Science
Introducing OMNI Reboot
Space Canon
Big news: yours truly has been tapped to become the Editor-in-Chief of a rebooted version of OMNI, the classic science and science fiction magazine upon which yours truly cut her very own teeth. The chain of events leading up to this appointment is so strange and circuitous that I recommend you read my entire article on […]
J.G. Ballard, Social Media Prophet
Space Canon
Quick nugget: this excerpt of an interview with J.G. Ballard in a 1977 issue of Vogue has been making the rounds on the web today: All this, of course, will be mere electronic wallpaper, the background to the main programme in which each of us will be both star and supporting player. Every one of […]
Flowers for Algernon
Space Canon
This is how long it’s been since I last read Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon: I can remember the neck-ache I got from bending to read it under my school desk. It was one of those particle-board, comma-shaped desks; to read covertly required a particular contortion in which I, at eleven, was an expert. I wept […]
Man of Earth
Space Canon
Although “Golden Age” science fiction has always seemed corn-fed as hell to me–space cowboys and army men, pioneering colonists and alien baddies usually tinged with Soviet undertones–I’m discovering, more and more, that it’s partially an immigrant’s literature. Isaac Asimov was a Russian Jew, born on the Belarussian border. Hugo Gernsback, editorial granddaddy to the age of […]
Ben Bova: The OMNI Interview
Space Canon
I recently had the great fortune of interviewing three of the surviving editors of the late, great OMNI magazine, a publication which, for 17 years, blew minds with its gonzo blend of science fiction and science. From 1978 to 1998 (it switched to full-time online publication in the mid-1990s) OMNI regularly featured extensive Q&A interviews with […]
Ubik
Space Canon
I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the […]
Merry Christmas from the Outer Limits
Space Canon
As a holiday treat, here’s a small gallery of painterly Christmas-themed covers from the great Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, all from the mid-50s and early 1960s, arguably the golden age of science fiction illustration. These were done by Ed Emschwiller, who later went on to a career in experimental film and video, creating groundbreaking 3D […]
We Can Build You
Space Canon
The scene is a basement repair shop, 1982. Work benches, tools, and a prone robotic simulacra of Abraham Lincoln, being turned on for the first time. In the presence of its makers, the Lincoln is slowly emerging from objecthood into the scrum of sentience. It flails to sit up, big hands grasping around, jet-black eyes beginning […]
Science Fiction’s Speculative Pharmacopeia
Space Canon
Last week, I published an article on Motherboard rounding up some of my favorite fake drugs from the coffers of science fiction. The list isn’t exhaustive; rather, it tackles a representative spread of uppers, downers, psychedelics, and unclassifiables. The tradition dates back to Homerian lotus-eaters, and has been taken up by everyone from Aldous Huxley […]
The Jewels of Aptor
Space Canon
The Jewels of Aptor is Samuel Delany’s first book, written when he was just 19 and published a year later. His wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker (with whom he went on to edit the speculative fiction anthology/journal Quark) was an assistant editor at Ace Books at the time, and so nepotism greased the machine to give the […]