I have an interest in the mining of asteroids, which features as a central driver of the plot in my upcoming novel The Cloud. By Philip Metzger Mining asteroids might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but there are companies and a few governments already working hard to make it real. This should not be surprising: […]
Read More Want Faster Data and a Cleaner Planet? Start Mining AsteroidsDownbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh My rating: 5 of 5 stars Read for the 12 in 12 Challenge, the LGBTQ Speculative Fiction Challenge,, the Military Spec-Fic Reading Challenge, the Women of Genre Fiction Challenge, the Grand Mistresses of Genre Fiction Challenge, the Hard Core Sci-Fi Challenge, the Read the Sequel Challenge, and the Space Opera […]
Read More Book Review: Downbelow Station by C.J. CherryhBy 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 […]
Read More Star Wars’ Vice-Admiral Holdo and Our Expectations for Female Military PowerMagazine issue: Vol. 193, No. 2, February 3, 2018, p. 7 OXON HILL, Md. — Future spacecraft could navigate by the light of dead stars. Using only the timing of radiation bursts from pulsating stellar corpses, an experiment on the International Space Station was able to pinpoint its location in space in a first-ever demonstration. The technique […]
Read More Spaceships Could Use Pulsars as a GPSNASA’s New Horizons spacecraft just took the farthest-ever images from Earth, breaking an earlier record set by Voyager 1’s “Pale Blue Dot” image taken almost exactly 28 years ago. In December 2017, New Horizons took these false-color images of objects in the Kuiper Belt, the farthest from Earth ever captured by a spacecraft. They’re also […]
Read More NASA Just Published the Farthest-Ever Images Taken in SpaceCat 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 RamboIN BRIEF Using data collected from their network of telescopes, the Event Horizons Telescope team hopes to produce the first ever image of a black hole in 2018. FIRST LOOK AT A BLACK HOLE Within the next 12 months, astrophysicists believe they’ll be able to do something that’s never been done before, and it could […]
Read More This Year, We’ll See a Black Hole for the First TimeBy 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 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
