Science fiction was birthed in the short form: stories that numbered in the thousands of words, which distilled big concepts down into fast-moving adventures that filled the cheap pulp of thousands of disposable magazines. It was decades before the genre flirted with novel-length stories, a change brought on by the emergence of the mass market paperback, the advent of chain […]

It’s March 2015, and I am standing on the bridge of a starship. The crew work stations look worn, the walls are covered with warning signs, and the grated floor looks like something designed to be functional. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that I was standing on a real ship, hurtling through space. Instead, I am on […]