News

Reading Time: < 1 minute The head of Russia’s space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, made a bizarre and wildly inaccurate statement last Thursday.

Reading Time: 3 minutes One day, humans might be able to regrow body parts, regenerate tissue damaged due to disease, and even sprout missing limbs.

Reading Time: 4 minutes Can we create artificial gravity? It’s called centrifugal force and it can simulate gravity.

Reading Time: 3 minutes If this year’s Super Bowl commercials are any indication, sci-fi and fantasy fans can expect an exciting year of film and television.

Reading Time: 2 minutes Boskone 59, New England’s longest-running science fiction convention, kicked off on Friday.

Reading Time: 2 minutes Don’t rush out and get Elon Musk’s brain implant just yet. According to news reports, 21 percent of Neuralink’s test monkey died after the experiments.

Reading Time: < 1 minute A rocket stage that’s about to hit the moon isn’t from SpaceX after all.

Reading Time: < 1 minute Douglas Trumbull died on February 8. You may not know the name, but you have seen his work in numerous sci-fi movies, including the dazzling spaceship scene at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Reading Time: 2 minutes Our official round of short story submissions begins March 1 and ends March 31.

Reading Time: 4 minutes A new trailer for the long-anticipated Halo series, based on Microsoft’s popular line of video games, books, and comics, premiered during half time of the AFC Championship last week.

Reading Time: 2 minutes Gaming industry veteran Steve Gray, former executive at Tencent Games, the world’s largest gaming studio, is getting into the metaverse business.

Reading Time: 2 minutes Blocking the sun’s rays to address climate is too risky, said a group of around 60 scientists and experts in an open letter last week.

Reading Time: 2 minutes A rocket booster launched by SpaceX in 2014 is headed on a collision course to the moon. It is unknown precisely where the rocket will crash into the lunar surface. Its orbit is slightly chaotic and perturbed by solar winds and gravity variations.

Reading Time: 6 minutes Here’s a list of your favorites and mine from 2021.

Reading Time: 6 minutes The winners for the Hugo Awards, the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book were announced at DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention, on December 18th, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

Reading Time: 3 minutes You can now get four months of Kindle Unlimited for $4 a month — it’s normally $10 a month. Amazon also has great deals right now on Kindle devices.

Reading Time: 2 minutes The Halo video game series is all about protecting Earth from alien invaders in the 26th century. A teaser trailer has just dropped for the Paramount+ TV series, expected to hit the streaming service sometime next year, and it seems to indicate that the show will focus on characters.

Reading Time: 2 minutes In a plan straight out of a sci-fi asteroid disaster movie, NASA will try to push an asteroid off-course by crashing a spaceship into it.

Reading Time: 2 minutes JPL and NASA need your help to identify objects on Mars so that the future Mars land rovers will have an easier time getting around.

Reading Time: < 1 minute MetaStellar’s open submission period for fall 2021 has officially ended. This was our best cycle for submissions yet, receiving over 400 stories in 31 days.

Reading Time: 3 minutes Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook changing its name to Meta in order to focus on the metaverse. Facebook itself will remain, but will now be just one brand in the Meta portfolio, alongside Instagram and WhatsApp. 

Reading Time: 3 minutes Blue Origin, Boeing and Sierra Space join forces on new commercial space station, Orbital Reef, to be operational the second half of this decade.

Reading Time: < 1 minute The trailer for the documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time, has just been released. The documentary, follows the science fiction writer from 1982 until his death in 2007, and is based on the 25-year friendship between the author and filmmaker Robert Weide.

Reading Time: 2 minutes The fall submission cycle for original speculative fiction begins on October 1 and closes at midnight on October 31. 

Reading Time: < 1 minute The votes for the annual Dragon Awards are in, and Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary won for best sci-fi novel, and Jim Butcher’s Battle Ground for best fantasy novel.

Reading Time: < 1 minute If you’re planning to write a novel during this year’s National Novel Writing Month, you can announce it now.

Reading Time: 3 minutes Dragon Con is the first week of September this year in Atlanta but whether or not you plan to attend the massive multimedia convention you can still vote in the Dragon Awards.

Reading Time: 2 minutes The Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association’s poetry contest’s deadline is August 31, 2021.

Reading Time: 2 minutes The finalists for the 2021 World Fantasy Awards have been announced, including Lifetime Achievement recipients Megan Lindholm and Howard Waldrop.

Reading Time: 3 minutes E. M. Foner tries out Amazon’s Kindle Vella, a new publishing option for episodic fiction, and tells us what he thinks about the platform.

Reading Time: < 1 minute The Live Remote VEX Robotics World Championship had broken the Guinness World Record as the largest online robot championship.

Reading Time: 3 minutes Last Saturday, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America announced the winners of the 56th Nebula Awards.

Reading Time: 2 minutes NavyCon, the premier science fiction and national security conference, returns for its fourth edition inviting speakers from a variety of backgrounds, including all five branches of the service, as well as civilian academia and science fiction fandom, to present on topics within the theme of national security in transition.

Reading Time: 2 minutes On May 9, Amazon pulled the Star Wars novel “Heart of the Jedi,” from sale on its online retailer. While there is no official statement from Amazon or Lucasfilm as to the matter, one can hypothesize that Disney took action against the selling of an unauthorized Star Wars book.

Reading Time: < 1 minute Do you want Luke Skywalker’s bionic hand? Thanks to 3D printing technology, soon you will be able to have it.

Reading Time: 6 minutes The results of MetaStellar’s first submission cycle of 2021 are in, and we at MetaStellar are thrilled to announce the success of our second original fiction submission cycle.

Reading Time: < 1 minute Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine is now in Kindle Unlimited, which means that if you’re a member, you can read this magazine at no additional cost.

Reading Time: 3 minutes Contrary to what sci-fi literature has been telling us for the past several decades, humans have not been able to fly on another planet until yesterday.

Reading Time: 7 minutes Finalists for the Hugo Awards, the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book were announced by DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention today in a YouTube video.

Reading Time: 3 minutes While it is marketed to “Space Operations Professionals,” it is also a cool opportunity to get some insight into how today’s space industry works.

Reading Time: 2 minutes The spring flash fiction submission cycle opens today. Stories can be submitted anytime from now until April 1, 2021.

Reading Time: 3 minutes Hayley Arceneaux will become the first astronaut with a prosthetic limb when she goes into space later this year on a SpaceX Falcon 9 mission.