Peter Nicholls obituary
My father, Peter Nicholls, has died aged 78. He was an academic and literary critic, whose 1979 work The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction mapped the landscape of the field and remains the definitive...
View ArticleThe best recent science fiction and fantasy novels – reviews roundup
Autonomous (Orbit, £8.99) is the debut novel from Annalee Newitz, a science journalist and co-founder of the SF website io9. It’s 2144 and in a hi-tech, down-at-heel US – a hybrid of Blade Runner and...
View Article‘Deeply weird and enjoyable’: Ursula K Le Guin’s electronica album
The late Ursula K Le Guin wrote many well-loved novels, but few people know that the legendary science fiction and fantasy author once made an album. The strange and enchanting record Music and Poetry...
View ArticleA Wrinkle in Time: weird science and giant Oprah – discuss with spoilers
After the spectacular success of Black Panther, Disney’s expensive new family fantasy, A Wrinkle in Time, signals another milestone in Hollywood inclusion. It was directed by an African-American woman...
View ArticleDreams Must Explain Themselves by Ursula K Le Guin review – writing and the...
In 1973 Ursula Le Guin was phoned by publisher and science fiction fan Andrew I Porter, trying to persuade her to write about herself in his magazine Algol. “Andy kept saying things like, ‘Tell the...
View ArticleThe best recent science fiction and fantasy novels – reviews roundup
In The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch (Headline, £14.99), NCIS agent Shannon Moss looks into the murder of a family and the abduction of their teenage daughter: the prime suspect is a Navy Seal who was...
View ArticleHow to make a monster: what’s the science behind Shelley’s Frankenstein?
The bicentenary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus has meant a lot of people are re-examining this brilliant work of science fiction. My particular interest is...
View ArticleOn my radar: Audrey Niffenegger’s cultural highlights
Audrey Niffenegger is an American writer and artist born in Michigan in 1963 and now living in Chicago. In 1997, she had an idea for a sci-fi romance graphic novel about involuntary time travel. It...
View ArticleWho put the spark in Frankenstein’s monster?
It is one of the most famous novels of all time, often cited as the first work of science fiction, with a genesis almost as well known as its terrifying central character. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:...
View ArticleThe Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton review – Quantum Leap...
Some books are a gift to the marketing department. The folks at Raven, a newish crime imprint at Bloomsbury, have described this one as “Gosford Park meets Inception, by way of Agatha Christie”. It’s a...
View ArticleRe-enter Sandman: Neil Gaiman’s comics return with new writers
Neil Gaiman is to oversee a new line of comic books set in the world of the Sandman, continuing the adventures of some of his best-loved characters including Dream of the Endless and Lucien the...
View ArticleTop 10 spaceships in fiction
Some of my earliest memories are of watching Star Trek in the early 1970s, on my grandparents’ black and white TV, and then getting caught up as a schoolboy in all the hype surrounding the release of...
View ArticleDon’t panic! The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is back
In 1985, Douglas Adams said the BBC’s view of the first series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was like Macbeth’s attitude to murder: “Initial doubts, followed by cautious enthusiasm, then...
View ArticleThe theatre company putting Victorian sci-fi centre stage
HG Wells hold a special place in the hearts of many sci-fi enthusiasts and scientists alike. Best known for his novels The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and The Invisible Man, Wells’s...
View ArticleSpielberg’s Ready Player One – in 2045, virtual reality is everyone’s saviour
It’s 2045 and Earth has been brought to its knees by catastrophic climate change and a worldwide energy crisis, not to mention famine, poverty, disease and war. In short, everything we presently fear...
View ArticlePlaces in the Darkness by Chris Brookmyre review – murder in zero-gravity
The award-winning Scottish crime author Chris Brookmyre tweeted a one-star Amazon review he received for his new novel, Places in the Darkness, earlier this month. “This needs a ‘serious science...
View ArticleCould science fiction save NHS data and improve our health?
The NHS lurches its way through funding crises and organisational dilemmas. It faces the challenge of antibiotic resistance and it must ponder the deeply conflicted question of the uses and abuses of...
View Article‘So many different types of strange’: how Nnedi Okorafor is changing the face...
As the science fiction novelist Nnedi Okorafor takes to the stage at the TEDGlobal conference in Tanzania, she challenges stereotypes before she has said a word. The 43-year-old writer who won the 2016...
View ArticleIain M Banks’s drawings of the Culture universe to be published in 2019
A final glimpse into the galaxy-spanning imagination of the late Iain M Banks is on the way in a collection of previously unseen drawings, maps and sketches from the Culture universe, many of which...
View ArticleAltered Carbon author Richard Morgan: ‘There’s no limit to my capacity for...
On my way to meet Richard Morgan, I pass a poster for Altered Carbon, the new Netflix series based on his hardboiled cyberpunk novel about a future Earth where humans can transfer into different...
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