Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
That SF has often inspired astrophysicists and theoretical scientists is not something that should come as a surprise. After all, space elevators, while first theorised by the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, were made famous by Arthur C. Clarke in his…
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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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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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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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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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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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