Charlie Jane Anders

From Lazarus Long To Capt. Jack Harkness: Bisexuality In Science Fiction

Why were there so many bisexual heroes in the 1970s (including Robert A. Heinlein’s Lazarus Long), and was bisexuality viewed as “futuristic”? More to the point, why did bi heroes mostly vanish throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and what brought them back? Erotic science fiction author and Circlet Press publisher Cecilia Tan explains. https://gizmodo.com/this-erotica-book-might-actually-be-the-years-most-dang-5969540 Tan…

C.J. Cherryh Explains The Key To Creating Terrific Female Characters

How do you go about creating female characters that have the same charisma and depth as the male ones? People debate this endlessly, and come up with complicated arguments about one aspect or another. But Downbelow Station author C.J. Cherryh has a refreshingly simple answer to this question. Writer and regular io9 contributor Andrew Liptak…

Your next urban fantasy TV or movie obsession? The other day, we reviewedDaniel Jose Older’s fun, inventive Half-Resurrection Blues. Now, the book’s been optioned for TV or movies by Tony Award-winning actor Anika Noni Rose (who also costars in The Good Wife).

The Originals Wields Irony Like A F–ing Straight Razor

To most people, The Originals is a wacky spinoff of the “vampire love triangle” show The Vampire Diaries — in which the ancient vamps from TVD go to New Orleans, have a magic baby, and get caught up in endless power struggles. But to devotees, The Originals is a reliable supplier of hilariously bitter irony.…

Rob Lowe Stars In “Witty” British Miniseries About A Comet Apocalypse

The apocalypse shows no sign of loosening its grip on mass media. The next end of the world: an eight-mile-wide comet strikes Earth and wipes out all life. But first, a group of surviving humans huddle beneath the English town of Slough and waits for the end, including Rob Lowe. Lowe will cross the pond…

The LEGO Movie Almost Didn’t Get To Include Star Wars

One of the funniest bits in The LEGO Movie is when the Millennium Falcon shows up to come and get Batman. But that Star Wars cameo almost didn’t happen — the makers of the film had to rush to finalize their deal with Lucasfilm before Disney bought the company. Producer Dan Lin explains to The…

The Best Ways To Honor The 50th Anniversary Of Star Trek

Next year marks the 50th anniversary of space opera’s grandest and most ambitious media series. But will Star Trek have a 50th birthday in keeping with its proud heritage? Here are a bunch of ways that we hope Star Trek’s birthday gets celebrated. Top image by Sam Woolley Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary was a pretty…

There’ll Never Be Another Space TV Show Like Far Out Space Nuts

Back in the day, space opera on television could get pretty crazy. You had heroes who weren’t just your standard intrepid space explorers, and stories that were willing to go completely bonkers. But few shows were as genre-breaking and ridiculous as Far Out Space Nuts, from Sid and Marty Krofft. In keeping with the Krofft…

Celebrate Smekday In Style With This Exclusive Home Concept Art!

The upcoming DreamWorks animated movie Home features Jim Parsons as a crazy dancing alien. But it also has some completely bonkers visuals of an offbeat alien invasion of the Earth. This film let a ton of great artists go nuts with spaceships and floating buildings. See for yourself, with some exclusive concept art from the…

Discover House Of Stairs, One Of The Most Underrated YA Dystopias

When people talk about classic dystopian novels for young readers, the same titles come up again and again: The Giver. City of Ember. A few others. But one classic book in that subgenre deserves a lot more love: House of Stairs by William Sleator, librarian Mina Hong tells io9. Last week, we asked booksellers and…

R.I.P. Alice K. Turner, Who Made Playboy The Home Of Great Stories

For decades, Playboy was known as the home of some of the best short fiction published anywhere — including a lot of groundbreaking work by Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury and Doris Lessing. This was largely due to the strong editorial hand of Alice K. Turner, who died yesterday of pneumonia. Turner joined Playboy…

How Product Placement Took Over Science Fiction, From E.T. To Star Trek

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. Science fiction helped to invent product…

First Peek At Weird Al Yankovic As The Adventure Time Game’s Evil Wizard

We can pretty much never get too much of Adventure Time, the cartoon show about a boy and a mutant dog in a cute/crazy post-apocalyptic world. So we’re chuffed to feature an exclusive first look at the villain of the next Adventure Time game — the Doodle Wizard, voiced by “Weird” Al Yankovic. Above is…

Only A Time Traveler Could’ve Predicted Syfy’s 12 Monkeys Would Be Good

It seemed like a totally preposterous idea: turn Terry Gilliam’s weird, clever movie 12 Monkeys into an ongoing TV show. This seemed clearly doomed to suckitude. But in a totally implausible twist, the Monkeys show is actually surprisingly terrific. Spoilers ahead… So as readers of our interview with showrunner Natalie Chaidez will already know, this…

The ultimate villain lair? A supervillain stands at the center of a great machine of destruction, in this awesome concept art from Emanuel Shiu.

An Urban Fantasy Novel That Shows Cities In A Way You’ve Never Seen

The urban fantasy genre isn’t just set in cities — it’s one of the main places that genre fiction engages with our urbanized existence, picking up the baton dropped by cyberpunk. But you don’t often see cities depicted the way Daniel José Older does in his new novel Half-Resurrection Blues. https://gizmodo.com/why-do-so-many-former-cyberpunk-authors-now-write-dark-5795217 Image via Daniel José…

What did we do to deserve this? Whatever it is, we’re really, really sorry. We swear we won’t do it again. But our remorse is as naught, for lo — they are making a sequelto the shittastic Ouija movie.

Ernie Cline Is Writing Another Ready Player One Novel

We still don’t know when Armada, Ernie Cline’s next book, is coming out. But now we have something else to look forward to — he’s writing a followup to his novel about people in a dark future who are obsessed with 80s video games, Ready Player One. Top image: Ready Player One movie promo artwork…

10 Great Novels That Aren’t About What You Heard They Were About

Science fiction and fantasy novels become famous for all sorts of reasons. Maybe they catch the zeitgeist, or maybe they have one idea that everybody falls in love with. But sometimes, we all fixate on something that’s not the actual point of the book. Here are 10 great novels that aren’t about what everybody thinks.…

Paddington‘s Journey To The 21st Century Shows How Cynical We’ve Gotten

The original Paddington stories have a certain fairytale quality. This bear just shows up in a London train station, with a tag that says “Please look after this bear,” and a kindly family instantly takes him in. We apparently can no longer believe in such a simple story of generosity, judging from the new film.…