Metadata
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
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.