How is it even possible to have this much control over an ordinary piece of string?

Ugh. You’re up an hour early, your body hates you for it, and even a gallon of coffee can’t get your day on track. Daylight saving sucks. But you know the worst part? It doesn’t have to be like this.

The holiday season has officially begun, and of course the holidays are a time for families. But science fiction and fantasy readers know that families come in all shapes and configurations. Here are 30 of the most wonderfully alternative families in science fiction and fantasy.

We all agree that, no matter where you stand politically, it’s a good thing to “support the troops.” But what if, instead of defending our freedom, the troops were playing football games with terrorists? That’s the question posed by one particular episode of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, titled “Pigskin Commandos.”…

Clara’s time on Doctor Who is coming to an end—no spoilers here—and it’s bumming us out. But she’s not the first companion to leave the Doctor’s side in a totally bummer fashion. Here are the 10 most depressing companion departures, until now.

Science fiction has rocked cinemas for a century, and the genre has produced many undisputed classics during that time. But which movies are essential viewing for anyone interested in the genre? We broke down the 50 must-watch science fiction films.

You want a really weird ride? A science fiction or fantasy epic that stretches your brain like taffy and ties it into strange irregular shapes? Forget television or movies: books are where the really off-kilter stories are told in speculative fiction.

Science fiction and fantasy are genres where almost anything can happen — as long as the author can make it seem plausible, and as long as it’s part of a good story. But that doesn’t mean there are no rules. If anything, the fact that these genres are so wide open mean that there are tons of rules out there, some…

Making aliens look cute is a tricky thing to get right in kids’ entertainment. Make them too weird-looking, and you could freak out your audience. Make them too adorable, and you run the risk of them looking more like plush toys than creatures from another planet. And then sometimes you make them look cute... but…

Look, drinking all day is not healthy. But what if you and the missus signed up for a nine-hour Napa County wine tour, and you want to get your money’s worth? Or maybe you’re hitting your bachelor pal’s BBQ, and the action starts at noon. Or, maybe, what the hell, you just want to go all out on a hot summer day. This…

Space colonization has reached an impasse, for reasons far more fundamental than a lack of money for the Space Shuttle program. There is simply no way humans can travel easily offworld without using massive amounts of rocket fuel to escape the gravity well — and that’s both expensive and environmentally unsustainable.…

Mad Max is a movie about a post-disaster world, and its success has inspired oodles of disastrously bad films. Witness Grade-Z movies so epically execrable that you’ll be yearning for a couple minutes in Thunderdome.

Taxidermy is a skill and art form that many think is plenty weird all on its own, even though it was practiced by luminaries like Charles Darwin and Theodore Roosevelt. It stretches from the lows of PT Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid to the highs of the myriad museums of natural history to the macabre artistry of rogue…

When the zombie apocalypse strikes, will you be ready? How can you prepare now to survive the undead onslaught? We got the inside scoop from the Green Light Anti-Zombie Squad, a group that's dedicated to protecting you from zombie attacks. Here are 10 practical tips on how to survive an encounter with the walking dead.

Kissing is so commonplace that most people rarely think to stop and ask where humans picked up the habit in the first place. Where in humanity's evolutionary history did smooshing our faces together come to be regarded as a display of lust, care, friendship, and love?

Science fiction and fantasy are full of great quotable phrases — but some are damn near irresistible. No matter how hard you struggle, these phrases worm their way into your consciousness. No matter how much you deny it, you let them back out. Here's a list of 10 phrases too good not to repeat.

These days, product placement is an accepted part of science fiction. We're used to seeing big brands splashed all over every TV show and movie about aliens or the future. But it wasn't always this way. Here's the quick-and-very-dirty history of how on-screen advertising became a science fiction mainstay.

The only thing worse than paying out the tuchus for unreliable internet from Time Warner Cable and Comcast is being forced pay a monthly rental fee for a modem you need to access that crappy internet. Happy New Year! The fees on both TWC and Comcast are going up yet again. Here's how to buy your own modem so you can…

Hope you had fun last night. Now it's time to kick that hangover, whatever it takes. Okay, well, maybe not the Sicilian method.