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What makes some SF 'great' and other SF less so? Tough call. Still, despite some disputes that sometimes amount to nitpicking, there's some kind of consensus about the books on...

What does Literary Science Fiction mean? Well not plot-heavy shoot-em-up adventures for a start, but that still leaves a lot of territory. Not 'literary' authors condescending to write sf, because...

Which sub-genre of sci-fi can claim both the literary greats, the grandmasters of science fiction, like Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, and the recently departed Iain M. Banks and the...

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords! I may have been waiting for a very long time to pull that old chestnut out. But this H.G. Wells quote that...

Science Fiction and Dystopias go together like Lindsay Lohan and court appearances, but the terms don’t necessarily have to co-exist. Both genres exist independently and are popular on their own. ...

The May 1964 issue of the venerable British science fiction magazine New Worlds had a new editor: Michael Moorcock. Moorcock, still in his early 20s, had already made a name...

"It's The End Of The World As We Know It (and I feel fine)" (REM, "Document", 1987). That's what 'apocalypse' is all about. Except that people usually end up not...

The science fiction masterpiece continues in the "major event,"( Los Angeles Times) Children of Dune. With millions of copies sold worldwide, Frank Herbert's Dune novels stand among the major achievements...

Do you like original, intelligent fiction, with a hard sci-fi slant? No? Well, clearly there's something wrong with you. Google your symptoms, and get to a doctor! Personally, our prescription...

Even when the British new wave was introducing literary experiment into science fiction, the genre has been suspicious of the avantgarde. There is a sense that no nonsense storytelling does...

Every major non-fiction publisher now seems to have a Companion to science fiction. In some respects, inevitably, they plough the same furrow, there are invariably essays on the history of...

William Atheling, Jr., was the name that James Blish took when he began writing science fiction criticism in the early 1950s. Before this, no-one had criticised science fiction like this....

In terms of literary culture, critical accounts of science fiction came rather late. Even so, there are some very early books that, if you can find a secondhand copy, are...

Iain Banks had written a string of science fiction before he finally burst into print with his brilliant and controversial novel, The Wasp Factory. That and the two novels that...

If you are a literary snob, this book will not appeal to you, but if you are a science-fiction nerd who lists their interests as: artificial intelligence, neural networks and...

Karen Joy Fowler isn't really a mainstream writer: she began writing science fiction, practically all of her short fiction is sf or fantasy, and she jointly founded the James Tiptree...

Iain Banks burst onto the literary scene with his controversial first novel, The Wasp Factory, the violent story of a girl who had been brought up as an emasculated boy....

China has a very distinctive literary tradition that can often seem strange to Western readers, and the political situation in the country makes it inward looking, turning its back on...

There are more books about H.G. Wells than any other science fiction writer, and it's not hard to see why. He led an extraordinary life: he had affairs with a...

I wonder if inserting an M in between my first name and surname will magically turn me into a top science-fiction writer like Iain Banks. (Really, he writes non science...

One of the finest space opera series out there. No, one of the finest Science Fiction books ever written. Hyperion stands on the top of many science fiction lists. Simmons,...

NOTE: THIS IS #26 on the TOP 100 LIST. The first 1-25 entries are found on THE TOP 25 BEST SCIENCE FICTION LIST. Dhalgren is one of the peculiarities of...

Wow, what a ride from beginning to end. True to a Neal Stephenson tradition, it ties a number of completely different ideas and themes together into a (somehow) working thread....

Search the sf award shortlists for 2013 and you will look in vain for this novel. It wasn't even submitted for any of the juried awards. Yet it is arguably...

On Friday, May 11, 2001, the world mourned the untimely passing of Douglas Adams, beloved creator of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, dead of a heart attack at age...

We never know exactly what has happened, an apocalypse of some kind that has covered the landscape with ash and destroyed all animal life, but which has left most houses...

Francis Bacon was a scientist to his fingertips, one of the very first to argue for the primacy of experiment, and so devoted to his own observations that he died...