Tag: Science Fiction

Three psycho-spiritual “events” of the 1970s — involving Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, and Terence and Dennis McKenna — had a strange synchronicity.

Ann and Jeff Vandermeer discuss talking animals, the weird/fantasy divide, and the ‘rate of fey’ as an organizing principle in their new anthology of classic fantasy.

Sarah Watts details how science fiction shaped her family, her religion, and her own self-image.

“I joke that this is the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.”

Man Booker winner Marlon James immersed himself in African myths and history, so he could use that world as a springboard for a new fantasy series.

Solarpunk, a new genre of science fiction, demands radical optimism of its writers and readers. It takes the apocalypse as given, but doesn’t assume the worst of people living through it.

Her planet/self-help guide for activists, “Emergent Strategy,” is going mainstream — maybe even in time to save the world.

High-stakes time travel adventure from sci-fi writer Jo Lindsay Walton.

Hiroshi Ishi­guro has spent his career creating robots. But does he know enough about humans to make them lifelike?

Ursula K. Le Guin may no longer publish fiction, but that hasn’t stopped her from writing.

The sci-fi writer explains how his city-dwellers learn to survive and thrive after a climate-change catastrophe.

Alec Nevala-Lee, author of Astounding, a forthcoming book on the history of science fiction, digs into the writing career of L. Ron Hubbard, gaining new insights into the life of the controversial founder of dianetics and the origins and nature of Scientology itself.

After the binge-watching comes the binge-reading.

Five centuries after Thomas More’s classic was first published, we still dabble in perfect-world-building.

A conversation between two novelists — Choire Sicha chats with Ursula K. Le Guin.

You, Little Sylvia, will come up knowing the truth, but to the rest of the world–to jellyfishes, crackers, finkies, and swells, to Bosom families and Consolidated alike–the stars are not real. The planets are not real. Astronomy, if spoken of al all, is regarded as a delusional cult scarcely more respectable than the Jesus Lovers. […]

Genre literature has power. Mainstream science fiction, historically, has a representation problem. (Why are there no black people in the future? Or, better yet, why is there only one black person in the future?! Did LGBTQ people disappear, too?) Where does that leave us?

“Science fiction is the fiction of ideas.”

Science fiction writer Eileen Gunn recently wrote in Smithsonian magazine about how the science fiction genre informs the way we think about the real world. Here, Gunn writes that big tech companies like Microsoft have hired science fiction writers to do “design fiction”—coming up with new technology ideas through imaginative works: Microsoft, Google, Apple and […]

Hilary Armstrong is a literature student at U.C. Santa Barbara and a Longreads intern. She recently shared six stories for the science-fiction newbie, and a reading list for Fantasy Newbies. These stories offer a little breadth, a little curiosity, and a little levity to the idea of artificial life.