Speculative Nonfiction

Somehow I missed this until I saw a TV commercial in a pub the other day. As an adolescent in the 80s, I was a huge fan of V, to the point...

It's amazing how little the technology has changed! Both in terms of AI and cardboard perforation. Thanks to Sallie for the card. It o...

I've said before "They have a Foundation movie already, except they added magic; it's called Star Wars." Matt Yglesias th...

Here .

Battlefield Earth is "widely considered" to be one of the worst movies of all time, but I don't share that assessment. Alien ...

In his review of Chris Anderson's Free , Gladwell addresses Anderson's discussion of the 1950's optimism about atomic energy: t...

Recently I've been watching classic movies from this period and they strike me as uncannily dark. Of course there's Alien (1979) a...

One of the perennially favored topics in "human-interest astronomy" stories is "what to say to aliens". Here's the ...

I just got back from Terminator Salvation. I enjoyed myself because I expected an action film, not a deeply thought-out exploration of the ...

Whoops! I'm supposed to put SPOILER WARNING before stuff like that. To all those who saw this in an RSS feed somewhere, sorry! SPOILE...

Click if you actually want to read it.

Ever read Accelerando ? It's one of those science fiction novels that'll annoy the hell out of you while you're reading it with...

I'd written before about how it can be useful to replicate universe-scale phenomena in local media. Here's a paper where the auth...

Discussions of von Neumann probes tend, like this one, to be largely enterprises of idle speculation. That can be explained by there being ...

From Vienna's Zentralfriedhof: Worth posting on this blog, if nowhere else. And worth clicking on so you can see the inscription ab...

A terraformed Mars. Too bad there's no way to get all that water there. (Image credit Daein Ballard) It's been said that the signifi...