In the twenty-sixth century, mankind has discovered the secret of interstellar travel and colonized scores of worlds hundreds flight years from Earth. But in the 26th century, an alien race–a microbial collective known only as The Swarm–brutally attacked Earth and her colonies. Humanity barely survived and vowed to never let it happen again. Now, 75…
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is an old favorite of those who would make unpleasant books go away, and was listed 37th on the American Library Association’s list of 100 Most Banned Books from 1990 to 1999. It was challenged in 2001 in Dripping Springs, Texas by a group of parents who declared it…
Imagine if you will, a world of the future. A world where rich kids are chipped to run automated houses and fly in grav-powered limos while poor kids watch their families dissolve into poor health and struggle to manage the bare necessities. The only thing that brings these groups together is the VirtuMax corporation, an…
Bad news: 451 degrees F is not, in fact, the temperature at which paper bursts into flame. (It’s actually between 440 and 470 degrees F depending on the type of paper). Good news: Ray Bradbury’s novel about censorship, mass media, and induced apathy in the modern world is as accessible and spooky as it was…
One of the niftier bits about growing up in the 1970s was that UFOs were real. Real enough for the U.S. Air Force to carry on with a project known as Project Blue Book. It was, we were told, a concerted effort by the military to quantify reported sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects in an…
I don’t generally read Star Wars novels. I read and loved Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and Brian Daley’s Han Solo at Star’s End decades ago because they were on the book store shelves and the shiny newness of the Star Wars films sparkled and glittered like the pyramids of Giza…
It’s a deceptively simple bit of wordcraft: you take the word “mortal,” stick a two letter prefix on it, and you get a word which raises a dizzying variety of possibility. Mortality is every bit as metaphysical a concept as the human race has managed to conceive. What is it to be alive? What does…
The Legacy Human by Susan Kay Quinn What would you give to live forever? Seventeen-year-old Elijah Brighton wants to become an ascender—a post-Singularity human/machine hybrid—after all, they’re smarter, more enlightened, more compassionate, and above all, achingly beautiful. But Eli is a legacy human, preserved and cherished for his unaltered genetic code, just like the…
(I know, I owe you a post about imagining the “death of the library.” But this is a big deal.) I recently got into a Facebook thread with a former (now grown up) student over e-book pricing decisions. She’s an avid reader but refuses to buy any e-book that’s more than a dollar or two…
Everyone remembers the day they truly became an adult; some call it the best day of their lives while others think of it as the worst. Kasey Byrne will never make that choice, because it’s just been taken away from her. Her old life has ended along with her world. What remains is an existential…