What’s worse than getting the flu–miserable aches, pounding head, bone-splintering chills, a fever you stubbornly endure until it flirts with 104 and you can almost hear your brain fluid begin to bubble? Having to go on a business trip the day after your fever breaks. Irritated at being forced to break my three-year streak of not … More Vexed in the City: Escape to the Morgan Library
Epiphany struck me 35,000 feet over Chicago. Dimmed lights in the plane cabin made my laptop screen glow conspicuously on the tiny tray table, an invitation to judge over my shoulder, but I didn’t have time for self-consciousness. I had revisions to finish. Faced with a cross-country business trip, I’d assigned myself a travel project … More In-Flight Entertainment: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Stories
Okay. Rant time. Remember when Blue Karma won some indie publishing awards late last year? One of the granting organizations just published interviews with the winning authors. Awesome, right? Except for one thing: “[We] recently caught up with author J.K. Ullrich, whose book Blue Karma won the science fiction category. You can click the link below to visit [our] website and read more about his winning … More Gender and Genre: Female Sci-Fi Authors are NOT an Alien Species
As a lifelong sci-fi geek, I thought I’d seen every variant of alien contact narrative the genre had to offer, from the invasion epics to the misadventures of benign visitors to thinly veiled social allegories. Even the enjoyable ones often rely on predictable tropes. But Dawn, the first installment in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, captivated … More Review: “Dawn” by Octavia Butler
If you’re interested in literature, STEM education, environmentalism, or just want to look at a picture of Jon Snow from “Game of Thrones” (yes, some culture critics argue the presence of cli-fi themes in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series) check out the article I just wrote for The Atlantic about the growing popularity of cli-fi and its … More “Can books save the planet?”: my article for The Atlantic
1984 is often regarded as the original dystopia, but Orwell himself acknowledged that the novel was somewhat derivative. His inspiration? Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel We, evolutionary ancestor of the totalitarian sci-fi stories so popular today. It’s easy to dismiss the book as cliched until one places it on the continuum of speculative fiction and remembers that … More Review: “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Wild Type 