Why Hunger Games Is The New Little House on the Prairie
At a recent New York panel on historical young adult fiction, a group of authors and moderators began by insisting that reports of the subgenre’s death were greatly exaggerated. And yet, the truism that historical fiction is dead to teenagers is widespread in the industry. Anyone who has walked into a bookshop lately knows that…
Your Summer Beach Reading List for 2012
Summer is almost here, and that means one thing: Escape! Everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, humans will be fleeing their buildings and shedding their protective outer garments, even as the sun grows hotter and more intense. But for some of us, simply fleeing to large bodies of water isn’t enough — we need to escape…
Straight, Gay, or Binary?: HAL Comes Out of the Cybernetic Closet
In this essay from his new collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, cultural critic Mark Dery contemplates the sexual orientation of one of science fiction’s most memorable machines: HAL, from 2001. Now it can be told: HAL, the psychotic supercomputer in the sci-fi classic 2001, failed the Turing Test. Not Alan Turing’s classic blindfold…