If you have been to a convention lately in which Connie Willis was a speaker, you will have heard about Primeval. The show is a British science fiction series that also runs on BBC America. Part Jurassic Park and part The Time Tunnel, it posits that ruptures in time allow creatures from other times to come through to ours (always in the UK, for ( Read more... )

I made it to the Nebulas! I have never been to a “Nebula Weekend” before. For a long time I thought you had to be in SFWA to go (you don't, except for the SFWA business meeting itself). And then the event was usually somewhere like New York where I would have to travel and (in the case of NYC) stay in a very expensive hotel. This year, however, the ( Read more... )

The Cloud Roads, by Martha Wells
300 pages
Night Shade Books (2011)

This is not the usual sort of review that summarizes (aka, gives away) the plot. Rather, I want to talk about why this book made such a good impression on me, and the one thing that bothered me. The Cloud Roads is that curious beast, a book that defies genre labels. Mind you, I' ( Read more... )

One of the things most writers got wrong about the future was computers. If you read some of the classic science fiction of the 1960's for example, you will see that writers then envisioned powerful computers that took up whole rooms or even buildings. The idea that a computer could be 1,000 times more powerful than something like the early ENIAC ( Read more... )

The above words were supposedly the first spoken over the telephone. But Watson is also the name of the IBM supercomputer currently competing in a Jeopardy tournament against human champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The tournament started last night and continues through Wednesday ( Read more... )

I recently got the entire series Firefly on DVDs. I had never seen any of it before. I watched it all within about 10 days; sad to say, it's only 4 discs, 14 episodes. All I can say is, wow! Well, that, and can we find the Fox executive who killed the show and get him/her fired ( Read more... )

If you're interested, I have an entry in the current SF Signal Mind Meld. If you're not familiar with it, SF Signal is a blog about science fiction. They do book reviews and news columns, and every so often they run a Mind Meld. In this recurring feature, they pose a question to a group of writers, editors, fans, and other folks interested in ( Read more... )

Today's post follows up on yesterday's comments about time. The title is a bit of a pun, because to some extent, our present- the world as it is today&mdash represents the future as I thought of it when I was growing up. Case in point: we did not get a newspaper delivery this morning because of the two feet of snow on the ground, so I turned the ( Read more... )

Time travel is a much-used trope in spec fic. It's been done enough times that it's hard to do well and still be original. In some ways historical fiction provides a very limited kind of time travel- at about the same level the Stereopticon allowed people to see places they had never been. The TV show Mad Men, on the other hand, is so well ( Read more... )

It's H.G. Wells' birthday today, a fitting time to think about the origins of the speculative fiction genre. I've heard different opinions on which "science fiction" story is the oldest: Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Frankenstein, Gulliver's Travels, etc. Of course, it depends on how you define science fiction. If you pull out fantasy, then the oldest myth ( Read more... )