’t last forever, we all know it. After all, we witness cycles of life and death every day. But there are things we are used to think as eternal – like stars and galaxies – even though we’re…
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