Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
Neuromancer is a 1984 novel by William Gibson, and the first in the cyberpunk genre. Also the first book to win the so-called SF “triple crown” — the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the prestigious…
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Some weeks ago I talked about the incredible variety of exoplanets, which we have just began to discover. I have also mentioned what we normally find and we can expect to find according to astrophysics, including the most coveted targets – i.e., planets in…
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The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin, is the first, famous example of feminist science fiction. Also well-known for the first coherent representation of a genderless society in SF. Being the daughter of the famous anthropologist…
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I have started since a couple of months or so to contribute to a great blog called Serious Wonder, one of the most innovative and amazing web outlets I have found on futurism, new technologies and, yes, my favourite subjects,…
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The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester, originally published as a serial on a magazine in 1956, is considered by many The Count of Monte-Cristo of Sci-Fi. With some reasons: revenge is the main motive of the story. But it’s…
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Descent (2014) is the latest novel of the Scottish writer Ken MacLeod. Set up in a near future, it follows a young man’s life among conspiracy theories, alien abduction and strange UFOs in the Uk skies. Provoking, brilliant and utterly…
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“Where in fucktopia are you, Dexter?” Yells Debra Morgan, obviously searching in vain for her brother. Sure thing, Debra did not hint at anything sexual here – even though there are some fictional versions of the universe where sex has an essential…
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The Reality Dysfunction (1996), by Peter F. Hamilton, it’s the first book in The Night’s Dawn Trilogy, one of the best known in the Space Opera genre. Controversially presenting humans split between Adamists and Edenists, omniscient aliens and fantastic,…
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In what seems more the plot of a SF novel than a scientific discovery, a new strand of DNA has recently been engineered in a lab (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v509/n7500/full/nature13314.html). The headlines have defined it “alien DNA”, technically a misnomer for what the…
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” The Martian Chronicles” by Ray Bradbury is a 1950 science fiction short story collection that follows a future history structure and tells the colonisation of Mars by humans fleeing from a dying Earth. One of the most known and…
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