46. Nick and the Glimmung

45. Galactic Pot-Healer

44. The Zap Gun

43. Mary and the Giant

42. A Maze of Death

41. The Game-Players of Titan

40. The Broken Bubble

39. Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb

38. The Ganymede Takeover

37. Voices from the Street

36. Deus Irae

Recently I've been rewatching "Battlestar Galactica." On a rewatch, I feel like it's a very long haul. And I've now seen a lot of people cruise through the first couple seasons then get bogged down in, say, season three. It's quite a bit of TV! For a non-fanboy or non-fangirl, it can get tedious. Reordering the Star Wars movies made so much sense; the so-called "machete order" for Star Wars (IV, V, II, III, VI, skipping "Episode One"!) is a work of genius. So I began to wonder, not so much about order, but: how can we chop down "Battlestar"? The answer: pretty easily. (DON'T KILL ME, FANS!)

But [...]

In 1962, when “A Wrinkle in Time,” after 26 rejections, was acquired by John Farrar at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, science fiction by women and aimed at female readers was a rarity. The genre was thought to be down-market and not up to the standards of children’s literature — the stuff of pulp and comic books for errant schoolboys. Even today, girls and grown women are not generally fans. Half of 18- to 24-year-old men say that science fiction is their favorite type of book, compared with only one-fourth of young women…. “A Wrinkle in Time,” the first in a trilogy that was later extended to include two [...]

News that scifi book nerds can use: Orbit Books is serializing the audio edition of the new Iain M. Banks book, Transition, for free!

In May of 1981, a draft-dodging ex-pat American published his first story in Omni magazine. The event went largely unremarked. After all, Ronald Reagan was just a few months in office then, and that was either awesome or terrible, depending on your viewpoint, plus that was the same month the Pope got shot! Which is why we now have a Popemobile! But there at your local newsstand, or, if you were lucky (or your parents were generous), there in your mailbox in the plain brown wrapper, William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" saw print.

And as you may have heard, the Internet Archive has done the world a service by maintaining an [...]

"Full disclosure: something about really cut girls really clunks up the screen, and the same goes for really cut boys. Most of the budget for Prometheus went for weight-training; even a gazelle like Charlize Theron looks like she was up on a treadmill all day between takes wearing a do-rag while like, field recordings of Sean Penn yelling played on her iPod." —Some short stray thoughts on Prometheus, scifi and "cool."

At the end of Gary Shteyngart's near-future satire Super Sad True Love Story, I sank into a curious exhaustion. I had impulsively bought the discounted hardcover while battling a poisoned haze of emotions-an agent is peddling my own near-future novel to publishers; I wanted to demonstrate the commercial viability of near-future-based literature; I wanted assurance that what I've written and rewritten over the past few years had not been made redundant overnight. I was afraid to discover better, streamlined permutations of my own ideas, and I was further afraid that Shteyngart's rich voice would alert me to the holes in my not-as-meticulous alternative universe. I came into the thing [...]

When I decided to go with Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land as this month's pick, the first thing I did was call my dad, being generationally incapable of solving problems without parental input. My dad, last shanghaied into action for our Hammer of the Gods discussion, is a man of exquisite and discerning taste. Sometimes, though, he must be nudged along:

Nicole: Dad, you have to watch "Sherlock," it's a revelation. Dad: I watched about ten minutes. It's not believable that he's that smart. Nicole: YOU WATCHED ALL OF "BUFFY" TWICE, ASSHOLE, AND VAMPIRES AREN'T REAL. I'm sending you the DVDs. Call me back when you've seen [...]