Novels written by university professors and set in the groves of academe are far more rigidly predictable than anything but the most routine science fiction novel, but they have escaped the stigma of being labeled as genre.
Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science fiction world means really understanding what you're seeing and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people don't bother to read.
I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things th...
When religious believers invoke miracles and acts of creation ex nihilo, that is the end of the search for them, whereas for scientists, the identification of such mysteries is only the beginning. Science picks up where theology leaves off.
In order to displace a prevailing theory or paradigm in science, it is not enough to merely point out what it cannot explain; you have to offer a new theory that explains more data, and do so in a testable way.
There's no question that how Johannesburg operates is what made me interested in the idea of wealth discrepancy. 'Elysium' could be a metaphor for just Jo'burg, but it's also a metaphor for the Third World and the First World. And in science fiction,...
If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn't come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that's where the stimuli and influence comes from.
Ribofunk indicates a focus on biology as the upcoming big science in the way that physics was for the last 50 or 100 years. If you look for a biological thread throughout science fiction, you can find it, but it's a very small percentage of the total...
Technically and logically speaking, actual Victorian science fiction writers cannot be dubbed 'steampunks.' Although they utilized many of the same tropes and touchstones employed later by twenty-first-century writers of steampunk, in their contempor...
Pauley Perrette: I was a criminal science fanatic and went to study it in college as well and I think that helped me on NCIS because I was comfortable with the language, I had studied criminal science in school for years.
Young people, those who think they're experts in science, there's no doubt. They just believe it, and so there has to be an explanation - and whatever man is doing has caused the jet stream to slow down, and that is permitting the polar vortex.
There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction, the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction, whatever you want to call it - mash-ups, gimmick lit, absurdist fiction - I do...
Ego, id, and superego are terms familiar to all, but for many years, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has thrived in English departments around the country as a tool for interpreting literary texts but has rarely, if ever, been discussed in science depa...
I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.
When I was fifteen, my father gave me a first edition copy of Ray Bradbury's magnificent work, 'The Martian Chronicles.' I had read other science fiction by noted authors, but this book was something else altogether.
The ultimate aim of all science to penetrate the unknown. Do you realize we know less about the earth we live on than about the stars and the galaxies of outer space? The greatest mystery is right here, right under our feet.
Let's get with it, guys: You don't need to hear a Ministry song to get political. You should be political on your own. We're just a side project to society. So do I care what people think about me personally? No. I just do what I do.
Even though Chinese society was really closed, there were two windows for me to explore the world. One was from my mother and grandmother, the unseen and invisible world. Another window was brought from my father's side, those classic and Western boo...
My privacy concerns have to do with the world, other people, technology intruding upon us - what Talmudic scholars once called 'the unwanted gaze.' Here I see major issues and concerns as society evolves, and I've written often on the subject.
A lot of jobs today are being automated; what happens when you extend that concept to very important areas of society like law enforcement? What happens if you start controlling the behavior of criminals or people in general with software-running mac...
Up until now, the biggest question in society about video games has been what to do about violent games. But it's almost like society in general considers video games to be something of a nuisance, that they want to toss into the garbage can.
