Star Wars’ Vice-Admiral Holdo and Our Expectations for Female Military Power

By Arkady Martine A vast and detailed selection of spoilers follow—if you haven’t seen The Last Jedi, go see it and come back to this one afterward. The first time we see Vice-Admiral Holdo in The Last Jedi, we see her through the eyes of Poe Dameron: hotshot flyboy, recently slapped down twice in the Resistance’s scramble to evacuate […]

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My Work Board for 2018 (So Far)

So this is how we manage work deadlines for my writing. This is the stuff that I’m intending to write & work on up to June of this year. The pink post-its are writing deadlines, and the green post-its are deadlines for my editor. We include the submission deadline at the bottom of the editorial […]

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Physicists Have Created an Artificial Gamma Ray Burst in the Lab

By Matt Williams On July 2nd, 1967, the U.S. Vela 3 and 4 satellites noticed something rather perplexing. Originally designed to monitor for nuclear weapons tests in space by looking for gamma radiation, these satellites picked up a series of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) coming from deep space. And while decades have passed since the “Vela Incident“, astronomers are still […]

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The Science of Desert Planets

By Alex Acks I’ve been reading science fiction and fantasy almost as long as I’ve been able to read, and I’m normally very good at suspending my disbelief. Unfortunately, seven years of university schooling and two degrees have now placed some suspension limits on certain areas—namely geology, landforms, and maps. I tend to notice little things like […]

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Why Spice Is a Staple of Science Fiction

By Abbey White One of science fiction’s most famous food tropes, spice often exists as something outside its everyday culinary use. Whether a deadly, interstellar travel enhancer in Frank Herbert’s Dune, a magical form of seduction in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, a drug in George Lucas’s Star Wars or currency in EA Games sci-fi simulation Spore, across mediums […]

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