I like to think this is something that doesn’t need to be said, but let’s just throw it out there anyway: Serial killers are not sexy. Or fun. Or funny. They’re monsters. But then fictional serial killers show up in a story as a well-dressed psychiatrist or a good-looking vampire and they’re tapping into a very…

Whatever you do, don’t press that button. It’s a trope that’s spanned pop culture for generations—and the real world, too. But where did this Big Red Button come from? And why does sick curiosity compel us to mash it down?

Last week our own Charlie Jane Anders gave us some excellent advice on the difference between good Worldbuilding and great Worldbuilding - but sometimes creators of some of our favourite worlds run afoul of a few tiresome Worldbuilding tropes. Here's seven clichés that need to stop cropping up in Sci-Fi and Fantasy.

We've called out various movie and TV tropes that we never want to see again in the past. But today we're calling attention to the silly, stupid, brilliant and hilarious scifi tropes that we absolutely, positively love—and hope we never live in a world without them.

Sometimes, a narrative convention is so ingrained in literature that writers reach for it even after it becomes clear that it's not so much "classic" as "offensive." What trope do you see time and time again that simply makes you cringe?

Yet another literary boffin has said science fiction novels can't be literary, and it's (not surprisingly) sparked some controversy. Benjamin Kunkel in Dissent Magazine wrote a long exegesis on the difference between SF and literature — in a nutshell, literature has more complex characters and trickier dilemmas about…