If I Had a Spaceship…

…with faster-than-light capability, without all the time paradoxes and other realistic nonsense that eventually ruined the fantasy of the science fiction pulps; if I had that, where would I go? I would head to every star that could sustain life, each with a reasonable habitable zone where planets might arise, or where we know planets […]

The West, Science Fiction, and No Future

Over at Genreville (on the Publisher Weekly’s blog), Josh Jasper asks a very intriguing question: Perhaps the future really belongs to people who’re hungry for it, not the ones who take it for granted. Does western culture take the future for granted these days, whereas rising cultures don’t? I think this really depends on who […]

Healthcare, My Thoughts, and My Resolution

Most of you are probably well aware of the fact that the healthcare reform bill passed and has been officially signed by President Obama. I am both very happy about this, and also very nervous. There are some understandable questions about the bill, and while I would like to pretend that critics, including myself, actually […]

Genre Labels: Are They Reductive?

A friend and I were having a discussion about The Famished Road by Ben Okri, a Nigerian novel with particularly obvious fantastic elements, and he thought that by labeling the novel as fantasy, I was being reductive. I’ll try to recollect much of the discussion here, but I’m sure I’ll leave out some salient point […]

The Confused Term: “Stealth Worldbuilding”

What exactly is so stealth about standalone fantasy novels set in the same world? Am I missing some crucial point, or am I the only one who thinks that if you take a few minutes to do your homework or are an attentive reader, it would be obvious that a bunch of standalone novels are […]

The Nature of Existence: An Insane Prospect of Knowledge

I’ve been reading a book called Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments For God Just Don’t Add Up by John Allen Paulos. One particularly potent quote caught my attention, but not in the way you might expect: [W]hy did He create the particular natural laws that He did? If He did it arbitrarily for […]