Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
The Years of Rice and Salt Quotes (2002) is a Kim Stanley Robinson’s speculative fiction novel. It’s one of the most convincing examples of alternate history – set in a world where the Black Death in 1348 has killed 99%…
Read more
The Dispossessed (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin, is an utopian SF novel. It belongs to the same fictional universe of the Left Hand of Darkness, where the Principle of Simultaneity makes possible instantaneous communication among interstellar systems, and it explores…
Read more
This is post number 3 in the Gundam series, aimed at helping you find your way in the complex multiverse of this amazing franchise (for the other posts, see this). As if the different timelines I have discussed before were…
Read more
Titan (1997) is a SF/ techno-thriller by Stephen Baxter. It examines Saturn’s moon Titan as the object of a manned mission aiming at discovering alien life, but also the more general issue of human exploration of the Solar System. More political than…
Read more
“There’s a reason we’ve never gone back to the Moon.” This is how the opening line on the movie’s website, a American-Canadian SF/ horror written by Brian Miller and directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego. I have briefly mentioned this movie when…
Read more
I have already written – rather enthusiastically – about the first instalment of this trilogy, The Lives of Tao, saying that the book is an innovative example of a techno/sci-fi thriller and that I looked forward to the rest of the trilogy. That’s…
Read more
Out of the Silent Planet (1938) by C. S. Lewis is the first of the Cosmic Trilogy and an early example of space travel novel featuring far-away planet – Malacandra – and various species of aliens. Allegedly written after a…
Read more
The City & the City (2009) is a weird fiction novel by the British author China Mieville and based on the investigation of a mysterious murder. Brilliant, compelling and vaguely hallucinatory, it combines many cultural influences, Borges, Robbe-Grillet and Calvino…
Read more
Post number 2 in the Gundam series. Let’s talk today about something I have already mentioned in my introduction to this amazing anime franchise, i.e. the complicated multiverse where its adventures take place. In order to understand what’s happening and…
Read more
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut is a novel about World War II experiences and journeys through time, narrated in a non-linear order by a soldier named Billy Pilgrim. In between dark fantasy, political satire and SF, controversial and ground-breaking, this postmodern novel…
Read more