Essays

Reading Time: 5 minutes Polaris Dawn pushes the envelope of civilian space travel in 2024, but at what cost?

Reading Time: 4 minutes While NASA researchers are directly combing the surface of Mars for signs of life, scientists are also using a site here on Earth to approximate ancient environmental conditions on Mars.

Reading Time: 5 minutes Science fiction and technological innovation feed off each other in an ongoing back-and-forth that can play out over decades.

Reading Time: 6 minutes I want to know what’s really going on with AI. And, as a writer and journalist, I have a personal stake in figuring out what’s happening because I have a strong feeling that my whole career is on the line.

Reading Time: 5 minutes Terry Pratchett’s novels have been adapted for the screen 11 times now. Why are his novels so hard to get right?

Reading Time: 4 minutes Mona Awad and Paul Tremblay’s lawsuit claims their books were used without their consent. But copyright protection doesn’t apply to ideas – they’ll need to demonstrate the likelihood of economic loss.

Reading Time: 5 minutes Startups are popping up that use new AI tools to bypass traditional publishing and distribution systems entirely.

Reading Time: 5 minutes Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle.

Reading Time: 5 minutes The idea of a multiverse consisting of “parallel universes” is a popular science fiction trope, recently explored in the Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. However, it is within the realm of scientific possibility.

Reading Time: 5 minutes NASA recently announced the discovery of a new, Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a nearby star called TOI-700.

Reading Time: 3 minutes You can make a high-quality film on a small budget, if you plan and manage it right. Here’s advice from someone who’s done it.

Reading Time: 5 minutes Mermaids have become a cultural phenomenon, and clashes about mermaids and race have spilled out into the open. This is most pointedly apparent in the backlash over Disney’s much-anticipated “The Little Mermaid.”

Reading Time: 5 minutes Imagine that a soldier has a tiny computer device injected into their bloodstream that can be guided with a magnet to specific regions of their brain. With training, the soldier could then control weapon systems thousands of miles away using their thoughts alone.

Reading Time: 5 minutes Fake photography is nothing new. In the 1910s, British author Arthur Conan Doyle was famously deceived by two school-aged sisters who had produced photographs of elegant fairies cavorting in their garden.

Reading Time: 4 minutes The combination of human creativity and the efficient functionality of AI will bring radical changes across the globe.

Reading Time: 7 minutes As an author, I’ve found grounding my science fiction in reality produces a more layered, immersive tale. Science fiction stories often occur in space. So, sci-fi readers and authors may appreciate this introduction to a relevant real-world organization, the United States Space Force, or USSF. The US Space Force Is No Joke Perhaps the first

Reading Time: 6 minutes The term “metaverse” was first coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash. He used it to refer to an immersive, virtual reality world in which people are embodied as their avatars.

Reading Time: 4 minutes While we still don’t have the flying cars, time machines, and holographic movies that sci-fi has long offered us, though other predictions have come to life, such as the Star Trek communicators that became Motorola flip phones. Today, virtual fiction is having its moment in the spotlight as the tech world leans into the metaverse.

Reading Time: 11 minutes The real history of stage magic in the 19th century was as hectic and violent as director Christopher Nolan portrays in The Prestige.

Reading Time: 5 minutes There is a troubling aspect to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In the first edition, the Oompa-Loompas are black pygmies who Wonka imports from “the deepest and darkest part of the African jungle” and enslaves in his factory.

Reading Time: 6 minutes It is hard to judge the effect that last year’s unequivocal confirmation of real UFO footage— captured by real navy pilots—has had on the common man or woman. But this new bill surely proves that the topic of UFOs has moved beyond the eye-rolling phase of the alien debate. Or does it?

Reading Time: 4 minutes The large and inhospitable sand dunes of the desert planet Arrakis are, of course, very prominent in both the books and film. But just how high would sand dunes be on a realistic version of this world?

Reading Time: 13 minutes The occult has made a strong comeback with gen Z.

Reading Time: 4 minutes You, too, can smell like a witch. Magic and scent were linked in ancient Greece and Rome, and today, you can buy scents that can make you smell like Hermione, Hecate, and other famous witches of literature and history.

Reading Time: 5 minutes Seven visions for the metaverse we’ve been hearing about.

Reading Time: 5 minutes Three scientists set out to determine if it were possible for humans to survive on a planet like Dune. They say yes — but not where you’d expect from reading the book.

Reading Time: 6 minutes What would lead someone to claim that a fantasy role-playing game like Dungeons and Dragons was a recruiting tool for satan?

Reading Time: 4 minutes The cultural relevance of urban fantasy can be traced back to the time period of its birth — the early nineteenth century — where many were struggling to respond to industrial change and a new economic system.

Reading Time: 4 minutes These holograms, created with mirrors and jets of air, could be the first steps towards a Star Trek-style holodeck.

Reading Time: 5 minutes The Dark Souls videogame shares many elements with the literature of British artists in the Romantic era such as Lord Byron and others from the early 1800s.

Reading Time: 4 minutes Rehearsing the end of the world through film may have desensitized us, lulling us into a false sense of security that all will end well — and that we are immortal.

Reading Time: 4 minutes Robert Stahl has analyzed some favorite horror films to present this list for your consideration.

Reading Time: 4 minutes One of the most interesting tools for thinking about future defense technology isn’t big data forecasting and the use of synthetic training environments, but narrative and imagination. And we get this from science fiction.

Reading Time: 5 minutes New knowledge of quantum fractals could provide the foundations for scientists to experimentally test the theory of quantum consciousness.