science fiction

For the entire 20th century, it had felt like telepathy was just around the corner. Why is that especially true now?

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins invented the setting that eventually became Wakanda in her science fiction, but her name isn't widely known.

The story of the girl who grew up in Pasadena, took the bus, loved her mom and grandmother, and wrote herself into the world.

Nothing dates our vision of the future like how we remember the past.

Andrew Liptak on the origins of cosplay.

Sci-fi has long provided an outlet for socialist thinkers — offering readers a break from capitalist realism and allowing us to imagine a different world.

Only in the science fiction genre can one compare an alien to a woman.

Physicist and writer Leo Szilard was vital to the creation of the atomic bomb. He also did everything he could to prevent its use.

Back in the earliest days of imagining what TV looked like, the appliance was a magic technology.

Who wants to watch a show whose characters never make real moral choices?

The author of a new book, The Underwater Eye, discusses how film enables audiences "to connect to the most remote environment on the planet: the ocean."

Written during World War II, Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos imagined a future liberated from racism and inequality.

John Jacob Astor’s "A Journey in Other Worlds" is a high-voltage scientific romance in which visions of imperialism haunt a supposedly “perfect” future.

Kim Stanley Robinson on how the High Sierra has influenced his science fiction.

Once Peter Parker received his miraculous spider powers, the last thing he wanted to do was go out and get a colorful costume and fight crime.

On the nostalgic and technophobic motives of the recent boom in suburban fantastic media.

A new book recovers the reputation Poe had in his own lifetime of being a cross between a science writer, a poet, and a man of letters.

Known as a master of horror, he also understood the power—and the limits—of science.

Observing the visible features of Martian landscapes, Giovanni Schiaparelli began seeing things almost immediately.

How a Gilded Age best seller shaped American race discourse.