Perhaps because of their own deskbound lives, many novelists have been able to find the outlandish stories filed away in the drabbest corners of modern life There’s nothing wrong with being a...
From 2001 to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, these awesome structures loom large over the genre, loaded with inscrutable significance We humans love things we can’t explain. Witness t...
Seen in literary fiction as well as SF, this genre weaves together complex debates in a way that can offer a clearer view of the future – think Atwood, DeLillo and Asimov Weirdly enough, scie...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/24/systems-fiction-a-novel-way-to-think-about-the-present
Elon Musk caused a stir last week by suggesting ours is not the real world , but sci-fi writers have been speculating about this for at least 70 years “There’s a one in billions chance that...
Two new nonfiction collections – Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats and Hurley’s The Geek Feminist Revoluton – present contrasting perspectives on geek culture today. So what’s the ...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/27/neil-gaiman-kameron-hurley-geek-culture
An all-male shortlist for YA fiction has left the Locus awards mired in controversy – but prejudice is an unavoidable part of any literary prize Literature has always been a tribal world, and...
Stephen Hawking’s plan to launch a nanoship to Alpha Centauri sounds like science-fiction precisely because we’ve been imagining this in books for eons Since time immemorial, humans have g...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/13/sci-fi-space-travel-earthsearch-aurora-ansible
Miller presents Gotham through the ugly lens of a billionaire’s delusional, messianic fantasy – his Bruce Wayne is not so different to Donald Trump I have a long relationship with The Dark ...
Science fiction has offered many visions of a computer-controlled future, and the future doesn’t look good for humanity It’s only March and already we’ve seen a computer beat a Go grandma...
Warren Ellis’s series is 20 years old, set 200 years in the future – and tells you everything about the 2016 US presidential race Comics have been quietly doing politics for decades. Loudly...
Creator of a host of enduring superheroes, from Iron Man to the X-Men, his own powers have enabled him to see far into the future A billionaire industrialist developing technologies that others...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/feb/19/stan-lee-the-greatest-storyteller-in-history
Some of the very best work in this genre comes from writers who embed their terrors into strikingly everyday settings Long-lived short fiction magazines are a rarity today. And ones that have h...
A century after the publication of the general theory of relativity, sci-fi is still grappling with its implications, and still trying to explain it to the rest of us A century after Albert Ein...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/15/sci-fi-general-relativity-einstein-planet-of-the-apes
After years of toil below the mainstream radar, a more inclusive generation of writers is set for crossover success After fans fought back at the Hugos, seeing off the Sad Puppies with a host o...
Star Wars made science fiction a cultural phenomenon, but the film’s origins lie in other texts, and ancient myths conceived a long time ago, in civilisations far, far away It’s remarkable ...
Literary fiction is an artificial luxury brand but it doesn’t sell. So nobody benefits by fencing it off from more popular writing It’s always a problem when one of literature’s big beast...
The imaginary constructions of science fiction fill us with awe at their alien vastness. Which have you explored, and what was the most overwhelming? Sci-fi fans call it “sensawunda ”, that...
An exciting new generation of writers are re-engineering fantasy for fans who love the genre but laugh at its hackneyed gender roles Look. I like Conan. If stories let us play out our secret fan...
Since HG Wells’s War of the Worlds, the genre has used the red planet as a theatre for the battle between utopian science and violent nature Mars has always been, as cosmologist Carl Sagan wr...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/oct/09/sf-discovers-reason-and-chaos-on-mars
By riffing on the paranormal in a city setting, urban fantasy explores the gamut of human weirdness and has become a publishing phenomenon. How long until it gives us the next Game of Thrones? ...