Geeks are my people. Book geeks, mostly—spastic, obsessive, all-in types. Literary superfans know everything (about their chosen reads), and it’s an honor to geek at their feet. If you don’t have any superfan friends, pencil in making some as a New Year’s res—there’s nothing like a discussion with someone who truly cares about and knows […]
From the slightly skewed to the utterly bizarre, alternate worlds are a staple of science fiction and fantasy. But as different as these parallel Earths can be, some things remain constant. To whit: there are a disproportionate number of alternate Londons (alt-Londons?) in genre fiction. While London is absolutely one of civilization’s greatest cities, it’s not […]
In his 2015 novel Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson brackets events taking place largely on a generation ship with two long sequences on or in the water: a father takes his daughter for an afternoon of leisurely sailing (an event that causes vertigo when you discover the pond is governed by the strange gravity of the generation ship […]
