SF is full of stories about alien invaders with curiously limited technology. It's usually just advanced enough to get them from their planet to Earth, but not so advanced that the human characters can't defeat them. Alien invasion stories have other oddities to them, like why there haven't been invasions thousands or millions of years ago, and ( Read more... )

One of the hardest things about creating SF aliens is giving them an alien psychology. There seem to be three main approaches to this, none of them very satisfactory. The first is to use some kind of stereotyped culture, like all those catlike aliens with their honourable warriors. The second is to create an wonderfully bizarre psychology that ( Read more... )

S.M. Stirling is currently writing a series of books set in an alternate history where both Mars and Venus are inhabited. You can read sample chapters from the first book here. The scenario is obviously a update of the old SF stories with Martians and Venusians, but tweaked to be consistent with modern science. For example, the Venusians don't just ( Read more... )

There are many small things wrong with The Da Vinci Code, but the biggest problem is one it shares with many, many other books, both mysteries and science fiction. In all of these stories someone wants to communicate a message to a specific audience, while keeping it secret from everyone else. So he hides the message in a puzzle that our heroes can ( Read more... )

On Earth, plants split water into hydrogen and oxygen using energy from sunlight, incorporate the hydrogen into organic compounds, and release the oxygen into the atmosphere. Animals breathe oxygen, eat plants, and combine the hydrogen and oxygen back into water. Science fiction writers have spent considerable effort trying think of substitutes for ( Read more... )

In fantasy stories, magic is often the product of interactions with intelligent supernatural beings - gods, spirits, or what have you. This at least gets away from the pseudo-technological feel of most gaming magic, but it raises an obvious question: what's in it for the gods?( Read more... )

My design for a SF lightspeed drive.( Read more... )

Another disaster that could spare the cities.( Read more... )