It’s a wonderful time to be a science fiction fan. The television adaptation of James S.A. Corey’s Expanse space opera series is poised to drag SyFy back from the brink. Ann Leckie’s excellent Ancillary Justice has been optioned, as has basically everything with John Scalzi’s name on the cover, from Lock In, to Redshirts , to The Ghost Brigades. But there’s one series […]
Few science-fictional settings are as intriguing as the one created across the nine novels (and one novella) that comprise Iain M. Banks’s Culture series. It’s a benign take on the concept of a galactic empire (at least on the surface), a post-scarcity future in which humanity’s every desire, from bizarre entertainments, to body modifications, to […]
What makes a science fiction story a space opera? Well, it needs to take place in space obviously, though not necessarily all of the time. Hanging out solely in an arcology on a climate-blasted Earth, or even in a domed city on Mars, doesn’t cut it. Actually, the more space the better; though there are certainly exceptions, […]
