Exopolitics: Foreign affairs with alien races
Scifi artist and novelist Jonathon Keats’ new book, Virtual Words, is an eloquent exploration of words and phrases that we’re using to describe our future-science world. In this excerpt, he explains the word “exopolitics.” At the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, an archivist named Herb Pankratz specializes in queries about the thirty-fourth president’s exopolitics. Pankratz…
Bones of the Gigantomachy
How does one make the skeleton of Hercules? Take a bunch of mastodon bones and mix well. In her excellent book The First Fossil Hunters, author Adrienne Mayor explains, in fascinating detail, how Classical myths of giants, dragons, titans, heroes, and other ill-formed monstrous beings often stemmed from a misunderstanding of the fossil record. After…
It’s J.G. Ballard’s future. We’re just living in it.
The good news is, we’re living in a science fiction novel. The bad news is, it was written by J. G. Ballard. When people complain that the Golden Age of science fiction never came true, they usually mean that the space programme has devolved to a series of uncrewed robot missions, or that we don’t…
10 classic SF books that were originally considered failures
Some of science fiction/fantasy’s classic books failed to win over readers at first. And the publishers of some of SF’s most beloved works were convinced they had a disaster on their hands. Here are 10 masterpieces that were deemed failures. Little, Big by John Crowley Writer’s Almanac summed it up best: “[John Crowley’s] most famous…