It's still hard to comprehend the impact that movie made on SF fans of the late 60s, who had very little good genre cinema to watch until its debut. I remember sitting in a theater in Fort Lauderdale in 1968, watching the Discovery slowly move past the camera, and it had every bit of the effect on me that a certain…

Haven't read The Dispossessed, but I have read The Lathe of Heaven and absolutely loved it. Then I tried to tackle The Left Hand of Darkness and ended up bailing out early because I was bored by the politics. But then, I'm bored by most politics, so it wasn't a surprise. She may well have written some great stuff…

If Occam's Razor is any indication, the simplest answer will be the right one. It's assumed that all the debris from the creation of the universe is now swept up into galaxies, nebulae and other cosmic structures.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Robert Sheckley (oh good - someone just did), who once wrote of a protagonist named Carmody who wins a prize in the Galactic Lottery that he didn't know he'd entered. Unable to find his way home, he visits multiple Earths in different dimensions while being chased by his own personal…

What a waste of a perfectly good motorcycle.

Unfortunately, there's a huge dissonance between movies like this and reality, as recently seen with the Russian spy ring sent back to the motherland. Sure, one of them was a hottie, but where was the gunplay, the hair's-breadth escapes and incredible gymnastics? Anna Chapman's biggest claim to fame seems to be posing…