Science fiction - Topics

Writing first contact without a translator device Clarke's three laws and which one people actually quote Military science fiction and the politics of invented wars What makes a replicant in Blade Runner count as human? Locked-room mysteries set in space and under the sea are the fastest growing variant right now Why The Time Traveler's Wife turns involuntary time travel into a marriage problem Kindred sent a modern Black woman to a slave plantation and Octavia Butler called it a grim fantasy Why so much science fiction casts humans as the underdogs of the galaxy Dark builds a family tree the show deliberately makes impossible to follow Why do dystopian fictional stories get quoted as if they were predictions? What counts as human in the Star Trek universe after so many hybrids The Peripheral splits its plot between 2032 and a 22nd-century stub Interstellar's water planet costs the crew 23 years and that is the point of the scene James Gleick's Time Travel is a history of the idea rather than a physics book The grandfather paradox appeared in fiction long before physicists took it seriously Faster than light travel and the plot problems it creates Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians and the fiction of fixed time Story of Your Life asks whether a language without tense would change how you experience time Weird fiction and the border between horror and science fiction Primer cost about 7000 dollars and still needs a timeline chart to follow Slaughterhouse-Five jumps through Billy Pilgrim's life because of trauma rather than physics Cloud Atlas nests six stories and links them with one comet-shaped birthmark The bootstrap paradox describes an object or an idea that has no origin at all Retro-futurism imagines tomorrow with yesterday's machines Every science fiction story starts from one changed rule Utopia and dystopia are one thought experiment reversed Writing AI characters without giving them a human childhood Three laws of robotics as narrative constraints Climate fiction set twenty years out rather than two hundred Alien species as mirrors rather than monsters Generation ship logistics that writers keep getting wrong The singularity as an ending problem