Meet “The First Female Robot,” Circa 1957

Fresh from the pages of the 1957 FAO Schwartz Toy Store catalog comes Susie Robette. “The first female robot is, as might be expected, a fastidious housekeeper. She sweeps, dusts and vacuums” and through it all remains “feminine enough to wear a pony tail of coppered wire.” Thank goodness. I mean, what girl wants to…

Put Futurist Syd Mead On The Hot Seat

Syd Mead has had a hand in designing everything from Ford automobiles, to V’Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, to the Sulaco ship design in Aliens, and even the look and feel of the cities in Blade Runner and Tron. He’s definitely a giant in the field of future design, and if you could…

Gallery: Lesbian Cylons Gather At Beijing Fashion Show

You have the green tentacle legs, the cylon lesbians and best of all, the head-eating parasol monster. It all happened at the Ordifen Cup 2007 Lingerie Innovative Design Contest at China Fashion Week in Beijing. Warning: skimpy costumes and not-quite-orthohuman shapes ahead. Gallery: China Fashion 2007

Power Pellet Popping Steampunk Contrapulation

If you’re driving past the Santa Cruz area anytime soon in an effort relive the glory days that The Lost Boys brought to that town, you could do no better than to stop by Cardboard Spaceship and check out the steampunk-themed Spit & Polish show. What will you see if you do? The topper has…

Cyborg and Bioroid Love After the Apocalypse

After a biological apocalypse, humanity’s only hope is a city called Olympus, run by an AI named Gaia. Most of the city is inhabited by genetically-engineered, semi-tech Bioroids, creatures whose strong emotions have been bred out. Still, somebody has to keep the peace. That’s why the human Deunan and cyborg Briarios have trained as warriors.…

The Truth About Prehistoric Potatoes and Mini Skirts

Our ancestors loved to dress up nice and go out for tubers, according to two new studies of ancient human living areas. So thousands of years ago we weren’t going all 2001, with guys in ratty cloaks grunting. In fact, the prehistoric world wasn’t full of guys with spears hunting meat at all, but instead…

Telepathic Alcoholics More Common In Books Than Movies

Why can’t movie science fiction be as creative as the books? Brendan at Balancing Frogs just read a collection of 1950s science fiction novellas about ancient telepathic civilizations, crystalline alien explorers and super-advanced humans who despise their primitive Earth cousins. Each story has at least one loopy plot twist. Why can’t the movies have that…

Murder As Entertainment In Darabont’s Future Reality Project

Frank Darabont recently let it slip that he owns the rights to The Long Walk, which was a short story included in Stephen King’s The Bachman Books back in 1979. It’s an extremely dark tale set in the near future about a new form of entertainment that has the whole country held in rapt attention,…

Eight-Limbed Indian Girl Is Surgery Mascot

Two-year-old Lakshmi Tatma, the impoverished Indian girl who had a “parastic twin” removed from her body last week, is being used as PR by her surgical team. It seems Lakshmi, who was reportedly hailed as a reincarnated goddess in her village and, more menacingly, sought for purchase by a circus, can’t escape the limelight. It…

Andromeda Strain Reborn As Miniseries On A&E

One point that Battlestar Galactica keeps trying to hammer home is “All this has happened before, and will happen again.” With yet another scifi remake on the horizon, they may be more right than they know. The Sci Fi channel announced back in 2004 that they would be making a miniseries version of Michael Crichton’s…

The 23 Biggest Slackers In Science Fiction

Our promiscuous, body-swapping descendants will hit the skids in the third book in John Varley’s Steel Beach trilogy — if he ever gets around to finishing it. Varley’s Irontown Blues is one of the most long overdue books in science fiction according to SF Signal. Varley told Locus the book would be a futuristic detective…

Poll: Is Tin Man Fantasy or Science Fiction?

With new miniseries Tin Man, the SciFi Channel has dressed up the old Wizard of Oz tales for the modern, science-fictional age by injecting initials (Dorothy is DG, Oz is “the O.Z.”) and making all the characters seem a little bit Farscape. So is Tin Man fantasy or science fiction? Take the poll and be…

Floating Tetanus Shot Nightmare Docks On Lost

Apparently a rusty freighter is going to be joining the cast of Lost whenever it starts airing again. If internet photos and rumors are to be believed, then the ship is docked in Suva, the capital city of Fiji, and has seen better days. But what does this mean for everyone on the island? Right…

Logan’s Run Remake Finally Happening … Maybe

Logan’s Run is one the only few films that was firmly rooted in the science fiction genre and wasn’t titled Star Wars to come out of the 1970s. It’s also been stuck running in place in Hollywood’s favorite prison: development hell. Will the remake actually happen this time? Directors ranging from Skip Wood to Bryan…

Electro-Domination and Backstory Blah On Heroes

So after weeks of draggy plots involving romance with flying boys and time travel to samurai world, we’ve finally gotten to the Heroes episode that explains what the hell happened at the end of last season when omni-mutant Peter went explodey and then suddenly showed up in fake Ireland with no memory. Show creator Tim…

The Joker Smacks Heath Ledger Into A Three-Week Coma

Heath Ledger’s Joker will be more like Sid Vicious than Jack Nicholson, he told MTV. His Joker was so psycho and manic, he had to take weeks-long vacations between scenes: I actually had quite a bit of time off between scenes — weeks sometimes. But it was required because whenever I was working, it exhausted…

He may be wearing a dorky cloak in Star Trek, but over in Heroes, Zachary Quinto is about to be shirtless. I picture an evil unibrow between his nipples.

Dream-Eaters and Three-Sexed Aliens in the Five Greatest World-Building Novels

What would weather be like if you lived in a planet-sized bag of oxygen? What would reproduction be like if there were a third sex who combined the genetic material of two other sexes by linking them at the neurological level and giving them braingasms? What would scientific progress be like in an anarchist-feminist society?…

Evil Drag Queens Will Transplant Your Penis Onto A Rich Dude

Forget kidneys and livers. Evil drag queens have raised the science of organ transplantation to an artform, encompassing sexy long legs, genitalia and even "manginas." Who needs to worry about tissue rejection when you can look so irresistible? It’s all in RuPaul’s new movie masterpiece Starrbooty, newly out on DVD. A supervillain, Annaka, is kidnapping…

An MRI Machine On Every Desktop

You’ll be taking pictures of your brain while checking email with new, consumer-grade magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines developed by an Israeli company called Aspect Technologies. Yesterday the company announced a six million dollar cash infusion from a secret US investor. Usually getting an MRI is very expensive, and can only be done in a…