Building New Worlds is a history of a pivotal decades-long episode in the birth and growth of today's science fiction. Enthralling and amusing, it's written with affection and wit. This is no dry, modishly theorized academic analysis. Nor is it a rah-rah celebration of the "Good Old Days." Here is a candid and astute reader's response to a magazine that, by today's standards, was often comically bad--but... [click here for more]
Science fiction loves strangeness. It relishes oddities, even when it piles on fear and dystopian loathing. The technical term for a fascination with the strange and alien is xenophilia, just as the term for a terror of the strange is xenophobia. At its core, then, science fiction is...Xeno Fiction. So science fiction seeks out the strange, roams far from home in space and time, looks with avid eagerness... [click here for more]