Cat Rambo, President of the SFWA, features some awesome SFF authors in On Demand classes available from her website. Her latest featured Ann Leckie on Space Opera. Leckie’s space opera novel Ancillary Justice won just about every award in the SFF field a couple of years ago. The following quotes Cat Rambo’s Twitter thread featuring […]
Read More Writing Space Opera According to Ann Leckie & Cat RamboBy Jay Bennett The Hypatia stone is only a few centimeters across, broken into pebble fragments, but it may very well be the most interesting rock in the world. Named for Hypatia of Alexandria, the first prominent Western woman astronomer and mathematician, the colorful rock was found in 1996 in western Egypt by Aly Barakat, […]
Read More ‘Hypatia’ Stone Contains Compounds Not Found in the Solar SystemBy 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 […]
Read More The Science of Desert PlanetsAncillary Justice by Ann Leckie My rating: 5 of 5 stars Read for the 12 Awards in 12 Months Challenge, the Women of Genre Fiction Challenge, and the Space Opera Challenge. This book won pretty much every freakin’ award available to SFF writers: 2013 BSFA Winner 2013 Golden Tentacle Winner 2013 Nebula Winner 2013 Tiptree […]
Read More Book Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann LeckieBy Kameron Hurley I’m going to tell you a story about llamas. It will be like every other story you’ve ever heard about llamas: how they are covered in fine scales; how they eat their young if not raised properly; and how, at the end of their lives, they hurl themselves – lemming-like- over cliffs […]
Read More We Have Always Fought: Changing the Women, Cattle & Slaves NarrativeBy 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 […]
Read More Why Spice Is a Staple of Science Fiction(Image features Cordelia Vorkosigan, nee Naismith, from the Vorkosigan Saga; an amazing example of a kick-ass heroine!) I was reading an SFR with a “kick-ass” heroine recently. The book is universally lauded. But something happened early on that ensured I wouldn’t go on to finish it, much less read the rest in the series. The heroine was […]
Read More How NOT to Write Kick-Ass HeroinesBy Mara Johnson-Groh The space high above Earth may seem empty, but it’s a carnival packed with magnetic field lines and high-energy particles. This region is known as the magnetosphere and, every day, charged particles put on a show as they dart and dive through it. Like tiny tightrope walkers, the high-energy electrons follow the […]
Read More NASA Studies the MagnetosphereRoads of the future could be lit by glowing trees instead of streetlamps, thanks to a breakthrough in creating bioluminescent plants. Experts injected specialized nanoparticles into the leaves of a watercress plant, which caused it to give off a dim light for nearly four hours. This could solve lots of problems. The chemical involved, which […]
Read More Living Plant LightsBy Nancy Jane Moore At a recent meeting of my writers’ group, we discussed fight scenes while critiquing an early draft of my novel in progress. The discussion went something like this: “Women fight differently from men,” one of the guys said in pointing out that the sword fight scenes didn’t vary much. I didn’t […]
Read More Fighting and Gender
