Back in September, the Museum of Science Fiction announced that they were going to be releasing scholarly publication: The Journal of Science Fiction. Now, their first issue is live!
This has been a really great year for science fiction, fantasy and horror books, taking us to fabulous worlds and opening our minds to new ideas and brilliant new characters. Here’s our list of the most amazing books we read this year.
A world ravaged by climate change is hard to imagine—but that world could be in our future, unless we do a better job of imagining it now. So we’re lucky that some of our most talented authors have tackled the challenge of depicting an environmental apocalypse.
Stories are powerful: they can change how people see the world, or change their lives forever. Looking back, what story has had the greatest impact on your life?
As the American west continues to dry out, science fiction about climate change is beginning take hold. Books from authors such as J.G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood and Paolo Bacigalupi are creating a new subgenre: Climate Fiction, stories about Earth and how its changes are impacting humanity.
“As the 21st century unfolds, science fiction increasingly comes to seem like a realist rather than a speculative genre,” says one essay/book review in the L.A. Review of Books. It’s just one of a few great pieces up at the LARB site right now, about the choice of futures we face: Mad Max versus Star Trek.
Hugo-Award winning author Paolo Bacigalupi is on tour in support of The Water Knife, and at his event yesterday in Brookline, Mass., he was asked about the disparity between “optimistic” scifi and “pessimistic” scifi. One of his observations: “Science fiction hunts for the techno fix, not the social fix.”
In today's mediascape, right and wrong don't matter: It's how you spin your story. In The Doubt Factory, Paolo Bacigalupi takes aim at the spin used by major companies and turns it into a compelling tale of a young woman who confronts the truth about her life.
Brand new magazine! LONTAR: the Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction has published its first issue, featuring Paolo Bacigalupi, Kate Osias, Zen Cho, Paolo Chikiamco, Chris Mooney-Singh, Ang Si Min, Elka Ray Nguyen and Bryan Thao Worra. Read a sample.
Amazing line-up. If you're anywhere near Williams College from Oct. 22-24, you should make a beeline to the David Hartwell '63 Science Fiction Symposium, featuring Samuel R. Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson, Elizabeth Kolbert, Paolo Bacigalupi and tons more.
This past weekend, it seemed like all of the Twitter conversations were about fiction writing, and selling out. It's a weird conundrum: Most advice for writers assumes that you're doing this as a business, and you want to make money at it. But you shouldn't want to make money too badly.
You've seen lots of timelines of "future history" before — but they tend to be mostly drawing from the classics by people like Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. But over at The Awl, Jane Hu has compiled a future timeline, which draws heavily on recent publications like Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 and Paolo Bacigalupi's …
Wind-Up Girl author Paolo Bacigalupi's essay over at Wired is both a must read and a quick read. The essay is mostly about how Cyberpunk saved science fiction by shaking up the complacent view of the future that had dominated for decades — but then he broadens out into a more general theory of science fiction as a…
May brings lots of amazing science fiction and fantasy books — including new titles from China Mieville, Kim Stanley Robinson and Charlaine Harris! You don't want to be the only one of your friends who isn't up to date on the latest happenings in far-future empires, brutal fantasy warfare, and the depths of weirdness.
Paolo Bacigalupi returns to the world of his young adult novel Ship Breaker with the new Drowned Cities, and we've got an exclusive look at the desolate book trailer. The visuals are pretty amazing, including ruined cities and interiors choked with vegetation. Plus a pretty grabby narration that ends with quite a…
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…
Our whole economy and way of life is based on the idea of cheap petroleum. So what happens when the oil starts to run out? Most scenarios assume that it will be catastrophic — rioting in the streets, governments collapsing, Mel Gibson fighting guys with big mohawks.
You know Paolo Bacigalupi's arrived when his next novel is already getting raves and nobody's even seen a galley yet. Over at Westword, Alan Prendergast talks about the excitement about Bacigalupi's forthcoming The Drowned Cities, which takes place in the Ship Breaker world but isn't a direct sequel. Chief among those…
What kind of world are we leaving to our grandchildren? Can we even imagine a world after climate change? Some of the world's greatest authors, including David Mitchell and Kim Stanley Robinson, grapple with climate change and our future in a new story collection. Here's a review by Pauline Masurel from Green Prophet.
This month, many of us are trying to pound out a novel. The ultimate dream is to break into the publishing world with a debut that makes people sit up and take notice. And there's some good news on that front — some of science fiction and fantasy's most beloved writers have made a splash with their very first…
