virtuosos

In the spring of 2015, with the release of the first issue, Ken Layne's DESERT ORACLE carved a place in the unforgiving Mojave Desert. The moment I took one into my hands, I felt like I was reading so...

Writing is a craft. We talk of crafting a story, and of wordsmiths who forge metaphors from the white heat of their imaginations. The creation of fiction, therefore, involves a process akin to that of...

At the dawn of the 1960s, the history of science fiction took a huge turn from its past. In two decades, the whole genre of sci-fi would change in ways that would alter mainstream perspectives of the ...

The seminal science magazine OMNI was known for many things: its futurist articles, stunning artwork and famous fiction. Some of science fiction's greatest writers were published in OMNI's pages, incl...

At the start of the 20th century, the history of science fiction took a great turn thanks to the emergence of motion pictures and the proliferation of pulp magazines. It is thanks to these two enterta...

When chronicling the history of science fiction, you need to think about the history of sci-fi as it pertains to the history of mankind. Throughout its span, sci-fi asks where we are as a species, whe...

In 2014, H.R. Giger died, and, thus, science fiction lost one of its greatest artists – but left behind were a multitude of H.R. Giger illustrations. Giger created some of the most exotic, darkest dep...

This story is excerpted from the novel Haveck: The First Transhuman by Matt Cates (Sable Mare Media, 2015).

I've been asked to interview a reclusive artist. An artist whose work I find to be exquisitely revolting. Work that, in my eyes, causes awkward hyper-sexualized repulsion in absolute terms. Like the p...

Fabrice Giger is easily one of the most influential trailblazers in the comic book world, yet many fans and professionals don’t know his story. In 1988, at the age of 23, he purchased Humanoids, Europ...

If you ask me, no single genre of literature ever really comes close to the aesthetic awesomeness that science fiction does. Sci-fi illustrators seem to have an innate ability to make a book's fantast...

Some of the most readily available sources of knowledge are books by scientists. The writers of these books can utilize their own experiences to better illustrate the process of experimentation and re...

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) is remembered as one of the top 3 science fiction writers, along with Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. Asimov is widely considered to be the founder of modern science fic...

Writer/editor Jason Davis has a special ambition -- to catalog, digitize, edit, correct, annotate and re-publish (or publish for the first time, in some cases) all of Harlan Ellison's writings. Twenty...

Vernor Vinge is a former San Diego State University math professor and a Hugo award-winning science fiction novelist. He is best known for his novels and novellas A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), A Deepness in the Sky (1999), Rainbows End (2006), Fast Times at Fairmont High (2002), and The Cookie Monster (2004). In Vinge's 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity" Vinge wrote, "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence, also referred to as th...

In Hyperion, Dan Simmons accomplished the creation of one of the most beautifully rendered science fiction universes ever encountered in the readers mind. Hyperion tells the story of a group of seven ...

I ran into my pal, Matthew B. Tepper, a fellow Isaac Asimov enthusiast at the L.A. Science Fiction and Fantasy Society. To date, he owns 465 of the 515 books Asimov wrote. I asked him if he had any su...

Philosophy was once the domain of the purely speculative—the nearly abstract. A well-known philosophy department posed the question, "What is human?" The questions were too complex. The answers availa...