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Rydell got his bag of cornflakes out of the cupboard and carefully unrolled it. About enough for a bowl. He opened the fridge and took out a plastic, snap-top, liter container with a strip of masking-tape across the side. He'd written MILK EXPERIMENT on the masking-tape with a heavy marker.

"What's that?" Hernandez asked.
"Milk."
"So why's it say 'experiment'?"
"So nobody'll drink it."

Virtual Light by William Gibson

Bytes

Binti

by Nnedi Okorafor, pub. 2015

Winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards. Binti is so moving and so exciting that it’s impossible to put down. In fact, I was downright sad to finish this trilogy – I would follow Binti’s story through all of spacetime. Ursula K. Le Guin says it best: “There’s more vivid imagination in a page of Nnedi Okorafor’s work than in whole volumes of ordinary fantasy epics.”

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Social Media in Science Fiction

Three science fiction stories that prophesied the possibilities and dangers of social media, years before it ever existed.

The saddest science-fiction story I’ve ever read

“It’s no coincidence that aspiration means both hope and the act of breathing.” – The Great Silence (2015), Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Further Reading

Chobits is a charming science fiction romance

Chobits explores how artificial intelligence shapes family, friendship and romance – and what it means to be lonely in the digital age.

Beautiful Dreamer is a “victory of dreams” over reality

Oshii Mamoru, director of Ghost in the Shell, blurs the line between reality and dreams in this 1984 anime classic.

Ursula K. Le Guin: A guide to definitive works

“Genre cannot contain Ursula Le Guin: she is a genre in herself.” -Zadie Smith

The Book of the New Sun is among the greatest fanfiction ever written

A gothic and seedy epic, reading this book is like feeling your way against a mossy wall to the dark center of a catacomb.

Not Quite Sci-Fi

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Doctor Moreau

Warlocks, curses, orgies, and death: the story of the making of Island of Dr. Moreau is stranger than the movie itself.

Artemisia Gentileschi

One of the only female baroque painters and a lifelong friend of the astronomer Galileo Galilei, Artemisia Gentileschi unites science and art in her paintings.