Last night at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn Sleep Dealer made its post-Sundance debut at the Imagine Science Film Festival, and you're now officially allowed to get excited for the film's 2009 wider release. Alex Rivera's first feature is a masterpiece — a modestly budgeted character piece that is the most exciting…
American conceptual artist Jenny Holzer converts the futuristic military-industrial complex into strange, alien art projects. Her light installations and conceptual work are the focus of an exhibition that opens on Saturday at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She uses excerpts from U.S. military documents…
Weird Science, Sliders, The Outer Limits and The Pretender all together in one place for the first time. Yes, we have learned to love the NBC and News Corp internet venture Hulu, which has done what few on demand services in any medium have accomplished - deliver a breadth and depth of content that keeps you coming…
This month's issue of Poets and Writers features a long chat with publishing vet Chuck Adams, who was one of the first people in publishing to see movie tie-in books as a never-ending source of income for houses. Does it help or hurt the rest of the genre to have subpar movie tie-ins flying off the shelves?Eventually…
Personalities don't get much bigger than Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, two giants of the genre. Though their views often clashed, the two spoke throughout their lives; they first met when Heinlein got Asimov a job at a Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. Primarily their conflict became a political disagreement, as Asimov…
Algis Budrys is a writer's writer, admired more for his style in the genre than his visionary ideas. The Lithuanian-American novelist and critic is the subject of a glowing profile by Technology Review's Mark Williams in which he offers up Budrys' literary style as an exemplar of what the rest of the genre should…
This image of a whale's bleached bones in Antarctica documents the disturbingly beautiful effect of climate change on the planet. It's an image by Sebastian Copeland, one of 18 photographers who entered their work in a competition funded by a Swiss bank that will give $85,780 to the winner. While photography about…
Last night, New York's Imagine Science Film Festival featured four short films about mad scientists — but they left out the maddest parts. Even though the films brought some unjustly overlooked geniuses to light — and shed some new light on familiar ones — they were missing some of the most important, and wildest,…
The Futurian Science Literary Society held its first meeting in September of 1938. Composed of literary legends-to-be including Isaac Asimov, Cyril Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim and Richard Wilson among others, the group's first Bronx home was a bachelor pad nonpareil. And yet even with their vast…
Richard K. Morgan burst on the literary scene six short years ago with the publication of the futuristic noir mystery Altered Carbon, a book that nabbed that year's Philip K. Dick Award and immediately sold to Hollywood. Since then, the prolific British author has written two sequels and two stand-alone novels…
What the family man wants, the family man gets. What the family man's alter ego wants, he gets from the family man's wife at night. My Own Worst Enemy's Henry Spivey has no idea why his wife is suddenly sexually pleased by him, and this confusion affects his job performance and his financial acumen. Can the second…
More than five years has passed since principal photography on 77, an indie comedy about Steven Spielberg and George Lucas' influence on future Dragonheart scribe Patrick Read Johnson. A post-production version of the film premiered at the Hamptons FIlm Festival this weekend, and the only question was "How much of a…
For any author, getting a book sold at a major chain is an important way to attract new readers and move copies. But it's especially important to scifi writers, who often get little exposure in book review sections. Now Borders, one of the two major bookstore chains in the U.S., has stopped stocking many new scifi…
How can the American Museum of Natural History convey the looming threat of climate change with its new exhibition on the subject? By using the hard-hitting power of dioramas for all they're worth. This stuffed tableau of a polar bear walking through some trash is the museum version of the Communist Manifesto or the…
When Jules Verne submitted his novel Paris in the Twentieth Century to longtime publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel in 1863, he might have had good reason to suppose his futuristic vision of an age to come would be accepted. Instead, Hetzel managed a scathing rebuke that still stings 145 years later. You think your boss is…
As the Gunsmith in Wanted, rapper Common may have looked more wooden than co-star Morgan Freeman, but with a role in Terminator Salvation, a new scifi-inspired album and a fledging relationship with Serena Williams, we're convinced that his star is on the rise. We're so convinced, in fact, that no longer can we even…
"I just don't want to be forgotten."
It's what Andre Norton told people before she left this world in 2005. With an ugly dispute over her work that finally concluded in the Tennessee Court of Appeals this week, that fate was probably ensured. Norton's caretaker Sue Stewart won her appeal against Texas oncologist…
Last Friday, Milton Friedman's grandson Patri Friedman and his fledgling Seasteading Institute had their first ever conference. Equipped with half a million dollars from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, the Institute wants to eventually build a fixed, independent structure off the coast of San Francisco called Ephemerisle…
Sanctuary totally redeemed itself last night with the best episode of its short run on the SciFi Channel. Dispensing with character development and CGI overload for the time being, the show focused on plot, spinning a noir-ish tale of men who can make themselves small enough to fit through any opening. You can fill in…
One of the greatest moments in the animated series Futuruma comes in "Godfellas" when Bender is sailing through the universe with no way of stopping his flight. That's basically what the Sloan Digital Sky Survey allows you to do: travel three-dimensionally billions of light years. Five terabytes of data hold 217…
