Centauri Dreams

Every time I mention a Brian Aldiss novel, I have to be careful to check the original title against the one published in the US. The terrific novel Non-Stop (1958) became Starship in the States, ...

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Power beaming to accelerate a ‘lightsail’ has been pondered since the days when Robert Forward became intrigued with nascent laser technologies. The Breakthrough Starshot concept has been to ...

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I’ve reminisced before about crossing Lake George in the Adirondacks in a small boat late one night some years back, when I saw the Milky with the greatest clarity I had ever experienced. Talk ...

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I want to return to Mars this morning because an emerging idea on how to terraform it is in the news. The idea is to block infrared radiation from escaping into space by releasing engineered dust...

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Mars was a lively destination in early science fiction because of its proximity. When H. G. Wells needed a danger from outer space, The War of the Worlds naturally looked toward Mars, as a place ...

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The solar wind is ever enticing, providing as it does a highly variable stream of charged particles moving out from the Sun at speeds up to 800 kilometers per second. Finding ways to harness that...

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Until we learn whether or not life exists on other planets, we extrapolate on the basis of our single living world. Just how long it took life to develop is a vital question, with implications th...

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A favorite editor of mine long ago told me never to begin an article with a question, but do I ever listen to her? Sometimes. Today’s lead question, then, is this: Can we expand communications ...

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When Arthur C. Clarke tells me that something is terrifying, he’s got my attention. After all, since boyhood I’ve not only had my imagination greatly expanded by Clarke’s work but have lear...

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Something interesting is going on in the galaxy NGC 6240, some 400 million light years from the Sun in Ophiuchus. Rather than sporting a single supermassive black hole at its center, this galaxy ...

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Overpopulation has spawned so many dystopian futures in science fiction that it would be a lengthy though interesting exercise to collect them all. Among novels, my preference for John Brunner’...

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I hardly need to run through the math to point out how utterly absurd it would be to have two civilizations develop within a few light years of each other at roughly the same time. The notion tha...

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“What is this fascination of yours with small red stars?” a friend asked in a recent lunch encounter, having seen something I wrote a few years back about TRAPPIST-1 in one of his annual delv...

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Put two massive galaxy clusters into collision and you have an astronomical laboratory for the study of dark matter, that much discussed and controversial form of matter that does not interact wi...

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One night a few years back I had a late night call from a friend who was involved in Breakthrough Starshot, the attempt to design a probe that could reach nearby stars and return data with transi...

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“We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town; We yearned beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down. Came the Whisper, came the Vision, came the Power with the Need�...

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Looking for new Kuiper Belt targets for the New Horizons spacecraft pays off in multiple ways. While we can hope to find another Arrokoth for a flyby, the search also contributes to our understan...

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Transients have always been intriguing because whether at optical, radio or other wavelengths, they usually flag an object worth watching. Consider a supernova, or a Fast Radio Burst. But non-rep...

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Browsing through the correspondence that makes up Freeman Dyson’s wonderful Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters (Liveright, 2018), I came across this missive, describing to his ...

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If you look at Galaxy’s December, 1962 issue, which I have in front of me from my collection of old SF magazines, you’ll find a name that appears only once in the annals of science fiction pu...

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