Why one of science fiction’s most ambitious biographies proves one of its most essential.
Margaret Fortune’s debut novel Nova is like a lot of formative science fiction: it follows a young person through an extreme situation, with the inscrutable movements of empire and the queasy ethics of genetic engineering, but does so on the ground, through a life that is real and lived. Ender Wiggin in Ender’s Game passes a test, and […]
A group of colonists on an alien world struggles to maintain its principles and build a new society over the course of decades in Sue Burke’s sci-fi debut Semiosis. Around 2060, a group of humans leave a blighted Earth, imbued with an almost religious zeal to start over and do things right this time. They arrived […]